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Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

nature.com

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Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#41

Post by phyalow »

bob1029 wrote: post #17
_yb2s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool, but I'm surprised you're sharing this on here and not in a job interview with a deep learning startup and/or an arXiv paper.

> a job interview with a deep learning startup I am not aware of any DL startups that are interested in techniques which are incompatible with GPUs and back propagation. I think this is a solo journey through the dark forest for now.

Correct me if im wrong, this is just a question originating from my own curiosity, but could you not apply the same or similar techniques to classical NN architectures? I dont see exactly how the differentiability of the architecture matters? I.e. in between epochs randomly perturb weight values (similar effect I understand to introducing scheduled noise or non-isomorphic transforms on the features), implement a scheduled causal drop in/out scheme etc? I know of people that train models these ways as a form of regularisation and they claim better fits too.

Enjoy your adventures in the Dark Forest.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#42

Post by r_hanz »

agumonkey wrote: post #27
mo_42 wrote: post #26

I'd like to point out that Norbert Wiener was the first to discover the concept of antifragility (under a different term though). It's also worth checking out more of his works as he initiated the field of cybernetics.

Where did he described this? (Honest question)

I believe Nassim Taleb coined the term.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#43

Post by dwattttt »

Animats wrote: post #28
_yb2s wrote: post #10

I love how Taleb managed to translate an ideal from stoic philosophy into a precisely defined mathematical concept

Some of this reads like rediscovering control theory, which is all about stability and robustness within defined limits. It's more popularization than innovation. The person who first translated this idea into math was James Clerk Maxwell, in his paper, "On Governors", in 1868.[1] Maxwell was the first to get a mathematical handle on stability of feedback systems. He wrote: "If, by altering the adjustments of the mac…

I thought so too, and I thought "this is just robust control with different words", but after reading the abstract I don't think robust control actually describes deriving an improvement from perturbing an input.

On the other hand, "persistence of excitation" (a phrase I've heard of but never applied) suggests this too is well trodden ground (Wikipedia suggests end of 70s & 80s)

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#44

Post by cfcf14 »

After reading the paper, I'm really unsure what the novel contribution is. It feels like they're attempting to rebrand well-understood concepts within various fields (control systems theory, etc). The provided mathematical definition of antifragility is somewhat unconvincing too: it's not that it's wrong, per say, but in the effort to find something sufficiently broad to apply to many different fields of applied dynamical theory they've had to adopt a definition which is a bit unintuitive, and overly general.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#45

Post by baq »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #36
fasteo wrote: post #34

Random note: Antifragility is called hormesis in living organisms, a concept that existed since the 1950s when the wrong dose - too low - of herbicides made the plants stronger.

Mechanical engineering uses the term system resilience. I must admit I don't like antifragility, which sounds like a novlang and is poorly defined.

It is something that Taleb proposed and given a name for - given 'fragility', 'antifragility' makes sense, since it isn't resilience (he discusses that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility contains a mathematical heuristic of the term applied to some function.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#46

Post by sethammons »

_yb2s wrote: post #13
bob1029 wrote: post #2

I've found that intentionally causing abrupt (but reasonable) changes to hyperparameters in evolutionary spiking neural network simulations (I.e between each generation) results in far more robust simulations that will meet fitness criteria with less likelihood of getting stuck somewhere. The tradeoff being that simulating will take longer, but this may be worth things like reducing the chances of your resource requi…

Very cool, but I'm surprised you're sharing this on here and not in a job interview with a deep learning startup and/or an arXiv paper.

Your surprise breaks my brain. Why would someone "keep it to themselves" outside some white paper they won't have time to promote or for a job interview that they might not need?

Is your thought that it is some novel approach that nobody is doing and has obvious market implications? Even then, the implications matter only if you are in a position to take advantage.

The Internet used to be a place people shared cool shit because it was cool, not for some monetization scheme or personal gain beyond the joy of sharing. Content creators (as a job) and hustle culture are a blight.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#47

Post by moffkalast »

0134340 wrote: post #39
fasteo wrote: post #34

Random note: Antifragility is called hormesis in living organisms, a concept that existed since the 1950s when the wrong dose - too low - of herbicides made the plants stronger.

That's what immediately came to mind when reading OP's comment. He's basically describing the action of perturbing a system just enough with a weak force that it 'innoculates', for lack of a better word, itself against similar but stronger forces.

So in a nutshell, making sure our robots are vaccinated against errors.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#48

Post by padolsey »

krick wrote: post #24

There are now so many bullshit-terms derived from Taleb's bullshit books. Like how people still keep mentioning "black swans" as if it actually means something other (or something more) than "unexpected event". And for some unfathomable reason it keeps traction. Similarly how Mandelbrot "redefined" (i.e. distorted) the meaning of "Lindy effect", and it stuck (however, I didn't notice if it became popular to call a mi…

I don't much mind the populurization of these terms or making people think in more novel ways. Even if it's seen as BS by those more informed, I'm glad such books are written and communicators like Taleb exist. Without him, I wouldn't have discovered a bunch of tangential things. I will admit, it gives my brain a satisfying itch too, as I realise that academia is often just the refined encoding of pretty mundane everyday truths, so when someone is able to come in and re-extract that and share it widely, even with a bit of gentle-re-branding, I think it's still net-positive.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#49

Post by tokai »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #5

I wish folks would write more plainly. “Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations.” Geish.

That sentence is completely fine, and not even close to being difficult. If that is not plainly enough for you, scholarly communication is not going to be possible.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#50

Post by K0balt »

dmichulke wrote: post #37
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical engineering uses the term system resilience. I must admit I don't like antifragility, which sounds like a novlang and is poorly defined.

Resilience is not the same, a system is anti-fragile if it gets stronger under stress. Resilience is just "not getting weaker".

Pedantically-not pedantic, but isn’t resilience the ability to quickly recover?
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