Antifragility
Contents |
Antifragility
The idea of antifragility is for a system to not only withstand or endure chaos, stress and high-impact events but to improve and upgrade itself. By looking at a system to be antifragile it adapts to the surroundings, and it is here that the antifragile system changes from the robust system. The robust system can withstand high-impacts and will not break when negative scenarios happen but neither will it take in the possitve impacts or scenarios, it will never improve before the whole system is changed. The antifragile system learns from the impacts, negative and possitive, and thus becomes stronger with each hit it takes.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially— a love of errors, a certain class of errors.
To understand antifragility it is important to remember it is the opposite of fragile. Fragile items or systems breaks when they are mishandled. The antifragile wants to be pushed, it wants to receive impacts and chaos, that is the way it learns and improves. Therefore the antifragile system is the ideal match for venturing out into the unknown.
The concept of antifragility is developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and discussed in his books, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragility.
The history of antifragility
Black Swan events.
Antifragility as a concept
Defenition of antifragile:
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
something that is robust merely tolerates adverse or unexpected conditions, whereas something that is antifragile thrives—its performance actually improves. - Robert W. Lucky, Antifragile Systems
The antonym of “fragile” is not robustness or resilience, but “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly,” using an example from Taleb when referring to sending a package full of glasses by post. - Terje Aven, The Concept of Antifragility and its Implications for the Practice of Risk Analysis
‘Fragility’ can be defined as an accelerating sensitivity to a harmful stressor: this response plots as a concave curve and mathematically culminates in more harm than benefit from random events. ‘Antifragility’ is the opposite, producing a convex response that leads to more benefit than harm. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘Antifragility’ as a mathematical idea
How to define an antifragile system?
- When do you reach an antifragile system? - What is the rules/guidelines for the anitfragile system? - Can an antifragile system become (anti)antifragile? And what is it then?
The use of antifragility
- What use would the antifragile system give? - Is there any benefits that does not exist today in other systems?
- Is there places that the antifragile system cannot be used?
- Are there any antifragile systems? (I.e. Can the concept be used, or is the the antifragile system a philosophical thought?)
Antifragility vs robustness/resilient
References
Sorry to the people making the peer review for not having any content.
