RE: Bitesized Lessons in Antifragility #3: What is Antifragility? Math Proves that You Should Lift Heavy Weights + My Transformation
Several intriguing elements in your post, thanks for writing this up.
Without having thought myself through these concepts I somewhat tend to believe that I´d aim for resilience rather than anti-fragility. As a human being it´s simply an impossibility to constantly gain from stress. Might be different for an algorithm or a learning machine.
Taking the bodybuilding/weight-lifting analogy, it would actually be the person at the very left that would be the most anti-fragile one according to the definition, since he would certainly gain the highest benefit from stress (exercising) . At the same time he would be the least resilient of the three, as his threshold for stress-induced physical damage is the lowest. The person at the very right has probably exhausted any room further stress-induced gain. Even a lack of stress (exercising) would let him becoming weaker. Just some thoughts on this very interesting topic.
Thanks for the feedback! Diminishing marginal returns is definitely true. There are many layers to this problem that makes it rather complex. Perhaps I am oversimplifying a highly complex topic.
While it is true that someone untrained would gain the most from the same amount of stress, he cannot handle as much actual stress. Weights that would allow a strong person to get even stronger would kill someone untrained. Strong people are also less likely to die in black swan events like car crashes.
There is also a threshold point of marginal cost vs. marginal utility. The more you lift, the higher of a marginal cost you would be able to survive, but that is up to a threshold level of stress that nobody could survive, which would be considered the black swan ruin.
I´ll definitely check your preceding posts to get a better understanding of the topic. Have you thought about what resilience and anti-fragility would mean for a network like Steemit?