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By Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Response | 2012 Annual Question | Edge

Hormesis Is Redundancy

Nature is the master statistician and probabilist. It follows a certain logic based on layers of redundancies, as a central risk-management approach. Nature builds with extra spare parts (two kidneys), and extra capacity in many, many things (say lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus, etc.), while design by humans tend to be spare, overoptimized, and have the opposite attribute of redundancy, that is, leverage—we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the reverse of redundancy (fifty thousand in extra cash in the bank or, better, under the mattress, is redundancy; owing the bank an equivalent amount is debt).

via By Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Response | 2012 Annual Question | Edge.
HatTip to Dave Lull.

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