[FRIAM] ** this Wednesday** Lecture May 31 12:30p - Carlos Gershenson: A General Methodology for Designing Self-Organizing Systems

[Phil]

Carlos,
> 
> > Well, yes, that's the advantage of creative homeostatic systems
> > like the
> > global economy.   The question, though, is whether pushing such a  
> > system
> > to grow exponentially toward critical response time failure is  
> > dangerous
> > or not.
> 
> It would be difficult to tell, because we don't know how the future  
> will be. But taking the sandpile avalanche analogy, if things break  
> down every now and then, there will be a low probability that they  
> will have drastic effects, because they "release tension" (the same  
> with earthquakes).
Well, that's true enough for a sand pile, assuming you're referring to a
steady shower of sand being added to the top of a pile and occasional
collapses of the sides.  That's not a model of growth though.  If a
natural system considered to allow continual growth is involved then
you're talking about successive jumps in organizational state as
successive scales of system domain are crossed and the explosively
expanding web of relationships evolves.  Biological evolution, economic
systems, languages and thought processes do that sort of thing, jumping
numerous levels of organization one after another sometimes.  

> Maybe it is not such a correct analogy, but my  
> guess is that there will be failures through history, lots of small  
> ones and only few big ones. And since the probability of having a  
> failure would be inversely proportional to its size, the probability  
> of having global-scale failures almost vanishes. 
I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.
Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and failings,
there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections, and
stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
relationships fails.

And if something  
> that big comes, anyway we wouldn't be able to do anything about it  
> (e.g. huge asteroid smashing against our planet).
Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of
seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an
entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure
that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of the
system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a major
failure of imagination it seems to me.  

> 
> > I do systems design too, designs for government competence,
> > self-correcting health care, etc.  There's most certainly a 
> need.    
> > Are
> > your models designs for adaptive business systems or something?
> 
> Last week I submitted a paper on "Self-organizing 
> bureaucracies": http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0603045
> maybe you would find it interesting.
I like your approach, and will read more!   I definitely think we should
make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and don'ts
regarding performance measures, but if departments developed concepts of
productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal groups
competing would be highly very productive.   If you also wanted to
attract people who enjoyed the creative challenge of providing good
adaptive service you'd need to make government a stimulating place for
just such people and collaboration.   You'd need to give them time for
professional research and involvement, giving them status when their
work gets used, etc.   Creative people like money, but really need a
place to feed their curiosity and express themselves it seems to me.

Phil
> Best regards,
> 
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
> 
>    “Tendencies tend to change...”



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