Thanks Jason for this lucid summary. To me the rational core of Taleb's confusing terminology is "robustness to turbulence". And while Kahneman is right that people tend to seek pleasure and avoid turbulence, successful systems do make use of turbulence.

The best example is evolution. Over 80 years ago, Fisher's "fundamental theorem of evolution" showed that the fittest population in adjusting to environmental stress has the highest variance. Note the contrast to Darwin's focus on static fitness, where the best population should win out and create more uniformity not less. There is dynamic tension there, but nowadays evolution embraces both concepts without having a conniption or making Fisher's ghost fight it out with Darwin's.

The most vivid illustration of dynamic tension in evolution is sexual reproduction. Think about it. Mother Nature intentionally makes higher organisms reproduce through coupling instead of cloning in order to increase variation. Moreover, Mother Nature forces the base type which we might call X to couple with a less stable type Y, part of whose X has been intentionally chopped off or rendered defective to induce even more random variation. Given Y's extra riskiness, Mother doesn't entrust core childbearing to Ys but keeps it with the more stable X side, and makes Ys flaunt their virtues and vices to woo X mates. Granted, as Kahneman said, creatures (not just people) don't naturally prefer the extra turbulence, so Mother Nature compensates by making sexual intercourse addictively fun.