Carlos > > > I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is > > statistical across all systems. I don't believe that to be > the case. > > Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really > > transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts > and failings, > > there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever > > bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections, > > and > > stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental > > relationships fails. > > I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile. Yes indeed, we frequently get caught by surprise and don't see which excesses do and don't matter.
> Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't. The evolutionary record is chock full of things with long successful track records that suddenly disappear. Statistics on past performance is not necessarily a good predictor of future results. (as they say in the market) > Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from > LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small > catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that > wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would > suck, for > sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we > humans are a persistant little vermin... Absolutely agree. Our tiny appreciation of the power and durability of complex systems hides from view a great deal of what is really happening to us. > In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely > that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't > collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and > all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still > around. The thing that's different now is that we're in what has become a strongly institutionalized 600 year exponential growth process, and have not asked whether taking that to its natural limits is benign or dangerous. The earlier limits to growth investigation usually used a 'stock & flows' analysis and failed because economies are organized around 'values flows'. My approach is different. So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe > us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth, > but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than > extinction by catastrophe. Certainly, I'm just pointing out that one general vulnerability of all homeostatic systems, whether relying on stocks and flows, or creative evolution, or organizational complexity, is that they can probably all be pushed to a crisis in which the entire network of corrective systems can fail at once, like Katrina. One fairly easy way to understood that vulnerability is from considering human learning and response patterns and whether they are capable of making ever more rapid competent decisions about ever more far-reaching environmental impacts, for example. The direct cause of the present global warming crisis is just that, after all, a learning/response lag in which the way investors chose how to build our economies over the last 200 years did not take into account what would be sustainable on earth. The good science on the subject is that the time available for redirecting those investment decisions to redirect the evolution of the whole life support system without significant harm occurring has been exhausted, and for avoiding major harm is quite short, 5-20 years. These are things no government or group of governments has ever done before, consistent long range science led aggressive economic planning that successfully exploits the dynamism of the free market. It's all got to work, or we're in deep trouble, and it's just one of many such problems I think. > > > Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination > might be of > > seeming equally stubborn nature. I mean, if we've gone and > built an > > entire civilization, business plan and government financing > structure > > that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of > > the > > system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a > > major > > failure of imagination it seems to me. > > If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization > collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on > increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous. Oh yes, there are options if we respond to the danger on the horizon. At present stability requires constant % increases in investment and returns = exploding complexity. That's what growth is, and has been for a few hundred years. Humans being creatures of habit and unable to imagine the complexities of the physical systems that were doing it get used to such things. There's also an interesting special deception, that throughout the growth process it has appeared 'the sky is falling', to conservatives and older people because economic growth is a continuously revolutionary process which upsets old ways of doing things without clearly displaying what new ways are being built. I get my comfort in discussing growth system dynamics from 30 years of closely watching all kinds and figuring out why its so hard to build models of them. > > > I definitely think we should > > make government competent by design. There are lots of do's and > > don'ts > > regarding performance measures, but if departments developed > > concepts of > > productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal > > groups > > competing would be highly very productive. > > Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people > might think > that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case > when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo- > democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will > try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too > slowly), but surely, we're getting there... Yes, but only half way. One of the fascinating aspects of our societal response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right over the past 40 years. People had the choice and were drawn into the illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the government response, rather than finding a better way to address our growing problems. My observation is that every complaint has some validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated. Trusting investors in a free market guided by maximum profit to make all the important design decisions for mankind's permanent occupation of the earth isn't working right. There's really no softer way to say it that's truthful. I'm still waiting for truthful observations and useful knowledge to become relevant in politics. Perhaps the old Missouri mule solution is more appropriate, since the real world seems to be getting too complicated and putting people to sleep. > > Best regards, > > Carlos Gershenson... > Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel > Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium > http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ > > "There is no game in which you cannot cheat" > > > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
