Via Ran Prieur, I’ve been directed to this post by Professor Nassim Taleb introducing the concept of “antifragility”—the property of systems to flourish in circumstances of disorder. In summary, it suggests that the opposite of fragility, the tendency to collapse due to change or disorder, is not robustness, or the resistance to collapsing due to change or disorder. It is antifragility—the tendency to benefit from change and disorder, to thrive and improve in health when circumstances vary wildly.
Taleb’s examples are not necessarily the most compelling to me—he suggests that in Greek mythology, an example of fragility is the Sword of Damocles, robustness is the Phoenix, and antifragility is the Hydra. Directed research, he says, is fragile, but doesn’t say why; opportunistic research is robust, but stochastic tinkering is antifragile. Some examples seem to be based on nothing more than the author’s simple prejudice (“Ways of thinking: Fragile—Modernity, Robust—Medieval Europe, Antifragile—Ancient Mediterranean.” What does this even mean?) Most familiar to my thinking process is his representation of modern industrial society as fragile, ancient settlements (I’m imagining the cities of Harappa as an example, which lasted virtually unchanged for 500 years before disappearing with no sign of catastrophic collapse) as robust, and the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle as antifragile. Let’s talk about this example a little bit.
It is common to think of our industrial lifestyle as permanent, compared to past civilizations (which by definition don’t exist anymore) and nomadic hunting and gathering peoples (most of whom have been either wiped out or forced into some stable mode of participation with global industrialism). But this is a fallacy. We have been a global industrial society for perhaps 200 years. Rome, as a Republic and an Empire, which is everyone’s favorite example of how civilizations collapse, lasted 900 years, with a sharp transition in the middle from a constitutional republic to an expansive principate. Hunting and gathering were humanity’s main means of subsistence from the appearance of humanity (let’s say 1.8 million years ago) until at least 10,000 years ago, when agriculture began gradually to take over in most parts of the world. But the lifestyle itself persists even into the industrial era. Even if we manage to sustain industrialism for another 200 years in the face of the end of accessible fossil fuels, global climate change, and the failure of our economic systems to distribute necessary goods and services in a sustainable and resilient way, we can’t consider the experiment a success in terms of longevity as compared even to the Roman civilization, let alone to the hunter-gatherer model. Global industrialism depends on high energy expenditures and infinite growth, two conditions that simply cannot be maintained for long. The jury is simply still out on whether we will be able to make this system robust enough to withstand the conditions of the immediate future.
But in another sense we could describe the modern system as one that has emerged specifically to take advantage of conditions of abrupt change. The cascade of scientific development and industrial invention that resulted from the discovery and exploitation of concentrated fossil fuels could be seen as itself an example of antifragility—a creative, immediately useful adaptation to changing conditions. The speed of social change made possible by the exploitation of fossil energy has enabled us to capitalize on environmental changes in ways we never had available to us before. And yet it makes us fragile to an environmental change that we foresee, but at the moment have no idea how to respond to—the unavailability of those selfsame fuels. So it’s possible that fragility and antifragility are not opposites at all, but characteristics a system can possess in varying measures, and only with respect to certain conditions. A system might be antifragile with respect to climate change but fragile with respect to habitat loss. A system that simply changes dramatically and somewhat randomly in response to external change, with no particular care for whether that change is adaptive or destructive, would seem to have a high potential for both fragility and antifragility.
Perhaps the clearest example of antifragility is one that I do not see in Taleb’s table—evolution.
When living systems are disturbed by outside change, individuals expressing variations that offer greater survival and reproductive potential to the changed conditions survive and reproduce, and those that do not may die out or fail to pass on their genetic contributions. On the whole evolution appears to respond more rapidly in conditions characterized by environmental change and disorder. When environmental conditions are stable over long periods of time, selective pressure likewise changes little. Less pressure-driven random mutations that survive longer due to relatively constant conditions could have a detrimental effect on the species as a whole. The resilience of living systems depends on changing conditions.
But environmental change, to produce beneficial effects on living systems, has to occur within the constraints of what the system is able to tolerate without collapse. If changes come too quickly or are too extreme or sweeping, populations tend not to last long enough to evolve adaptation.
Dr. Taleb introduces an interesting concept—antifragility, fluxophilia, whatever you want to call it. But I think his characterization of it as the opposite of fragility perhaps oversimplifies the very complex reactions of creatively adapting systems to change. If we understand better the conditions that promote creative adaptation to change, we can use that to promote the development of more antifragile or fluxophilic human systems. I believe in a changing environment, this would promote greater resilience. What characteristics promote fluxophilia? How do emergent systems develop and strengthen this property?
I would suggest that they are process driven rather than rules driven. An example of what I’m calling “rules driven” is the common model of disaster preparedness—decide what potential changes you are likely to face, come up with a policy to respond to it, test the policy in a controlled simulation scenario, and then enforce adherence to the policy. An example of a process driven alternative might be the Superstruct game/modeling process advanced by the Institute for the Future. (FD: My friend works for this organization; she’s the one with purple hair.) In this game, the public at large was invited to imagine a future of upheaval and drastic—even disastrous—change. IFTF game developers offered general scenarios for the public to respond to, but the details were largely left to the imagination. Over 6800 people registered as participants, though undoubtedly some of them (FD: like myself) probably did little to contribute to the scenarios. However, among them, they created around 1000 stories about these future scenarios, which IFTF researchers have been mining for information about how people are likely to react to real change and using as a springboard to research the responses most likely to be productive.
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Interesting post, although I think you would benefit from a closer examination of Taleb’s ideas. In everything, I’ve encountered he points to nature (and by implication evolution) as the prime example of an anti-fragile system.
There is an interesting talk here which expands a bit on the post you linked to, which in my opinion, appears more like a public page from a note book than a detailed exploration of the idea of anti-fragility.
Cheers.