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There's a whole book[0] about it. But to summarise (poorly): 'robust' - resilient against shocks, volatility and stressors 'antifragile' - thrives on shocks,
by nicky0 10y ago
There's a whole book[0] about it. But to summarise (poorly):
'robust' - resilient against shocks, volatility and stressors
'antifragile' - thrives on shocks, volatility and stressors (ie. gets better in response)
Antifragile is a step beyond robust. Examples of antifragility are evolutionary systems and true free market economies (as opposed to our too-big-to fail version of propped-up, overly interconnected capitalism).
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile
- smallnamespace 10y agoIsn't that bad because now you're depending on having stressors and shocks to have the best performance? If you can't control the amount of stressors and shocks, you want a system that is neither antifragile or fragile, but strictly indifferent to the level of shocks.
- nicky0 10y agoGood questions. It is a very interesting subject. If you haven't read the book, I recommend it. I think you will find it interesting if you read it with an open mind.
- dsr_ 10y agoCan you provide any examples of working, real-world antifragile systems which were designed and built by humans and accomplish their purposes? Preferably in terms of software and hardware? So far you've named "evolutionary systems", which are quite fragile in the real world, and an imaginary thing called a "true free market economy".
- wandernotlost 10y agoNetflix with their chaos monkeys is a great and relevant example.
- hueving 10y agoBut their system doesn't thrive on chaos monkey. It's just resilient to it.
- jerf 10y agoIn this case, the anti-fragile system is the entire system, including Netflix engineers and the cloud over time. The cloud is stressed, maybe even goes down, but in response, becomes stronger and more reliable because engineers make changes. Point-in-time human-engineered systems still can't really be anti-fragile, except perhaps in some weird corner cases, but the system as a whole with the humans included, over time, can be. It should also be pointed out that "anti-fragile" was always intended to be a name for things that already exist, and to provide a word that we can use as a cognitive handle for thinking about these matters, not a "discovery" of a "new system" or something. There are many anti-fragile systems; in fact it's pretty hard to have a long-term successful production project of any kind in software without some anti-fragility in the system. (But I've seen some fragile projects klunk along for quite a while before someone finally came in and did whatever was managerially necessary to get someone to address root causes.)
- hueving 10y agoAh, true when you include the engineers in the loop I suppose. But then that becomes a vague term for any system where engineers fix problems after some load/failure testing. When I think of anti fragile systems, truly adaptive algorithms come to mind that learn from a failure. For example, an algorithm that changes the leader in a global leader election system based on the time of day because one geographic region of the network is always busier depending on time of day and latency to the leader impacts performance.
- wandernotlost 10y agoYes. It is stronger because it is attacked by it.
- woot01 10y agoTaleb's book often came back to the example of the relatively free market that is a city's restaurants. Any one restaurant is fragile, but the entirety of the restaurant business in a city is antifragile - failure of the worst makes the marketplace better.
- nicky0 10y agoJust trying to define it. I'm not advocating for anything. That said, if you are calling the entire multibillion year phenomenon of life on this planet "fragile" then we are not going to get on well.