Tuesday, May 06, 2014

What is the opposite of fragile?
Perhaps you answer "robust" or something similar? Not true. Somthing fragile gets worse when stressed. Something robust is neutral to stress. The opposite of fragile is something that improves with disorder and stress. There is no word for that property, so we call it "antifrgaile", a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The concept is studied in great detail and from many angles in his excellent book Antifragile - Things that gain from disorder. I recommend it to anyone.
There are a number of examples of antifragile systems in nature: our skeleton and muscles. Our immune system. They must be stressed to become effective. Genes become more fit when subjected to varying stresses.
There are fewer examples of man-made antifragile systems, but anyone working in the software field will recognize the need. Our systems, and systems development efforts, are fragile. They fail when stressed, in particular when the stress is of an unexpected kind. This is unacceptable given software’s central role in our civilization. Many organizations today are helpless when their systems fail. Some organizations don't even exist in any meaningful way outside their systems (Facebook, Twitter, etc). We need to find ways to build antifragile systems, systems that improve under stress. Is that even possible? I think it may be.
One example would be Bittorrent. When a torrent becomes popular the load increases, but each downloader (leecher) also provides upload of the same torrent to others, so the more people download a torrent the more available it becomes. Bittorrent is antifragile to load.
Another example could be an optimizing compiler that uses runtime instrumentation of a system as input when compiling the system. The more uses cases we subject the system to, the better the optimization will be the next time. This system is antifragile to usage.
In both these cases there is a feedback mechanism, implicit in the case of Bittorrent and explicit in the compiler. I would be happy to hear of more examples of antifragile systems. This is not a concept software developers in general are familiar with today, but I think they will have to be in the future.

2 Comments:

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8:17 AM  
Blogger Ellie K said...

Hello, Jan Mattsson!

I found my way here via one of your answers to a question on Money Stack Exchange from a long time ago. It was a good answer and I up voted. Stack Exchange is not anti-fragile, sadly.

This is a clever, well-written post about Taleb's concept of anti-fragility. We talked about it on English Language & Usage SE back in 2014 or so. I'm not sure if you allow links. I hope so, and that my comment doesn't go into the spam bin! https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/56513/is-there-a-better-existing-word-for-antifragility

1:23 AM  

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