That's a good example of the way models fail as I've been describing. We make models as projections of how things made sense in the past and not to have any awareness of the future except their own failure. That's where my method kicks ass.
I don't have the fancy tools others do, but I watch the environment for the divergent processes that are emerging and ask the dumb questions, like what will they run into and how will they be changed by it. One thing that happens when growth system collide with their limits is that their independent parts run into each other. I pegged this whole thing 16 months ago (and 30 years ago as well) and spotted the collision between the growth centers of energy and food (evident in the global price war bio-ethanol was part of touching off) and how that started a series of unexpected changes in direction. I called it the beginning of "the big crunch" and the control system misbehavior "fishtailing". If people want to know what to do to reduce the level of the calamity even at this point they should ask. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:06 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; 1st-Mile-NM Subject: [FRIAM] Economic Disequilibrium or How Complexity Science nearly killed America http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol15/?pg=173 Here is a beautiful article by George Dyson that is truly one of the clearest examples of the current problems with complexity theory especially its relationship to economics , what it is trying to do and what it actually did with the mess created on wall street it should make every every CTO and CEO sit up and shudder. Basically the credit models created by complexity science geniuses, that are the foundation of most high flying arbitrage financial houses, created there own version of reality that had very little relevance to the real world. These same geniuses made enormous amounts of money by designing this fake world and convincing there neophyte non tech masters they should be paid millions for its discovery conveniently forgetting that its roots were firmly built in fiction Someone shouts the Emperor has no clothes and presto the whole house comes tumbling down The FBI is also apparently digging into this cesspool so expect to see a large number of these bright software phds entering federal prison in the not to distant future It also has relevance to the scary statement by Janet Wing at the institute when she said that future computer models need not be grounded in reality but could create there own. Think also on the connection that not only are these complex models non verifiable but so are most databases and agent modeling systems. Without easy verifiability I would submit they are worse than useless As Dyson points out the tally sticks " stocks" that where used in the 13th century are far superior to the billions of dollars of hardware and software used today. A stick " Stock " lived in the real world and was verifiable at the lowest level of inspection. Sadly today our complex system have proved to be totally non verifiable with the associated collapse of trust. Its also a stark example to our 1st mile friends about the higher relevance of what goes into the pipe rather than the pipe itself and why hi speed verification of what is happening in the real world is so much more important The quicker we realize that the raison d'etre of the digital world is to improve the quality of life and include some moral directives in our work based in reality the more we will be able to sleep at night ( : ( : pete -- Peter Baston IDEAS <http://www.ideapete.com/> www.ideapete.com
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