Antifragility - A Baseline
Building the Foundation of a Fantastic Architecture
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is one we’ve talked a lot about here on Polymathic Being: Antifragility. It’s popped up enough times that I think we should probably pause and make sure everyone fully understands this seemingly obvious, but completely counterintuitive concept. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Intro
Antifragility burst into the popular lexicon with Nassim Talib’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. In the book, he defines antifragility thus:
“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Antifragility is a system or group of systems that gets stronger over time when exposed to stress. An example we all can understand, because we each have one, is our immune system. The immune system is not created with knowledge of pathogens, only structures that know how to identify and fight off pathogens. It must be exposed to those stressors to learn.
It all starts during birth when we are crushed with hundreds of pounds per square inch of pressure as we pass through our mother’s hips. This literal physical trauma stimulates the immune system and primes it for a healthy response. As we pass through the birth canal, natural bacteria are mashed into our nose and mouth starting a cycle that builds up our healthy gut bacteria.
In one more step that shows the amazing complexity of nature, this vulnerable baby's first nursing provides colostrum. This pre-milk contains high levels of immunoglobulins, antimicrobial peptides, and growth factors which leverage and stimulate the immune system to provide antibodies and other benefits.
Human human babies emerge with what is effectively a broad-spectrum vaccine.1
It’s a perfect example of an antifragile system; it fails if it isn’t stressed and succeeds when it is appropriately stressed.
Antifragile Systems
Other human antifragile systems are muscles and mental health. Anyone who has exercised knows that you need to actually tear muscles in order to build them stronger and bigger.
Mental health is a bit more counterintuitive but trauma is essential to a healthy psyche and we explored this in Trauma and Antifragility. To build resiliency and to learn how to deal with adversity, we must be exposed to adversity. Most religions and philosophies understand this unique relationship and leverage our antifragile capacity to become focused, stronger, and more balanced.
Ironically, while humans, and nature writ large, are quite antifragile, the things we build have only begun to take on these characteristics more recently.
A geodesic dome is a perfect example where the force of wind actually strengthens the structure which is why it’s used in hostile environments and for things like Radar domes.
Current architecture, specifically in earthquake-prone areas has learned the painful lesson that a building that survives has to bend and flex. You don’t fight an earthquake, you design to flow with the earthquake.
Interestingly, the ancient people of what is now Peru figured this out with their interlocking stonework which allows the blocks to shift. The concave and convex surfaces ensure the blocks settle back into their original position without mortar.
Fragile Systems
Human-designed antifragile designs are unique because they aren’t common. In my world of engineering advanced technologies, we often build very fragile minimum viable products that don’t scale well, are hard to secure from adverse usage, and break quite regularly. This is why I write a lot about intentional design to look for opportunities to create antifragility.
Our digital / internet systems are shockingly fragile and we focus on protecting them through hardening (clearly fragile) and resiliency (still reactive) and I push every day to have people consider the next step for antifragility. This would mean that instead of trying to stop a hacker with something like a door lock you would invite them in and learn from them similar to an immune system while keeping them contained.
Back to the book by Talib, he explores, in-depth, how many of our monetary systems, investment strategies, and politics are hyper-fragile which directly led to the 2008 financial crisis and more.
Even worse, with ourselves personally, we have taken our antifragile bodies and minds and turned them fragile. From the idea that trauma is bad to the over-medicalization of normal life, to our over-reaction and over-sanitization of pathogens, to the way we walk wrong, breathe wrong, and even poop wrong, we’ve taken our natural ability and made it frustratingly fragile.
I think our inclination toward fragility is rooted in tyring to establish order and, as we investigated in Choas and Order, order is necessary but fragile and chaos is necessary but needs to be bound. Together they create antifragility and highlights the natural tension we need to address to unlock this capability.
Summary
The challenge isn’t that antifragility is something new or a technology that we need to invent, it’s that we often overlook how natural and powerful it is. We just have to step back, let go of trying to control everything, accept a degree of risk-taking, and be exposed to stresses that allow things to become more robust and resilient.
In the Book Antifraile, Talib relates the following annecdote:
“Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: ‘It’s simple. I just removed everything that is not David.’”
Some things need to be designed better while others need to be allowed to go back to their original nature but it all starts by first thinking of how we can make them more antifragile. We might need to pull back helicopter parents, revamp our reactive healthcare system, avoid the binary in politics, create balanced risk portfolios in finance, or design modular and composable systems with technology but no matter what topic, antifragility provides a powerful foundation for improving our civilizations.
What examples do you have of good antifragile systems? What are some systems you’d like to see become more antifragile?
Other essays that explore antifragility:
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Vaccine theory relies on the idea of anti-fragility to work. You inject a pathogen and an immune stimulant in just enough volume to not kill the child but trigger the immune system response to become stronger
An interesting consequence is that one vaccine has enough immune system stimulants to trigger a proper vaccine response. Six vaccines contain… Six times that. 50 years ago kids would get one or two vaccines at a time. Today they might get six to eight at once. At the same time, adverse effects are increasing with vaccines and that is likely due to the fact that we are over-burdening their immune systems and creating fragility
Antifragile is fixed premises and assumptions and variable results - it's a lot harder to scale a system that isn't consistent.
Fragile is variable premises and assumptions and fixed results - shoving everything into a box in order to make it work.
Lovely as always. What do you make of the issue of wildfire?
Some claim that nature’s state is to have occasional wildfires to keep overall fuel levels under control, while humans try too hard to not have wildfires happen at all, which makes them worse when they do happen.
Is this an example of our instinct to avoid the danger of wildfire actually making the system more fragile?