> None of those contexts are anti-fragile.

Nassim Taleb (who coined the term), literally uses the aviation industry as a prime example of antifragility in his book[1], so I think our wires are getting crossed somewhere.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...

Yeah, I love the book and remember that being brought up. I might have to go revisit that part of the book as a refresher. Aviation, in general and in my current mindset, doesn't seem to benefit from disorder the same way a lot of the other examples he uses in that book.

Aviation is absolutely robust though.

Do you happen to remember how Taleb framed aviation as anti-fragile instead of just robust/not-fragile? As an industry I suppose we're quite good at taking lessons-learned from failures and incorporating those lessons back into making aviation safer as a whole.

Antifragile means that whenever something bad happens to the system (i.e. an airplane crash), the system gets stronger by design. A robust system is just a system that is resistant to bad stuff happening (but does not necessarily improve once it happens, or at least it's not built that way).

I'd argue that most Western government institutions (say, governments that have been around for 200+ years) are what you'd call "robust"; likely churches (the Catholic Church, since it's quite centralized), as well.

Awesome, thanks for the reminder!

Aviation safety is designed to be anti-fragile.

Each flight and aviation as a market are very fragile, what is the entire reason its safety was designed to be anti-fragile. An anti-fragile safety process makes aviation robust, despite its inherent fragility.