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245 comments on How Will Knowledge of Collapse Impact Collapse?
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245 comments on How Will Knowledge of Collapse Impact Collapse?
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Nate -
I'm glad that DalefromCalgary raised the questions that he did, because certain aspects of the terminology used in this general discussion trouble me a bit.
Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics, but if a system is diverse and heterogenous, does that not usually imply that it is more complex than a uniform homogeneous system, all other things being equal? If so, and if heterogeneous systems fair better than homogeneous systems, would that not also imply that a certain type of complexity can be a good thing?
I also suspect that some of us may be conflating the concepts of complexity and chaotic. As you know, there are many complex systems that are highly stable, and there are many simple systems that are highly chaotic in behavior.
An example of the former would be one of these elaborate 18th-century clocks with a dozen functions, a system that is incredibly complex mechanically yet can keep running in the same manner for several centuries if properly maintained. An example of the latter would be one of those novelty toys consisting of an iron pendulum swinging between several fixed magnets. While it is extremely simple in terms of complexity, its behavior is highly chaotic.
So, I think it a mistake to automatically assume that just because a system is complex that it is more prone to failure than a system that is simple. How prone a system is to failure depends on many thing and degree of complexity is but one of them.
Complexity can also be in the eye of the beholder, as well as the criteria used to determine complexity. In the above examples, the elaborate clock in a certain sense may be considered simple because it has few degrees of freedom in which things can go wrong, while the pendulum toy might be considered complex because there are multiple degrees of freedom in which it can move.
Getting back to your central question: if the tipping point that causes a catastrophic failure is generally impossible to predict, then having knowledge of the behavior of such systems would seem to have little usefulness in preventing said failure. In other words, we would be largely guessing and perhaps just as likely to attempt to fix the wrong thing as the right one.
I think that the condition to fear is over optimization and complexity doesn't make a system more or less stable. If redundancy is in place very, very complex systems can be robust.
So I guess over optimized systems with no redundancy is the danger.
Besides diversity and complexity there is another factor that explains quite a bit -- that of dispersion. Dispersion is the spreading out of rates over time such that gaps between human-valued metrics grow. It is related to entropy but it differs because one can actually try to model the details of the process. Example, we can consider the various human cultures in the world diverse, but due to technology the dispersive trends are quite high and the high-tech cultures will strip the resources faster than the low-tech cultures. Dispersion trumps diversity in this case and there is nothing at all very complex about it.
But of course I belong to category #1 or #2 in people following collapse dynamics so am apparently only along for the ride. So you can safely ignore anything I have to say.
I didn't mean that to be insulting (but maybe incendiary..;-), it was mainly an observation of the many systems experts I have interacted with.
Out of curiousity - are you doing anything in activist role? (I put myself in those first 2 groups too, by the way)
What category would you put the 14-year old astronomer from NY who discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610154505.htm
Why is she doing this? Hasn't she seen Annie Hall yet?
Excessive navel-gazing leads to these kinds of responses. I likely don't treat meta-posts with enough rhetorical glee as I can't get past the ambiguity inherent in the statement of the problem. "Why are we here?" Guilty as charged.
Well, underlying ALL these posts is the meta-question 'why are we here'?
;-)
Way too early in the day to get that deep Nate.
I think it has something to do with turtles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Actually, some scientists got together and went to the edge of the world and held one of their colleagues by the heels so he could look over the edge. "what did you see?" His colleagues asked him. "I saw six large elephants standing on the back of a giant tortoise, and off in the distance there was another giant tortoise with six large elephants on top of it coming toward us.
The scientists put their heads together and decided that the tortoises were coming toward each other for the purpose of mating. This has come to be known as the big bang theory:-)
The word "complexity" confuses more than it enlightens.
Consider the following two examples of "complexity". Each example is a means of getting a 200 ohm resistance to supply that LED that keeps the world awake.
Example one uses 200 one-ohm resistors wired in series.
Example two uses 1000 200k-ohm resistors wired in parallel.
They're both needlessly complex but the implications for fragility are exactly opposite to one another.
Arguably the grand corporate system has the series-sort of complexity, making it more fragile rather than less. Whereas biodiversity is of the parallel-circuit variety.
This is incorrect - you are assuming that the failure mode of an open circuit is more likely than the failure mode of a short circuit. If both modes have equal probabilities, then the two circuits have an identical likelihood of failure.
Both of the models fail to include the consequences of the failure of the power supply...
And many other things that happen in real life.
Twilight, you are in abstract principle correct, but I suspect you are not much of a practical person. In practice resistors usually burn out to become non-conductors rather than conductors. And the general rule is that a functional unit of some sort of other becomes a "break" in the process rather than the opposite. For instance failure of any part of a transport network or a production process. So my fragile ego is preserved undiminished which is ultimately what really matters.
Funny, I'm an electrical engineer with 23 years experience in circuit design for harsh electrical utility environments. Yes, open circuits are common, and so are short circuits due to other causes, but you missed my point.
You were using the circuit as illustration of two complex systems with very different vulnerabilities. In fact both circuits are equally vulnerable to a single failure of a resistor, it just depends on the relative likelihood of each type of failure (which can change in real life). And regardless of how you arrange the resistors, you can still fail due to an open elsewhere in the loop for example.
I'm less interested in levels of complexity than I am the tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency, as described by Greer (I will try to find the link). Systems that are highly optimized to improve one specific variable are very vulnerable, when compared to systems that are less optimized but more general.
Twilight--I agree the analogy with a resistor array was less than perfect. I was just trying to make the point briefly which is exactly made (but more tediously) in terms of comparing (1) a journey (or process) of one leg for which three alterative vehicles are available (enhanced resilience) with (2) a journey of three legs with only one vehicle available for each leg (hence reduced resilience). Maybe you're too much an electrical and not enough of a travelling engineer!
There is complex, and then there is complex.
A mechanical watch is complex, but most of that complexity outside of the watch: i.e. the knowledge needed to produce a watch - it's not just counting teeth on gears, there's friction to deal with, shocks, temperature and gravity impact on the movements of the balance spring, and so on. A reasonable mechanical watch can run -20/+40 seconds a day.
Building watches requires highly specialized workers, high precision turning and milling tools, and a clientele able to pay for the work and the materials.
Watches may be relatively sturdy, the system of resources, work and education that is needed to produce such watches is much more fragile.
Today, it has become hard to find a decent mechanical watch that costs less than a month's salary.
A natural and functional ecosystem is also very complex, and composed of complex subsystems. The thing is this, in nature every subsystem has to coexist with local conditions. Also, ecosystems have high redundancy (highly diverse populations - insects, birds, mammals - can feed of the fruits of a tree, but it still manages to reproduce)
Our economic and social systems, however, are as 'efficient' as we can make them, and we are not satisfied with local inputs only. So we criss-crossed the world with trade routes, and pumped billions of barrels of oil into building our very affluent and increasingly indirectly connected lives. And all of this enterprise is based on more or less sparsely localized and finite resources. It is a cinch, that collapse is imminent for most of civilization.
Moreover, we have built our cultures on fiction. There is a lot of good stuff in there: the bible, the koran, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, all contain precious nuggets of knowledge and wisdom, but they are not science. They are incomplete and sometimes clumsy attempts at describing the human condition. Stories we invent about ourselves.
And then we started to really believe in the ultimate goodness of growth. In forty years of perusal of the press, I cannot remember a single issue of a newspaper that did not cheer or worry about growth, somewhere in its pages.
We just don't get it. If growth doesn't stop, the bottle explodes.
The flaw in the human system is, that it does not stop growing, even as outlying areas are being sucked of life. And the human system is imposing uniformity, reducing diversity.
So yeah, things can only get worse.
Personally, I have to admit that being conscious of this stuff doesn't change my life very much. I pay my debts, slowly, which fills me with misgivings, as I can see deflation looming. I go to work, and have a beer afterward. I tell scare stories to anybody who cares to listen. I sort my garbage, but my food comes from chain stores.
From where I live in town, it takes more than an hour to walk to the nearest field.
I use public transport and a bicycle, have no car. I have two adolescent kids who I try to warn about the coming dearth of everything. They spend a lot of time in front of screens, manipulating buttons. As do I.
Apart from trying to build a little stash of food, I have no idea of what I will do wtshtf. I would like to own a plot of land, but in a densely populated country, land is at a premium, and I have to get out of debt first.
I feel about as powerless as my neighbors, most of whom don't have a clue of what is hanging over their heads.
I'm looking to find a decent mechanical watch. If I muddle through, I would like to have a memento of our technical prowess to bequeathe to whomever is left.
I don't know if you want a swiss watch but if price is a factor.............. I picked up a couple of cheap mechanical self-winding Seikos (one for me and one for my 10 year old son). If TSHTF then watch batteries aren't going to be around long.
If TSHTF so hard that you can't get a watch battery then a wristwatch will be the least of your problems.
Agreed.... but it will be better than paper money.
When it gets that bad I think most of us will be fine falling back to this:
http://www.sundials.co.uk/projects.htm
I agree.
But a mechanical watch is a nice example of technology that can easily be reverse-engineered. Anyone can count the gears, figure out how they are connected, and see that force comes from the mainspring and regulation from the balance spring.
A watch is a lesson in physics and mathematics, a library of knowledge ready for reading.
Quartz movements are very precise, and rotor plus quartz movements do not require batteries, presenting major advantages for using the timepiece as a -perpetual- counter of time. But quartz movements are quite incomprehensible pieces of technology, especially if they lack power.
From the standpoint of a 19th century white and civilized explorer: When the primitives first see a watch, it may look like magic, but it's workings are easily explained, and any smart kid could attempt to construct a similar timepiece, materials provided.
But how the f-expletive deleted- do you find out that quartz oscillates at 30 something thousand oscillations per minute when under a current, when no current is available, or for that matter, measurable?
Gears you can count using only eyes and fingers.
I agree with Joule.The lacking definition is "complexity". For us, it is complex a system that we do not easily understand. Another definition is "chaotic", that fractal mathematics describes as a behavior that we do not easily understand or that is largely disturbed by unknown variables...
In a strict sense all systems are complex and chaotic, but we are adept of over-simplifying things to get a proper mathematical description. Take a basic example of dropping a weight from 1 meter height, simple physics, isn't it? We can reduce the formulas to Fg=m.g.h, f=m.a, and calculate the uniform acceleration movement to get the time of flight. Obviously we will get it wrong, and no measurement will result in the calculated value, because we did not take into account the air resistance,derived from the shape of the object, that depends of the orientations it takes in flight, and so on...
The worst example possible is drop a sheet of paper, we cannot even know the position on the ground it will end up in! It depends on to many factors, the way it is dropped, the winds, the dynamic deformations of the surface, etc... So, if we cannot get these simplest thing right, how can we expect to understand the behavior of huge systems like our own biosphere?
There is no simplicity, except the one we made up in an abstract and imaginary world, that discards variables that "appear" to have little influence. But some times we discover that the "little influence" is not so insignificant after all.
What we are missing is the humility to understand our ignorance...