Thanks for engaging. You're right in that the ideas are not new, but I feel the language and the framing somewhat is. I'm not sure if you've come across N. N.

Thanks for engaging. You're right in that the ideas are not new, but I feel the language and the framing somewhat is. I'm not sure if you've come across N. N. Taleb's work -- he's the guy who coined the term "antifragility" = things things that benefit from perturbation. In it he argues that the antifragility is a property of systems that satisfy Jensen's inequality [1]. If the system's function f is convex, then: E[f(X)] > f(E[X]) X is a random variable representing perturbations to the system, and f(.) is the system's response. If Jensen's inequality is satisfied (which is only true if f is convex), the inequality tells us that the average response to variable inputs (E[f(X)]) is greater than the response to the average input f(E[X]). This means that the system benefits more from variability in the input than it would from a constant, average input. Antifragile systems, in that sense, are not conventionally "stable". Taleb describes a spectrum: Fragile -> Robust -> Antifragile Stable systems often fall into the robust category -- they can withstand stress without breaking, but they don't necessarily improve from it. It's a really subtle nuance. An example from life: the young person who takes no risks, has a stable job, does well enough but isn't really interested in moving or taking on new opportunities. They'll never make it big. This is stability. But the young person who starts a startup and keeps taking risks, iterating and pivoting. If they win, they win big. If they lose, they only lose a few years of their early life. This is antifragility, and it is actually a departure from stability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen%27s_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen%27s_inequality