Thread by @swardley

X : What is anti-fragile?
Me : It's my favourite shibboleth, up there with scaled agile and industry 4.0.
X : Am I going o get any sense out of you?
Me : On these topics ... no. They have nothing to do with reason or critical thinking.

X : You mean you disagree with them?
Me : To disagree with something then there would have to be substance. I just find opinions on categorisation that often require a peculiar perspective or interpretation of existing works rather than anything new that progresses the field.

X : But I find them useful.
Me : Good on you. I don't. What I find less meaningful is spending time arguing over such categorisation ... is it industry 4.0? Is anti-fragile a discrete subset of resilience or a spectrum of common properties?

Sorry, I just don't see the value.

X : Taxonomy benefits all.
Me : It can do but not when people simply redefine things in order to create more classification. There has to be some meaningful reason beyond simply adding "more categories" and opinion is not enough.

i.e. If I suddenly declared that I've redefined cheese into 15,000 different categories based upon my opinion, well ...

a) more taxonomy
b) I can give examples of cheeses in one or more of my categories

... it is meaningful?

X : But I find terms like anti-fragile as being meaningful.
Me : Well, here's the rub. Most people I know of within the field look at it as redefining resilience in order to create space for anti-fragile. It's a bit like redefining cheese in order to create new categories ...

... the best way I can think of describing the problem is to consider Holling's work on engineering vs ecological resilience, which I've tried to summarise in the following table -

... so one approach would be to look at resilient systems like "nature" itself (both engineering and ecological resilience) and try to identify discrete subsets within that where systems "learn" or gain from disorder. It probably won't be discrete but a spectrum ...

... because characteristics such as diversity, learning, adaptation and exaptation ... to name a few ... are essential in such resilient systems to some degree (hence, spectrum).

An alternative is to redefine resilience to something else and declare a new category of things called anti-fragile.

It's like going ... you've got a scale from white to black, I'll redefine black as grey and declare that I've now discovered black.

Yep, whatever.

... and so getting into arguments over redefinitions of terms and classifications of scale based upon opinions that seem poorly informed by existing work ... well ...

whatever.

Not my cup of tea.

Oooh, if I redefine cheese I can include cheesecake as part of my low carb diet?

X : Don't you have a responsibility to get involved in such arguments to prevent "pollution" of topics.

Me : Oh no. Make me feel guilty and drag me into a debate of opinions and classifications as though my opinion was somehow more important than others ...

... but then, that's the problem - it's about opinions.

Whilst I certainly agree that some systems gain from disorder or shocks, this is already covered by the concept of resilience. It might be reasonable to have a subset but I do not find this redefinition to be helpful.

... to cut the story short, if you said a subset of resilient are systems that grow from disorder then I'd agree but might argue all have these properties, so it's more of a spectrum.

If you say to me that anti-fragile systems are separate from resilient then ... no.