Category Archives: Antifragile

Natural disasters: Counting the cost of calamities | The Economist

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Referenced in Antifragile pg. 470

Such multi-billion-dollar natural disasters are becoming common. Five of the ten costliest, in terms of money rather than lives, were in the past four years see map. Munich Re, a reinsurer, reckons their economic costs were $378 billion last year, breaking the previous record of $262 billion in 2005 in constant 2011 dollars. Besides the Japanese and Thai calamities, New Zealand suffered an earthquake, Australia and China floods, and America a cocktail of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and floods. Barack Obama issued a record 99 “major disaster declarations” in 2011.

via Natural disasters: Counting the cost of calamities | The Economist.

Stewart Brand GBN Book Club : Antifragile

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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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Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Risk and anti-fragility — GigaOm

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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.

On Antifragility in Systems and Organizational Architecture | Continuous Delivery

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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.

NNT on Reason TV!

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Treat! From Reason.com

Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of “skin in the game” to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won’t rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he’ll never take writing advice from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies” (51:49).