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The more things go wrong, the more things going wrong (jakeseliger.com)
9 points by vwoolf on Dec 2, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



This seem to be on tune with https://how.complexsystems.fail/

Things in systems (i.e. your body) are not usually independent. If everything goes absolutely smoothly, a disruption may affect more than just the point of disturbance. And if everything is not going so smoothly, and you have an already running problem, or fragility, the emergence of a new one could impact the system more than just the sum of both problems. And that is worse for long running problems that somewhat you dealt with, like accepting some inefficiency or extra cost but not solving them.

Part of the idea of Antifragile is that stress for some systems or components may not be "wrong", as they may be ready for an on-production optimization instead of doing a premature one.


I'm starting to think that Taleb used the wrong word in choosing "fragile" as his comparitor, and then complaining that it doesn't have an opposite.

A fragile object may break easily, but this does not mean that it will keep breaking more easily the more stress it is subjected to. This is seen in breaking ice, for instance. It's much easier to fracture a large icicle than it is to continue fracturing the smaller fragments of the icicle. The fragments of a fragile object may be more robust than they were when part of the larger object. (Irrespective of which weak points they actually fragmented on - that is to say that an icicle may 'randomly' fragment at certain weak points instead of others, but that it may still be more difficult to fragment the resulting pieces on the remaining weak points than it would have been to fragment the larger icicle on those particular weak points in the first place. A large object facilitates it's own shattering thanks to the leverage it's large body provides.)

So fragile objects can actually demonstrate some of Taleb's "antifragility" after the initial demonstration of fragility.

Just as there's no word (outside of specialist terms used by physicists?) for Taleb's "antifragile", there's also no word for the opposite of his "antifragile". I think decent compound words to describe these two ideas might be "systems robustness" and "fragile systems"; or "compositional robustness" and "decompositionally fragile".


Fragility properties change with scale too. It turns out its really hard to break up an iceberg. Explosives will do damage but the energy diffuses through the ice making all these mini fractures instead of clean break anywhere.


> <author quoting Nasim Taleb> “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile.”

Well in that case there's also no word for the exact opposite of robust. I think this is why we use modifiers such as "completely robust" or "extremely fragile".

> Most people don’t like writing and can’t maintain relationships primarily through text.

Is this generally true (outside of the author's friends), and to what extent (what kinds of friendships) is it true?

It sucks what the author is going through.


This was a very insightful essay.

For those wondering about the title: it's a post by a cancer survivor about cascade failures, fragility, and their experience coping with complications from cancer treatment.




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