But you can do that with a simple growth model? Larger systems can already withstand larger shocks that would have been fatal when they were smaller.
Antifragile is a bit odd, the idea is supposed to be things that get stronger because of the shocks. Think how your muscles grow specifically from micro tears. In that regard, they must have resistance to grow. Though, I think that also misses on some of the definition?
Really, the more I try to defend the idea, the more I question it. :(
I'm not sure why you're talking about the size of systems, maybe I missed something.
I think the point is that the systems become stronger with negative stimuli. The community and relevant economy become stronger only because of the hurricane. They would not have done it otherwise.
I meant only that larger town/cities can take hurricanes a bit better than smaller ones can. Same reason that large trees weather the storm better than smaller trees do. If you increase the size of the system/thing, then it necessitates larger negative stimuli in most cases. Consider the size of a wave that would topple a canoe versus standard war ships.
At any rate, this is a hard analogy to stick with as it isn't the hurricane that makes things stronger. It is being ready for the hurricane. And, yeah, you can argue that getting hit by hurricanes is why the city was prepared, but that is kind of silly. Are non-coastal towns that don't have to evacuate for large storms somehow weaker than the ones that do? Not really, they are prepared for other shocks.
Again, muscle growth would kind of follow an antifragile model. In that you have to have some resistance for most growth. Maybe the old SR-71 was an even better example. Literally needed the resistance of flight so that it wouldn't leak. The saying for it was the faster it went, the faster it could go.
> I meant only that larger town/cities can take hurricanes a bit better than smaller ones can. Same reason that large trees weather the storm better than smaller trees do. If you increase the size of the system/thing, then it necessitates larger negative stimuli in most cases. Consider the size of a wave that would topple a canoe versus standard war ships.
I don't know anything about that but it's an empirical question that you can't answer with a priori reasoning like you're trying to do. We need actual data.
> At any rate, this is a hard analogy to stick with as it isn't the hurricane that makes things stronger. It is being ready for the hurricane.
No, the point was that they are not ready the first time, but they are the second time. The hurricane is what causes them to be ready the second time. If their preparations were not good enough the second time, they will be even better the third time.
I'm not sure I follow. You don't need heavy logic to explain why a single person can capsize a canoe rather easily, but would be unable to capsize something like a ferry.
As a similar example, we know that you can't just scale up an ant body to be human sized, as it would crumble under its own weight. Look up the "square-cube law". Same basic idea, in many ways. Ratios and scale just don't hold as things grow.
Back on the cities and preparing for a hurricane, this is not that they are stronger because they were hit by a hurricane. By this logic, you couldn't have a new coastal town that can weather one. After all, they weren't made stronger by the first hit. I think we can agree that is silly logic? If you know what forces you will get hit by, you can build anticipating them.
This is too close to the phrasing that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Which, frankly, is mostly nonsense. Many things can weaken you to the point that what didn't kill you this time let something else finish you off. Its cute, but largely presupposes growth between hits that has to happen.
Right, and I said that is cute, but mostly nonsense. There are no systems that can take arbitrary hits without ending. And as soon as you acknowledge that this only works by spurring growth after the hit, you are back to tolerances and growth.
My argument here would be that this isn't that new, all told? And... I would be shocked to find a lot of disagreement there. Indeed, other threads are already pointing out that terms already existed that covered this general idea.
My problem with antifragile, as often offered, is that it is positioned as something that gets stronger from being damaged, full stop. But... there is literally nothing on earth that would withstand the sun going nova, so that there are obvious limits to the idea. And if you accept that it is something in limits, you are back to model ideas of feedback and growth. And as you get back to that, you cover a lot of the same ground as many other discussions.
It is a cute model, mind. And somewhat fun to play with. Also worth knowing that some systems will react violently to small changes. Think flashbacks in building fires. It just doesn't bring much new to the table, all told.
Edit: I meant to add "fair enough!" at the top of this. Is a valid point to make! :D
I guess it's important that the negative signal be relatively small compared to the affected system, like antivenom doses, but also it needs to be predictable/differentiable to some degree. If two different doses of venom never had the same molecular patterns then it would be impossible to immunize against it.
A one-time supernova event would destroy a solar system, but the universe itself is antifragile to supernovas, and actually has built emergent spatiotemporal structures which depend on supernovas as part of their lifecycle. New solar systems rise up from old supernovas.
Predictability/differentiability of internal and external states is key for building robust systems, negative signals alone are often just detrimental. You can't learn from chaos.
Right. If you have systems that can adapt to stimulus in ways to prepare for recurring stimulus, you can look like this antifragile system. If the answer is to just be bigger... It is not a compelling model.
So building your immunity by using low doses doesn't mean you are antifragile. It means you are trainable. And even then, you are within tolerance levels. And cannot ever withstand some poisons.
Indeed, training is largely rehearsing some specific stimulus to be ready for it in a non training environment. We don't think of athletes as antifragile, though. Do we?
I don't think it's very common to experience antifragility outside of abstract complex systems such as economic markets. My intuition is that physical systems which exhibit antifragility tend to be metasystems, and the antifragility is described in the context of achieving specific states of subsystems.
For example, with the universe in relation to supernovas, we can say that a supernova wipes out a solar system. But new solar systems then take their place, with a different metal distribution that may be more conducive to advanced intelligence. If advanced intelligence is the goal, we might say that the universe is antifragile to supernovas, or more generally to the effects of gravity.
However, it's definitely a matter of perspective given that supernovas themselves are entirely inconsequential to the universe as a whole, and are only relevant to subsystems at specific emergent layers within the universe.
We could also form similar conclusions about natural evolution in general.
We might even be able to generalize further and posit that there is a natural tendency for order to arise out of chaos, and so order itself is antifragile to chaos, given that order thrives under the right chaotic conditions[0] and isn't simply immunized against it. So antifragility may exist as a fundamental property of the foundation of stuff, but it's not automatically an inheritable property of subsystems.
It all becomes very abstract, but at least we can define some constraints, namely that antifragility should be described in terms of optimization goals and measurement of specific states, and are thus subjective to the observer and not an innate property of the universe or any other system.
My intuition is that antifragile is often mistaken for controlled/directed growth. In that it works well in examples where things are able to die off and to be regrown. Muscles, in that regard, are able to withstand tears and are able to grow back. They will do so largely where they were torn.
There are limits. It's not about arbitrary negative stmuli and the entire idea only applies to certain kinds of systems. These criteria are covered in Taleb's books. The limits are well known in biology.
My gut is my main gripe is with many of the examples used. They often ignore that they are all on things that are in a healthy state of growth and that what is largely happening is that growth is refocused based on stimuli. More, there is no guarantee that you can refocus growth based on feedback in a way that will be ideal for future stimuli.
Which, I confess is silly for me to really get upset about. Luckily, I'm confident I'm sounding far more upset on this message board than I am on it. :D
