well.. lost a great post because web mail times out... Marcus, Responding to your post of last night. You said "it is necessary to invest only in those ideas where a broadly-defined payoff can be estimated". But what makes nature so successful in creatively responding to change seems to me to be that she creatively explores every possibility. Of course, metaphorically, it would be a waste of time to read every magazine cover each time you stopped at a news stand for a piece of gum. What I think's important is that you take any first impression you get and push it this way and that in an exploratory way to experimentally see if there's anything of interest hidden behind its strange features.
I think your question was whether there are examples of when the principle that growth is destabalizing is a better explanation than what people usually say. That might mean 'better' in offering more useful choices or in terms of offerning more satisfying images. For people who are not interested in or know how to apply general principles, or who just want to talk for pleasure, the anecdotal associations between particulars of familiar situations are probably more satisfying, and they'd need help to learn how to be guided by a general principle. For those who know about general principles, they offer better explanations particularly for situations never encountered before, in this case for where the multiplying internal and external strains of growth are beginning to overwhelm the system's internal and/or external environments. Then connecting cause and effect with the model gives you the new choice to do what nature does most gracefully sometimes, to redirect the feedbacks toward building sustainable systems and away from building unsustainable ones. Almost any person who has run a business is familiar with this switch, gaging internal and external strains that develop with growth and the timing of when to ease back on the self-multiplication at some optimal level. They just don't interpret what they normally do through a general principal for the succession of developmental changes in systems. ... well, I think I got most of it. -- Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com ============================================================ 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
