# Murat Demirbas - Antifragility From an Engineering Perspective (Highlights)  ## Highlights - The robust-yet-fragile effect is also known as highly optimized tolerance. If you optimize tolerance for one anticipated stressor, you become very vulnerable to another unanticipated fault. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9prhg08vv6f6rh1c0s9yjt)) ^595754054 - The resilient system approach is the opposite. It prescribes not to mask stressors; the stressors perturb the system somewhat, but you eventually recover from them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9pt57sw60ngpxhfm54aw5b)) ^595754166 - Today, it is more or less established that systems should aim to expose stressors/faults/problems in some suitable manner, rather than hide them. Even as a system masks problems, it should at least report/log them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9pvq9jj42fq42c0w9a8g03)) ^595754488 Metastable failure - Taleb says in the book that one of the few examples of antifragile materials he knows is carbon nanotubes, which gets stronger when faced with a stressor. Here is another antifragile material, [a non-newtonian fluid](http://kottke.org/13/05/non-newtonian-noodles). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9pzqk36hfb7s8jq64bahkb)) ^595754918 - An antifragile system reacts to environment actions to keep a utility function high, and sometimes achieve a very high utility function (this is when stressors help to improve the system). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9q4z3p74e8265gn0cd9zaq)) ^595755246 - Then we can define antifragility as the ability to improve the utility function to the face of "bad" environment actions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9q4ksv82gb1kccjp73z7cj)) ^595755224 - For an antifragile system, the more you try to stress the system, the stronger it grows. A great example is [bittorrent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01ha9q8pr4tg0pzj2spcd2076s)) ^595755510