Popularized by Nassim Taleb, the sliding scale of fragility, robustness, and antifragility refers to the responsiveness of a system to incremental negative variability. A fragile system or object is one in which additional negative variability has a disproportionately negative impact, as with
"While hard to precisely define, an algorithm is generally an automated set of rules or a “blueprint” leading a series of steps or actions resulting in a desired outcome, and often stated in the form of a series of “If → Then”
Gresham’s Law, named for the financier Thomas Gresham, states that in a system of circulating currency, forged currency will tend to drive out real currency, as real currency is hoarded and forged currency is spent. We see a similar result in human
We find that in most systems there are irreducible quantitative properties, such as complexity, minimums, time, and length. Below the irreducible level, the desired result simply does not occur. One cannot get several women pregnant to reduce the amount of time needed
A concept introduced by the economist and ecologist Garrett Hardin, the Tragedy of the Commons states that in a system where a common resource is shared, with no individual responsible for the wellbeing of the resource, it will tend to be depleted
Higher-level behavior tends to emerge from the interaction of lower-order components. The result is frequently not linear – not a matter of simple addition – but rather non-linear, or exponential. An important resulting property of emergent behavior is that it cannot be
A preferential attachment situation occurs when the current leader is given more of the reward than the laggards, thereby tending to preserve or enhance the status of the leader. A strong network effect is a good example of preferential attachment; a market
In a world such as ours, governed by chaos dynamics, small changes (perturbations) in initial conditions have massive downstream effects as near-infinite feedback loops occur; this phenomenon is also called the butterfly effect. This means that some aspects of physical systems (like
All complex systems are subject to positive and negative feedback loops whereby A causes B, which in turn influences A (and C), and so on – with higher-order effects frequently resulting from continual movement of the loop. In a homeostatic system, a
Named for Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by about 20% of its population, the Pareto Principle states that a small amount of some phenomenon causes a disproportionately large effect. The Pareto Principle is an