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Neural Foundry's avatar

Strong piece. The antifragile framing is spot on because stress inoculation really does work, but only if the stressors are calibrated correctly. I've seen companies try to toughen up Gen Z hires by just throwing them into the deep end without structure, which backfires and reinforces the fragility instead of building capacity. The participation trophy generation is a real thing, but the solution isn't just more hardship, it's more deliberate exposure to manageable challenges that scale up progresively.

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Dr Ioannis Syrigos's avatar

Absolutely. It has always been to progressively introduce challenging experiences that grow their capacity rather than reinforce their fragility… And for a generation that doesn’t know what challenge means, we definitely need to be more careful.

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Dr Ioannis Syrigos's avatar

An excellent video on the topic.

https://x.com/i/status/2000986601858719877

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Janelle Lucido's avatar

"To win, you have to put an effort and whoever puts the best effort wins. That’s life, that’s evolution, that’s nature. " That's not life or nature. That's a belief system you choose to believe in. Just clarifying because if your entire logic is based on this it it's deeply flawed.

Also the discussion of name calling is strange. To label people. To call names. To generalize. Is any of this valuable? Does it contribute to developing a stronger humanity? Is it generative?

Hardly.

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Dr Ioannis Syrigos's avatar

Janelle, thank you for your comment. The article's point applies in life, evolution, and nature. And it is pretty common sense: Those who apply the best effort often prevail, as seen in natural selection where adapted traits for survival, outcompete the rest. We see the same in society, where hard work frequently yields success despite obstacles. To dismiss this as mere "belief" ignores all historical evidence from pioneers to modern achievers. If your logic rejects competition as flawed, that's your choice, but it doesn't invalidate the reality. As for name-calling and generalizations like "snowflakes," they're blunt tools to highlight real societal trends of declining resilience, which is a fact. They spark necessary debates on toughness versus coddling, and this is how we grow a stronger humanity by calling out weaknesses that need fixing rather than sugarcoating them.

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Janelle Lucido's avatar

Common sense is a belief system. Until you acknowledge that you don't understand your own bias.

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Dr Ioannis Syrigos's avatar

Common sense is primarily as an act of consciousness. It is the active process of perceiving, reasoning, and making judgments based on immediate awareness and practical experience in everyday situations. Animals do not have common sense …

And of course common sense is not a rigid belief system like a religion or ideology, which relies on predefined doctrines or convictions that might not adapt to new contexts. On the contrary, common sense is dynamic, situational, and tied to conscious observation and adaptation.

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Janelle Lucido's avatar

Sounds like you really buy that!

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