Good description of our complex system. Ahh for the good old days of vacuum tubes and things that can be tightened, loosened, and touched and understood.
Any "long jumps" that citizens can initiate? Long jumps that citizens can begin rather than respond to. arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 1:36 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: consistency Keith wrote: > Our present politicians are still mainly composed of lawyers -- > products of a medieval, agricultural, religious age. Asking them to > point the way forward is like asking a car mechanic to repair a > computer. As I am (or rather, I once was) a hot-shot car mechanic and (more recently) I have "repaired" numerous computers, that got my attention. Moreover, I've been reading Steven Pinker's ramblings on metaphor and his critique of Lakoff & Johnson so I'm (more than usually) alert to what we might mean by locutions such as, "A is like B". I think this is a yarn or a rant or something of the sort so if you're keen on "terse" and "cogent", you may want to hit DELETE just here. I once worked at B.J.'s Foreign Auto in a university town where eccentric academics and hip students drove a bizarre assortment of auto marques you've never heard of or at least specimens of which you've never seen. Finding parts or specs for a 10 year old Borgward, an even older Panhard or a model of DKW that was never sold this side of the pond was, predictably, a constant problem. Bud Jarvis -- the boss -- was just barely tall enough to have passed the US Navy physical and had spent WWII on carriers in the Pacific, repairing airplanes. After the war, he spent some time in England as a mechanic, maintaining the pitiful fleet of domestic vehicles with which the Brits were left after prolonged wartime austerity. Now, not infrequently, we'd call Bud over to look at a broken, frayed, chafed, cracked or otherwise nonfunctional bit of some weird car and complain that it was, well, a problem. The company that made the car had been out of biz for a decade and hadn't imported any parts for twice that long. And bud would say, "A man made it. A man can fix it." So I've made parts for a Lancia out of wood, hand-forged parts (when I was still a novice blacksmith), adapted, hand-filed, glued and fabricated parts. But no more. Cars, you see, are now made by robots, not by men. Bud's dictum is evicerated and you *can't* always fix them. And that's the reason for the scare quotes, above, when I said I'd "repaired" computers. I lied. You can't "repair" computers. You can't even properly diagnose them without an oscilloscope, a circuit analyzer and other electronic devices of which I don't even know the names. You probably can't determine the true source of a fault without a metallurgy lab and an electron microscope. The faulty capacitors of recent years that can be identified visually are a rare exception and even then, it's equally rare that you can "fix" them. So: You can't repair computers because the interiors of half dozen major assemblies of which they're composed simply aren't accessible to the brightest -- or even most experienced -- humans. Even for the few thousand highly educated, fully equipped and experienced engineers in the world, an accurate determination of etiology -- what's causing a malfunction -- could take weeks. That's vaguely similar to a mechanic taking a fortnight to diagnose a maladjusted carburetor float valve. To follow this metaphor, finally, to it's end, even if the MIT solid state physicist and his colleague, the electronic design engineer can, after a month's work, say something like, "Yes, a heisenbug in the clock chip causes the timing pulse stochastically to desynch in a certain way from from the CPU and the latter is designed to treat this as a fatal error", there's still no way to actually *fix* it other than to do what your 14 year old nephew could have prescribed: replace the whole motherboard. Okay, back on topic: I submit that the whole global economy has passed through a sort of phase boundary of the same sort that separates repairing a 1955 Borgward from repairing a Dell laptop. The mechanisms of the socio-economic structure that dominate and control your life just aren't accessible, even if you're quite bright and well educated. If you are, in fact, quite bright and well educated (or a voracious learner) and you make a serious avocation of studying, dissecting, analyzing, comparing, assimilating, you may arrive at a meaningful truth or a verifiably valid principle. But the magnitude of the rest of the system -- a "rest" that remains a black box -- is so great that there's nothing you can do with your hardly won truth or principle that is predictably better than anything else you might do. [See "long jump", infra.] If you make a *real* career of this -- become a policy analyst, economist, politician, corporate, government or political strategist, investment banker or the like -- you become, after a decade or three, so deeply immured in so narrow a domain that you forget that the "rest" of the system even exists. Reiterating Keith's remark: > Our present politicians are still mainly composed of lawyers -- > products of a medieval, agricultural, religious age. Asking them to > point the way forward is like asking a car mechanic to repair a > computer. The number of people, especially influential or powerful people, who operate with an essentially pre-enlightenment mind set is shocking. The consequences are equally shocking. But that may not be the best characterization of the problem. There are numerous other shortcomings that are (I surmise, without any hard evidence) over-represented among "present politicians": clinically diagnosable psychopathy, fulminating greed, pathological yearning for approval etc. You know the list. It may not be those, but rather a feature of the system itself, of a system that reaches a certain (if ill defined) level of complexity, that engenders the apparently refractory problem. Stuart Kauffman: ...the onset of a novel complexity catastrophe which limits selection. It is the consequence of attempting to optimize in systems with increasingly many conflicting constraints among the components: Accessible optima become ever poorer, and fitness peaks dwindle in height. [....] I believe this to be a genuinely fundamental restraint facing adaptive evolution. As systems with many parts increase both the number of those parts and the richness of interactions among the parts, it is typical that the number of conflicting design constraints among the parts increases rapidly. Those conflicting constraints imply that optimization can attain only ever poorer compromises. [1] Standard bearers for American exceptionalism, and to a lesser extent, those for all the functioning democracies, proclaim that with "free markets and free elections" [2] we have achieved the indisputable global optimum, a peak from which others, still lost on the rugged landscape of evolving systems, try to pull us down when they should be climbing up to join us. But it's not like that. The rugged landscape in Kauffman's model of a complex system *changes*. What may well have been something like a global optimum in the age of sail and 2 billion population, may, in the age of the Airbus, the internet and 7 billion population, be a small and declining local optimum that, by its situation and nature, obstructs access to other potential peaks in a landscape of dwindling optima. What's the conclusion of all this abstraction? One of the strategies to deal with being stuck on a local optimum is the long jump, the "punt" in jock terms. Jumping to a random place on the systemic landscape offers a chance of an improved situation or at least, a chance to start climbing toward a better and hitherto unreachable optimum. Of course, almost no politician or nation would just do random things but, in the context of a complex system, a carefully planned and executed strategy for dramatic change will be executed in that context with the result that it might as well be random for the planners cannot reliably predict outcomes. Long jump is not a demonstrably or even theoretically promising move but it may be the only one to preserve even vestiges of what we think of as Western civilization from spiraling into chaos or freezing into deadlock. So we're back to my computer metaphor again: Even the insiders and the experts can't access enough of the global black box to diagnose and prescribe with any certainty. Yank the motherboard and stick in a new one? "Revolution" and the 60s revisited? Would the Royal Society and the Enlightenment ever have happened in Britain without Cromwell? Would we have the internet without the treasonous Declaration of Independence? Some long jumps we now regard as unthinkable: Revoking the US Constitution; a land war in China; nuclear destruction of Israel; total collapse of the US or global financial system; global pandemic. Do we just have to mark time til one of them happens? Is there a better way to cope with a system that is so complex that it has, so to speak, a mind of its own? One that is intrinsically inaccessible to us? Well. I had a second point but this is already too long. More later. - Mike [1] The Origins of Order, pp. 52-3. Recommended reading, especially if the metaphor of "landscape", above, is obscure and you're comfortable with pre-calculus-level math. [2] In that order, in the words of Bush 41. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
