Phil
wrote:
Carlos
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.
There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to improve
efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
movement is about gains
made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews,
and instead having quality as an
up-front and intrinsic effort.
[PH] That's good and bad. Refinement is wonderful
in itself in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return endeavor,
like polishing. You do the easy gains first and then successively
smaller gains take increasing work.
Major layoffs by large
companies these days are often
a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes
go hand-in-hand with additional hiring
of different types of positions).
[PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had for
the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by innovation has had an
net effect of putting everyone to work at higher wages. That
stopped in 1970. Check the charts.
Certainly there's the
traditional investment-driven
growth, but I think a lot of people are
trying to reduce complexity while maintaining
the gains and responding
faster as a result. I remember Leary commenting that in
2012 all this
exponential growth would come to a head, but I don't see it as
just
willy-nilly growth.
[PH] If I get your meaning I think I generally
agree. There are always going to be many kinds of currents heading different
directions, not just open ended and dead ended paths. One of the
usual ways in which apparent dead ends have been overcome is by reconceiving
the game. Remember in the 80's when it seemed Japan was the
winning empire and America was stumbling. Then we made up a
new game with new rules and started having fun and they had no idea what
the hell we were doing with it. I'm cautious because 1) I know the
reasons you can't bank on being able to do that, and 2) see strong evidence
that the growth drivers (investment institutions) are quite clueless as to the
danger ahead, and 3) the general human learning mechanism seems to be
responding to the information overload with a narrowing focus to the point of
shutting down...
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.
In some ways, the sky is falling, and falling faster and faster.
[PH] yes,
but what does that mean? I see it perhaps as meaning
the sorcerer's apprentice can reasonably decide
that once things become a complete blur there's nothing more to
worry about...
The US has been doing a
pretty good job of adapting to that change, and getting more used
to
continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a philosophical
outlook antithetical
to traditional Amero-European society, in that
stability becomes a barrier to progress.
[PH] yes
sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game. Only our images of it
are purely a game, however. For example, the US
is presently transferring the ownership of our productive assets overseas
in exchange for current consumption at an accelerating rate now my rough guess
around 3% a year (a state and a half). It's bringing us
a lot of prosperity. Is that good?
I'm not sure that old
people are that worried anymore - I sense more of an attitude of
wonderment
and possibility. But also to put things in perspective, the
developments
from around 1860-1920 impacted the lives of Westerners much
more radically than
anything since.
[PH] well there's a mix of course, and a
scattering of 'dynamists' even in nursing homes. You could also
imagine that most people who are not very plugged in these days are just
mostly out of the loop, and their dazed wonder in it all to be taken is many
ways.
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.
We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have at
dampening political
cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic
impressions of what government can do,
which is good, but now we have
idealistic impressions of what government can't do. Instead
it would be
better to have good models of what factors make for effective government in
the
real world, including the recurring motions of balances and corruption
of power, .
[PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're
driving ever harder to perform miracles go turbulent. No
doubt better government would result from combining the insights into common
problems from different points of view. I think it's directly
symptomatic of our being pushed over the edge mentally by the collision of
growth and earth that we've settled on a government that builds grand
fantasies from a single view instead of investing in research and
planning. The business cycles of the past were irritating but they
gave us pause and a chance for change. The fact that now we can go
ever faster without interruption has a hidden drawback in that it lets
things get much further out of whack before the
correction.
I imagine it would also fall into the "sky continually
falling" motif, and without too much
stasis or unilateral motion. If that's
true, a biparty system tends to drift off into the extremes too
often in
the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at balancing and
instead of a heavy
pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the
zone. But then maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
Europe, where we tack
radically left and right and move much faster than if stayed a
center
course.
[PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to observe those
systems but, didn't Germany have a parliament and get a little carried
away a while back? I think the core problem is not entirely solved
by having an open hearing of diverse points of view. If
social movements develop with a winner-take-all attitude powered by a long
term campaign of character assassination for its opposition, no structure will
protect.
My
hope is that when we realize our radical error in expecting
unlimited exponential growth it will knock some sense into us, whether it
comes soon enough for us to avoid the worst of the consequences or
not. I think the core problem is we tend to think the world is
imaginary, since nearly every thing we see in our minds is, and that it's just
as boundless as our greatest fantasies. How can you tell the
difference? You can tell that mathematical functions are
imaginary, for example, because they have absolute continuity with no
grain. They're projections, not things, like all images.
Every real thing in nature requires different models of description at
each natural scale of behavior because natural continuity is built
and not absolute, essentially being thorough ally fractured and layered
in every way... It takes a little adjustment, but I find things
end up looking more natural that way. The long tradition of
trying to prove the opposite has been productive in lots of ways, but
maybe its giving us local solutions to a more general
problem.
