Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A simple slide to explain my idea that risk resides necessarily in the nonlinear. A linear risk that produces the same harm for large deviations as a nonlinear (concave) one would scare the s**t out of you. Hence detecting risks consists necessarily in finding nonlinear responses.
(I am lecturing today to bank inspectors. They are good people looking for tricks and heuristics.)
The author of The Black Swan appears to have something equally powerful, and related, in his concept of “antifragility.” What is fragile, Taleb writes, succumbs to shocks. What is robust resists shocks. What is antifragile learns from shocks.
Organizations, especially large ones, crave order and predictability and exert their considerable powers to ensure stability. But by suppressing the impact of small shocks they make themselves vulnerable to large shocks, which are inevitable. Their fragility is self-inflicted. By contrast, entities allowed or designed to feed on disorder prosper in an increasingly disorderly world. Often they have bottom-up features that live close to the small shocks and adapt locally and quickly. Thus city governments are far more antifragile than national governments except highly distributed ones like Switzerland
via GBN : Article.
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Friends let us discuss the following. M. Bolton made me realize that just as the opposite of fragile isn’t robust the opposite of reject may not be accept (neutral) but promote. This would explain the following effect I described in TBS : people default to accepting statements and need to make an effort to reject (they are more likely to accept under cognitive load). Accepting is inert, like an act of omission. So the negative of the act of commission of rejecting would be promoting or some active type of acceptance.
So mathematically things would be {-1, 0, 1} rather than the dyadic {0,1}
So why would anyone want to promote an approach that encourages constant change, when failure in the form of outages or breaches or large-scale processing errors exact such a heavy toll on businesses? The short answer is because some application domains require it, but that’s also a bit glib. Instead, let me bring in the concept of “anti-fragility,” as coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book “Anti-fragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.”
I explained the gist last week:
“Anti-fragility is the opposite of fragility: as Taleb notes, where a fragile package would be stamped with ‘do not mishandle,’ an anti-fragile package would be stamped ‘please mishandle.’ Anti-fragile things get better with each (non-fatal) failure.”
Anti-fragile systems benefit from variability and can take advantage of differences from the “normal” to ultimately gain value. Anti-fragile systems behave in such a way that failures due to change exact a small cost, but successful change drives exponentially higher value, so the system gains overall. Taleb argues this is only achieved by keeping the scope of each activity small enough that the downside risk is manageable (and results in strengthening the system), and that any gains can be maintained ongoing.
via Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Risk and anti-fragility — Tech News and Analysis.
Taleb argues that we want to create systems that are antifragile – that are designed to take advantage of volatility. I think this concept is incredibly powerful when applied to systems and organizational architecture.
Why Continuous Delivery Works
Taleb shows why the traditional approach of operations – making change hard, since change is risky – is flawed: “the problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks… These artificially constrained systems become prone to Black Swans. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups… catching everyone off guard and undoing years of stability or, in almost all cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state” (p105).
This a great explanation of how many attempts to manage risk actually result in risk management theatre – giving the appearance of effective risk management while actually making the system and the organization extremely fragile to unexpected events. It also explains why continuous delivery works. The most important heuristic we describe in the book is “if it hurts, do it more often, and bring the pain forward.” The effect of following this principle is to exert a constant stress on your delivery and deployment process to reduce its fragility so that releasing becomes a boring, low-risk activity.
via On Antifragility in Systems and Organizational Architecture | Continuous Delivery.