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

[Phil]

Bill 

Phil wrote: 

Carlos

  


If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization  

collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on  

increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.

    

Oh yes, there are options if we respond to the danger on the horizon.

At present stability requires constant % increases in investment and

returns = exploding complexity.  That's what growth is, and has been for

a few hundred years.

There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to improve
efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality movement
is about gains
made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead having
quality as an
up-front and intrinsic effort. 
[PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself in lots of
ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return endeavor, like polishing.
You do the easy gains first and then successively smaller gains take
increasing work.
 
 Major layoffs by large companies these days are often
a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with
additional hiring
of different types of positions). 
[PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had for the past
500 years, that putting people out of work by innovation has had an net
effect of putting everyone to work at higher wages.   That stopped in
1970.   Check the charts.

Certainly there's the traditional investment-driven
growth, but I think a lot of people are trying to reduce complexity
while maintaining
the gains and responding faster as a result. I remember Leary commenting
that in
2012 all this exponential growth would come to a head, but I don't see
it as just
willy-nilly growth.
[PH] If I get your meaning I think I generally agree. There are always
going to be many kinds of currents heading different directions, not
just open ended and dead ended paths.   One of the usual ways in which
apparent dead ends have been overcome is by reconceiving the game.
Remember in the 80's when it seemed Japan was the winning empire and
America was stumbling.   Then we made up a new game with new rules and
started having fun and they had no idea what the hell we were doing with
it.   I'm cautious because 1) I know the reasons you can't bank on being
able to do that, and 2) see strong evidence that the growth drivers
(investment institutions) are quite clueless as to the danger ahead, and
3) the general human learning mechanism seems to be responding to the
information overload with a narrowing focus to the point of shutting
down...




  Humans being creatures of habit and unable to

imagine the complexities of the physical systems that were doing it get

used to such things.  There's also an interesting special deception,

that throughout the growth process it has appeared 'the sky is falling',

to conservatives and older people because economic growth is a

continuously revolutionary process which upsets old ways of doing things

without clearly displaying what new ways are being built.   I get my

comfort in discussing growth system dynamics from 30 years of closely

watching all kinds and figuring out why its so hard to build models of

them.



  

In some ways, the sky is falling, and falling faster and faster.
[PH] yes, but what does that mean?   I see it perhaps as meaning the
sorcerer's apprentice can reasonably decide that once things become a
complete blur there's nothing more to worry about...
 
The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that change, and
getting more used to
continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a philosophical
outlook antithetical
to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a
barrier to progress.
[PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game.  Only our
images of it are purely a game, however.   For example, the US is
presently transferring the ownership of our productive assets overseas
in exchange for current consumption at an accelerating rate now my rough
guess around 3% a year (a state and a half).   It's bringing us a lot of
prosperity.   Is that good?
 
I'm not sure that old people are that worried anymore - I sense more of
an attitude of
wonderment and possibility. But also to put things in perspective, the
developments
from around 1860-1920 impacted the lives of Westerners much more
radically than
anything since.
[PH] well there's a mix of course, and a scattering of 'dynamists' even
in nursing homes.   You could also imagine that most people who are not
very plugged in these days are just mostly out of the loop, and their
dazed wonder in it all to be taken is many ways.



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.

      

Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people 

might think  

that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case  

when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo- 

democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will  

try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too  

slowly), but surely, we're getting there...

    

Yes, but only half way.   One of the fascinating aspects of our societal

response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right

over the past 40 years.  People had the choice and were drawn into the

illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity

of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the

government response, rather than finding a better way to address our

growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some

validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.



  

We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have at
dampening political
cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic impressions of
what government can do,
which is good, but now we have idealistic impressions of what government
can't do. Instead
it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
effective government in the
real world, including the recurring motions of balances and corruption
of power, . 
[PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're driving ever harder
to perform miracles go turbulent.   No doubt better government would
result from combining the insights into common problems from different
points of view.   I think it's directly symptomatic of our being pushed
over the edge mentally by the collision of growth and earth that we've
settled on a government that builds grand fantasies from a single view
instead of investing in research and planning.   The business cycles of
the past were irritating but they gave us pause and a chance for change.
The fact that now we can go ever faster without interruption has a
hidden drawback in that it lets things get much further out of whack
before the correction.
 
I imagine it would also fall into the "sky continually falling" motif,
and without too much
stasis or unilateral motion. If that's true, a biparty system tends to
drift off into the extremes too
often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at
balancing and instead of a heavy
pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the zone. But then
maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much faster than
if stayed a center
course.
[PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to observe those systems but, didn't
Germany have a parliament and get a little carried away a while back?
I think the core problem is not entirely solved by having an open
hearing of diverse points of view.    If social movements develop with a
winner-take-all attitude powered by a long term campaign of character
assassination for its opposition, no structure will protect.   
 
My hope is that when we realize our radical error in expecting unlimited
exponential growth it will knock some sense into us, whether it comes
soon enough for us to avoid the worst of the consequences or not.   I
think the core problem is we tend to think the world is imaginary, since
nearly every thing we see in our minds is, and that it's just as
boundless as our greatest fantasies.   How can you tell the difference?
You can tell that mathematical functions are imaginary, for example,
because they have absolute continuity with no grain.  They're
projections, not things, like all images.   Every real thing in nature
requires different models of description at each natural scale of
behavior because natural continuity is built and not absolute,
essentially being thorough ally fractured and layered in every way...
It takes a little adjustment, but I find things end up looking more
natural that way.   The long tradition of trying to prove the opposite
has been productive in lots of ways, but maybe its giving us local
solutions to a more general problem.


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