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Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

nature.com

51–60 of 115 posts

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#51
post #13
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.

Respect to the OP as spiking networks are a different domain, but the field of Graceful Degradation and Perturbations itself is almost older than the field of Neural Networks itself. Generally, the bitter lesson occurs - these techniques show some kind of useful robustness at parameter M, but fail to show as much of a useful robustness relatively as parameter M*100. For example, before attention, using Drop out (in essence a form of forcing robustness) was one of the most common techniques. The quality of robustness or its resulting sub parts (e.g. the tradeoff between precision and recall) is incorporated as a measure in some of the fields basic scores, such as harmonic F1 score.

Still it, like alternate activation functions, data beyond matrices and vectors and non-linear networks, remain very unstudied.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#52
post #10

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

Interesting connection can you elaborate more about ideal stoic which part of the philosophy that translate to which math concept.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#53
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I wonder what a machine learning model with risk seeking behaviour would look like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231644

I had read this comment, but didn't read it under this lens. Thanks for (re)pointing me to it.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#54
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.

This presentation by Todd Becker titled How Hormesis Works: The Biology of Beneficial Adaptation to Stress is a great introduction to the subject with some practical advice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDm_guQfESA

Also see his Desirable Difficulties: Using Hormesis to Learn More Effectively - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc0PZe08Ues

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The first graphic in the paper has a good illustration of the differences between fragility, robustness, resilience, adaptiveness, and antifragility: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-024-00014-y/figures/1

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#56
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did he described this? (Honest question)

To be correct, he maybe didn't coin the term. At least I didn't find it on quick search in his book Cybernetics. Seems like the term ultrastable actually comes from Ashby [1]. [1] https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ezequiel/AS/lectures/AdaptiveSys...

Yeah, I'm more curious about his point of view than terminology. Thanks

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#57
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When enduring successive hurricanes the most worthwhile effort might be to improve antifragility on more of a continuous basis than even recovery itself.

You can definitely benefit by increasing your antifragility in the face of a second hurricane long before recovery from the first hurricane has been very well completed at all, no matter how focused the recovery effort.

I never thought people needed a new term to be coined for this, but it doesn't sound so bad when you think about it.

It's just one of the things you inherently know your whole life.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#58
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 ever…

Well said!

As you point out; "making people think in more novel ways" (or making them think at all given the amount of parroting in the education system) is the usp of Taleb's books. People need to stop focusing on the attributes of the author (arrogant etc.) but instead need to learn to focus on the content of their writings.

Re: Antifragility in complex dynamical systems

#59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When enduring successive hurricanes the most worthwhile effort might be to improve antifragility on more of a continuous basis than even recovery itself. You can definitely benefit by increasing your antifragility in the face of a second hurricane long before recovery from the first hurricane has been very well completed at all, no matter how focused the recovery effort. I never thought people needed a new term to be…

I think you mean resilient or robust, not antifragile. I know of no building which gets stronger under/after hurricane force winds.
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