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225 comments on Easter Sunday Open Thread

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Leanan on April 16, 2006 - 7:57pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There were a couple of stories in local papers during the Katrina spike.  Rural gas stations that closed, and left people to drive 40 miles to buy gas.  It wasn't just Katrina, of course.  They were on the edge anyway, and Katrina just pushed them over.  Gasoline is already a loss leader for many gas stations.  
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expat on April 17, 2006 - 1:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hello,
   the insanity of this should be pretty clear. At the peak, maybe the brain is ruined before going down the slope?

   I actually am not a great believer in Tainter's complexity framework as leading to a society's failure - to a certain extent, the various formulas to describe human ecology are more or less tautological, in the same sense most socio-biology (old fashioned term) is tautological, generally being unable to escape the social/cultural blinders of its practioners.

   But certainly, this would be a shining proof - vehicles and people being run ragged and a finite resource being exhausted so that people can keep driving their vehicles since they cannot imagine living differently.

Insanity.

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Leanan on April 17, 2006 - 7:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Tainter doesn't say that people can't imagine living differently.  Indeed, the fact that they can imagine living differently is often the reason societies collapse.
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expat on April 17, 2006 - 9:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A subtle point about societies collapsing not through the increasing problem of fighting entropy to stay in place, but merely because people imagine another way to live.

I find the aspect of complexity necessarily leading to  collapse a deceptive problem - who defines complexity? For that matter, who defines collapse?

But the idea that finite resources are exhausted in meaningless or counterproductive ways when viewed from outside the context of those engaging in such actions was what I found insane (yes, not exactly Tainter's perspective, but a society without cars will appear to most modern eyes as one with containing less complexity in the sense that Tainter would likely find acceptable). And much like the wooden shipbuilding industry migrated throughout human history, with many of the literal cradles of that craft being turned into stony or sandy wastelands, the fact that resources are exhausted does cause people to live differently, whether they imagined it first or not. In the case of shipbuilding, by ending up with the Industrial Revolution, which ended the problem of trees in terms of shipbuilding.

But burning increasing amounts of fuel simply to be able to keep burning fuel doesn't seem likely to lead to anything but depletion for reasons which will not likely be very comprehensible in the future.

But truly, how many people in America are imagining life without their cars? On the other hand, how many are burning increasing amounts of gasoline because they can't imagine living differently?

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Leanan on April 17, 2006 - 9:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I find the aspect of complexity necessarily leading to  collapse a deceptive problem - who defines complexity? For that matter, who defines collapse?

Tainter defines his terms in his book.  

I'll swipe this part of Chris Stolz's excellent review at Amazon.com:

Complexity, writes Tainter, describes a variety of characteristics in a number of societies. Some aspects of complexity include many differentiated social roles, a large class of administrators not involved in the production of primary resources, energy devoted to different kinds of communication, centralised government, etc. Societies become more complex in order to solve problems. Complexity, for Tainter, is quantifiable. Where, for example, the Cherokee natives of the U.S. had about 5,000 cultural artifacts (things ranging from recipes to tools to tents) which were integral to their culture, the Allied troops landing on the Normandy coast in 1944 had about 40,000.

Collapse, then, is the loss of this quantifiable complexity.  Almost always accompanied by a 75%-90% drop in population.

That last is, I suspect, a big reason why complex societies stick with their strategy long past the point of diminishing returns.  They become so committed to their way of life that changing ends up being very difficult and painful...perhaps even fatal.  Hence it is avoided as long as possible.

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BOP on April 17, 2006 - 10:12am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
. . . a big reason why complex societies stick with their strategy long past the point of diminishing returns.  They become so committed to their way of life that changing ends up being very difficult and painful.



"Being committed to their way of life" implies volition and perhaps even a measure of obstinacy. An alternative perspective would view the society as having become embedded in a certain set of memes that permits one course of action and forecloses many others.


There are those of us who remember life before suburbia. There are a far larger number who know nothing but suburbia and cannot conceive of an alternative, or perceive any need for change. This ignorance is very different from committment. A high level of Tainter Complexity would promote this ignorance; milk comes from the corner store not from a cow.

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Leanan on April 17, 2006 - 10:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Being committed to their way of life" implies volition and perhaps even a measure of obstinacy.

Then I'm sorry I used that word.  It's not what I meant.  How about "locked in"?  I don't mean they're being obstinate, and I don't mean they are blind to alternatives.  I mean they end up logistically unable to change without significant pain.

As an example...the oil-fueled Green Revolution has resulted in a lot of problems that weren't visible at first.  With the knowledge we have  now...many of us are now thinking we should never have started down the agribusiness path in the first place.  

But what are we going to do about it?  Agribusiness has allowed us to increase the population to levels undreamt of a hundred years ago.  If we give up agribusiness, how are we going to feed all the "extra" people?  We are locked in by our previous choices.

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expat on April 18, 2006 - 12:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The idea that societies are best defined by what they exclude is something which occurred to me a long time ago.

This also takes care of the problem of volition - an individual can make choices, but if they go into the territory that society excludes, the individual no longer has any meaningful impact in that society. And stepping outside of society is generally very dangerous - here, you could make a simple natural selection argument on why this is so, but I hate such perspectives.

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expat on April 18, 2006 - 12:27am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Not to get into a long discussion, but this exactly what I mean by complexity definitions - more/quantifiable means more complex?

An example could be made of something like aircraft motors - the original models had a fair number of moving parts, as time went one various improvements were made adding more moving parts, and as more time went on, the number of moving parts was reduced, until, at least in theory/practice, something like a SCRAM 'motor' has essentially no moving parts, except for the fuel pumping system.

But the SCRAM 'motor' is much more complex, even if it has many fewer moving parts - but here, complexity comes in the design and development of materials (and airframe), not in the number of parts. Further, after the design and material development phase is over, it is also quite conceivable that the infrastructure to construct and maintain such motors would be considerably less quantifiably complex than that required for the first Boeing 707s in terms of tools, parts, etc.

Complexity and simplicity are often in the eyes of the viewer, and that is what I find difficult when engaging in such discussions.

I haven't even begun to engage the idea of 'simple' or 'complex' language, except to note that most 'older' languages are actually considered more complex in grammar than English.

Or the idea of social roles - personally, I think the entire advertising/marketing branch of our society could go away without any loss of complexity, since in my eyes, that complexity is merely manufactured.

In a sense, whether the solution to a manufactured problem is part of a measure of complexity is the sort of question which would need to be addressed.

I could even further add that this idea of complexity could also be seen as the rise of parasites, with the parasites being considered the measure of the host.

And on, and on. Endless discussion.  

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