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Anti-fragile and robust are two different concepts as defined by Nassim Taleb. Anti-fragile software is exposed to low level stress, and evolves to survive it.

• geographomics 12y ago
  To use an analogy, it sounds roughly like the distinction between adaptive and innate immune systems in vertebrates.
• bluecalm 12y ago
  It's learning from errors and failures or evolving or self-correcting. The only real function that neologism serve is to ensure that there are several pages to fill with easy writing about examples of things that are robust and things that are fragile. Really, when reading about concept of learning from mistakes (or in case of software self-correcting) not many would find examples of fragile things interesting. Just because you are defining neologism which have perfectly good equivalents already doesn't make it any more compelling. You just fill paragraphs with boring fluff and make reader wonder why the hell you are not jumping to the point already. This is unfortunately also visible in the paper from OP as, following Taleb, about half of it is concerned with giving murky definition of completely redundant term and then telling the reader what it is and what is it not with numerous examples. The author would do well to remove all the references to anti-fragile and Taleb and substitute those with some history of self-correcting software. Maybe try to research who first wrote about it or tried to construct working code. You know, like some information and background about the concept instead of redefining it and then doing a session of mental masturbation over it.
  • graeme 12y ago
    Self-correcting isn't quite the right term, though it's closer than robust. Something antifragile won't necessarily self-correct if left alone. Instead, antifragile refers to something that improves when subject to disorder and shocks. It's a new word for a concept we can understand, but have no word for. Lacking a word for something severely impairs our ability to talk about it. To validly criticize the word, one should first show that they understand what's meant by it, and propose an existing term that captures that. None of the critiques in this thread have done that.
• doctorstupid 12y ago
  Regardless, 'anti-fragile' sounds horrible. I think that resilient is a better word for the job.
  • lukifer 12y ago
    The concept is distinct from resiliency. It is the idea of a system that actually benefits from small amounts of stress or entropy. One example Taleb gives is bone: the micro-fractures created by the normal stresses of standing and walking force the bone to grow stronger; whereas astronauts in prolonged zero-G are at risk for gradual bone loss due to the lack of this stress. That said, it's probably not the best word, but the realities of path dependence make it very difficult to coin new words out of whole cloth. An equally arbitrary neologism like "hyper-resiliency" would have probably made just as much sense.
    • mpyne 12y ago
      Might I suggest "hormetic", which comes from similar hypotheses of biological processes? E.g. the idea that low levels of radiation might even be beneficial overall by forcing your body to continuously use strong healing mechanisms is known as radiation hormesis.
      • lukifer 12y ago
        It may not be as "sticky" to laypeople, but that's a super-cool word, thanks for sharing!
    • deleted 12y ago
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