Coevolving Innovations

… in Business Organizations and Information Technologies

Currently Viewing Posts Tagged robust yet fragile

Robust Yet Fragile Complexity, or Scale Free Network?

A mention of “Robust-Yet-Fragile” label by resilience author @andrew_zolli led me to John Doyle‘s research at Caltech.  Andrew Zolli writes:

We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole.  Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.

This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? [….]

CalTech system scientist John Doyle has coined a term for such systems: he calls them Robust-Yet-Fragile — and one of their hallmark features is that they are good at dealing with anticipated threats, but terrible at dealing with unanticipated ones. As the complexity of these systems grow, both the sources and severity of possible disruptions increases, even as the size required for potential ‘triggering events’ decreases — it can take only a tiny event, at the wrong place or at the wrong time, to spark a calamity.

In an 2007 Discover Magazine article, Carl Zimmer provides a simplified description of research conducted from a theoretical foundation (in Scale Free Networks) in contrast to that from empirical practicalities in control engineering.… Read more (in a new tab)

A mention of “Robust-Yet-Fragile” label by resilience author @andrew_zolli led me to John Doyle‘s research at Caltech.  Andrew Zolli writes:

We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole.  Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.

This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? [….]

CalTech system scientist John Doyle has coined a term for such systems: he calls them Robust-Yet-Fragile — and one of their hallmark features is that they are good at dealing with anticipated threats, but terrible at dealing with unanticipated ones. As the complexity of these systems grow, both the sources and severity of possible disruptions increases, even as the size required for potential ‘triggering events’ decreases — it can take only a tiny event, at the wrong place or at the wrong time, to spark a calamity.

In an 2007 Discover Magazine article, Carl Zimmer provides a simplified description of research conducted from a theoretical foundation (in Scale Free Networks) in contrast to that from empirical practicalities in control engineering.… Read more (in a new tab)

  • RSS qoto.org/@daviding (Mastodon)

    • daviding: “Instead of #SustainableDevelopmentGoals, #KaitlinKish #Steph…” March 12, 2023
      Instead of #SustainableDevelopmentGoals, #KaitlinKish #StephenQulley say #EcologicalLivelihoodGoals. "informal processes of exchange, familial care, place-bound community, mutual aid, and reciprocation –​which we designate as _Livelihood_"Open access book for March 13 https://wiki.st-on.org/2023-03-13 #SystemsThinking #EcologicalEconomics
    • daviding: “From the debate between Michael Quinn Patton and Michael C. …” March 10, 2023
      From the debate between Michael Quinn Patton and Michael C. Jackson OBE on "Systems Concepts in Evaluation" on 2023-02-27, I've digested into text the few minutes with the largest contention. https://ingbrief.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/concerns-with-the-way-systems-thinking-is-used-in-evaluation-michael-c-jackson-obe-2023-02-27/ #SystemsThinking #evaluation
    • daviding: “Peer-reviewed article on #SystemsChanges Learning 2019-2022 …” March 9, 2023
      Peer-reviewed article on #SystemsChanges Learning 2019-2022 published in special issue of J. #Systemics #Cybernetics & #Informatics, on "#Sustainable, Smart and #SystemicDesign #PostAnthropocene" edited by #MarieDavidova #SusuNousala #ThomasJMarlowe https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/systems-changes-learning-recasting-reifying-jsci/ #SystemsThinking
    • daviding: “Truthiness was coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and became…” March 7, 2023
      Truthiness was coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and became legitimated as an entry in a dictionary by 2010. > ... _truth_ just wasn’t “dumb enough.” “I wanted a silly word that would feel wrong in your mouth,” he said. > What he was driving at wasn’t _truth_ anyway, but a mere approximation of it […]
    • daviding: “Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, may be better viewed as putt…” March 7, 2023
      Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, may be better viewed as putting together hypotheses, where testing either leads to corroboration or truthiness. > The glitch seems to be a linear consequence of the fact that so-called Large-Language Models are about predicting what _sounds right_, based on its huge data sets. As a commenter put it in […]
  • RSS on IngBrief

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • RSS on daviding.com

  • RSS on Media Queue

  • Meta

  • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
    Theme modified from DevDmBootstrap4 by Danny Machal