Edge Perspectives With John Hagel has the article Getting Stronger through Stress: Making Black Swans Work for You. In the article he has a very helpful explication of the meaning of Nassim Nicholas Taleb new book Antifragile.

The real opportunity, in Taleb’s view, is to learn and grow from volatility and unexpected events – not to return to where you were, but to become even better as a result of the exposure and experience.  This is the essence of antifragility, a term that Taleb feels he has to coin because the English language doesn’t have a word that adequately captures this property of systems. While they may not be perfect synonyms, Taleb is seeking to describe the properties of adaptive or evolutionary systems that become better and reach even higher levels of performance as a consequence of encountering and overcoming challenges.  They are dynamic rather than static. They thrive and grow in new directions rather than simply sustain themselves. They actually need random events to strengthen and grow and they become brittle and atrophy in the absence of these random events.

I think it will be very helpful to have some idea of where Taleb is going as you start to read his new book. Sometimes, I  find a lot of promise in a Taleb book about what he is going to tell you, but I walk away feeling that the promise has not been fulfilled to my satisfaction.  I do learn a lot, but not as much as I had hoped.  I know Taleb is trying to tell me something profound, but I never quite get a firm handle on the actionable part of what he is trying to tell me. Perhaps the new book with the help of the introduction of the above article will be even more fulfilling than his previous books.

The way I came to find the article may be an antifragile example in itself. By looking at the statistics of where the traffic to this blog is coming from, I found that an author on Scoop.it had referred to my post about Taleb.  The Scoop.it “magazine” was Generative Systems Design by Anne Caspari.  Her site pointed to the article Antifragile system design principles in Wired.com.  The Wired.com article pointed to the article that is the subject of this blog post.  Each layer along the way added to what was in the layer below.

The Republicans are pushing the video below.

The Republicans ask the question,

Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria, but not with Congress to address the Washignton’s spending problem?

1. The Washington spending problem is not spending enough to stimulate the economy. The Republicans want to spend less. What’s to negotiate?
2. Negotiation with Putin breaks the deadlock on an insoluble problem and brings about an almost perfect solution.  (Bombing Syria would might have let loose the chemical weapons into terrorist’s hands.  Syria’s turning these weapons over to international control for eventual destruction accomplishes exactly what we said we want to accomplish.)
3. It is more likely that Putin will stick to his negotiated promise than it is that Boner will stick to his.

It is a sad day when we find that the Russian leader is more amenable to reason and negotiation than is the Republican party. It’s odd that the Republicans would want to focus our attention on this fact. Maybe they really do have a death wish.