“The entire idea of via negativa is omission does not have side effects and the branching chain of unintended consequences” -Nassim Taleb
While I didn’t used to understand antifragility besides the superficiality, now it is clear to me that what Taleb calls antifragility is the same idea of Chris Langton calls the edge of chaos. Complexity lies in the edge of chaos. Antifragility is the system’s ability to walk the tight rope along the edge of chaos towards increasing complexity. Thus Antifragility is an aggregate or systemic characteristic. In a complex system the occasional minor shocks introduce changes into the system much like random mutations do in biology. These minor shocks are what allows natural selection to weed out the fragile in any system. As a result the aggregate becomes better. Natural selection does not work to add antifragile or even robust individuals into the system , but rather work to remove the fragile from the system. In the western world, we love to add but rarely do we subtract. If there is a problem, we add something to fix it instead of getting rid of the problem in of itself. We build fragile skyscrapers and add reinforcements to prevent collapse. We eat ourselves sick and add a pill to bring us back to health. We created a financial mess by blindly wielding convoluted derivatives, then tried to fix this mess by adding the onerous Dodd Frank Act, and now we are trying to add more legislature to repeal it. Much of history has been spent on fixing things that shouldn’t have been necessary to be fixed in the first place. The ultimate result is that the entire system becomes more fragile because with every addition comes many higher order consequences. The classics (Heraclitus, Seneca, but NEVER Plato) and the various eastern (Buddhism, Taoism etc) and western philosophies (stoicism, nihilism, certain parts of Christianity, etc) have all stressed the importance of either removing (via negativa) worldly desires completely, or accepting (not adding to) the workings of the world. Observe how the world works, and increase our optionality so we are able to react to it if good fortune were to grace us. 

It’s time we realize that one can do much more good by removing evil. Via negative is essentially the hippocratic oath of life. Whatever we choose to do in the world, primum non nocere