Science
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This latest Veritasium video is about a widget that shrinks when you pull on it. The script makes whimsical detours into springs physics, road congestion, and Braess' paradox, however the key insight about this little counterintuitive oddity felt unremarkable at first.
But then I realized that it is a rare example of antifragility in action (yes, the Taleb kind), although the video makes no mention of that. As a refresher on antifragility: a few systems benefit from randomness over time, while most don't.
An object threatened by randomness over time is said to be fragile. Such is the case of a vase because so many random events (a baseball, a cat, moving houses) can irreversibly destroy it.
An object is considered to be robust (neither fragile nor antifragile) if it is mostly impervious to randomness over time. Mountains are a good example — only erosion over geological time scales can affect them (and love, if we get lyrical about moving them).
But an object is said to be antifragile if it strengthens as a result of stressors and volatility. If you skip to the 20-minute mark, you'll see that with just the right amount of stress applied to it in the form of vibrations, the widget can oscillate between vulnerable (resonant) and stable states.
That's a fascinating property — imagine that applied to a building in an earthquake-prone zone, to a computer network, or to an immune system.
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