Re "beyond efficiency" podcast episode... I remember reading many years ago about this idea, maybe in Scientific American... Basically, evolved systems tend to be inefficient and full of redundancy, whereas designed systems are efficient and parsimonious... But many evolved systems can still function when many components are damaged

Similar, reminds me of how a lot of really old texts that started as stuff that was orally transmitted are filled with redundancy and repetition. In The Information A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick makes an interesting juxtaposition between repetition, information, and transmission and how they all relate to what I’d call robustness.

I had a professor in my undergrad who opened up the intro computer security course with an argument that cells expend a majority of their energy on self-defense (or something like that, IANA biologist) and this was supposed to mean that we should be devoting more computational resources to security/resilience/error resistance

I came across this viewpoint in A Third Window, which described fragile systems as those reliant on a single feedback loop for one or more of its required resources, and described resilient systems as those built of overlapping feedback loops with multiple sources of each resource, and the tendency of the former to become the latter when there’s a dearth of competition for the same resources.

This topic always makes me think of this oldie but goodie: a lovely .