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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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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!