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

[Phil]

Bill

Phil wrote: 

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.



Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality. In some
ways it sounds like
the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma crowd -
that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area (technical
only, say),
while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might have a
spruced
up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs a
better sales force.
Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business processes
with
enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to sales
support in
the field, better customer ability to configure and order... 
[PH] Well our scenarios are different.   You seem to be describing a
constant resource being used to enable growth produced by creating
emergent levels of reorganization.   I was assuming that the difference
between growth (positive exponent increase)  and refinement (negative
exponent increase) was clear and you seem to be using good English in a
way that makes it unclear which we're talking about.   My description
was meant for the later.
 
 Certainly the progress from dragging a hoe, letting a yak do it,
letting a machine do it
has been more than "diminishing returns". It's been exponential returns.

[PH] Right, of course not, it's leveraging a fixed amount of labor using
quantum shifts in technique.    
 
If you extend
the refinement to across-the-board: getting the crops to market (Kenyan
roses through Amsterdam to the
US and Britain), improved crop survivability through fertilizer and
genetic modification, etc., 
better handling of the company's finances through other methods, better
user service
through automated info & purchases via the Internet, etc., you get
something completely
opposite of "smaller gains taking increasing work". Now, at some point
maybe that
efficiency process hits a wall, but 10 years ago that wall would have
been predicted
as much closer.
[PH] Well, yes, that's related to my mention that historically it has
always appeared that the new system taking over the old one was on shaky
foundations.   I fully accept that there are deep perceptual problems in
judging where the limits to explosive change actually are.   I'm just
quite convinced from what I think is an set of principles that
completely avoid the perceptual problems, that pushing a growth system
as a whole to a point of failure is highly dangerous.    

[PH] Can you say that pushing exponential growth to failure is a benign
means of approaching our limits on earth? 

Watch microprocessor development. Yes, its current way of improvement
has some
expected diminishing returns, but combining those with hybrid
techniques, going off
into nanotech, biocomputing, etc., there are still a few tricks up their
sleeves. Progress
may stop being linear - it may become much more discrete as we shuffle
around looking
for disruptive methods vs. enhancements - but it will quite likely
continue.
[PH] As I understand it there is still considerable room for increases
in raw computational power, even without the radical increases some talk
about conceptually.    That may facilitate a greater ability to respond
the the exploding side effects of growth, or just help explode the side
effects leaving everyone in the dark as to how to respond.    It really
depends on our intent.

[PH] Think about what limits the growth of living things.   An animal's
organs don't stop growing because they grow till the animal starves or
can't walk, or because the skin gets so tight it prevents animals from
eating.   It's not from outside causes.   Living systems very largely
stop their growth at some internal point of completing the design, when
they do in fact switch from explosive growth to maturation and
refinement.   It's that 2nd step after the 1st that our global system is
built to be unable to take.   The unified world master plan is to
encourage investors to build whatever they think maximizes their
profits, compounding returns to build their wealth exponentially.   It's
that magical trick for creating revolutionary change, the compounding of
returns, that I think is truly dangerous to push to it's natural failure
limit.

I remember hand-soldering shops 25 years ago, which were completely
replaced by
wave soldering, which is now being replaced by reflow soldering. Aside
from the little
issue of inhaling lead fumes, it makes the electronics business much
more flexible and
affordable.
[PH] yes, we can see long chains of positive sign exponential increases
in productivity from emergent new systems.   It's been going on for
5-600 years  ( with an accumulative productivity increase on the order
of 1 billion!! ) and we're kind of used to it.   Still, I think I can
build a case of physical necessity as strong as the ones for entropy or
conservation of energy that it's a dead end into an impenitrable wall of
complexity if we pursue it to failure. 

Steel was one area where we'd supposedly hit technological peaks. During
the 1980's
world production levelled off at 40 million tons/month, in the 1990's at
a bit over 60 million tons,
and now we've jumped to 100 million tons. But often the old players
aren't set up to take
advantage of new methods and technologies - they have too much invested
in the older tech
and too many relationships, so that innovation would be cannibalizing
their own profits.
Instead, it's the new players that are often able to reach new levels of
efficiency that allow
them to compete with the entrenched leaders. If they didn't, they'd
never get off the ground.
But improvement can mean efficient in production, size, location,
response, quality, diversity, etc.
[PH] all absolutely correct, but we still can't find peace as the
sorcerer's apprentice.   We've got to know when to cool it. 


 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.



I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as offshoring
continues.
I won't say it's all roses, but in general, it's producing wealth and
more better-paying
jobs. We're also putting the rest of the world to work at better wages.
Maybe we'd
rather be sending them charity checks, but this version is more
sustainable, and they
get to grow their own economies as well. But it's not evenly spread.
[PH] It's the average wages I was thinking of.   Women's wages, though
still lower than men's, have a mildly positive exponential shape over
the past 35 years, but real men's wages are virtually flat.   Of course
an aggregate figure hides many stories, but the lofty theory that making
investors rich by putting people out of work actually makes everyone
richer was only true before 1970.   We've continued to pour money into
the hands of investors for them to fix the problem, ignoring that they
seem not to be investing in that way anymore...



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?

This is more a political issue that's separate from the complexity issue
(IMHO), so I'll leave it to the side.
[PH] I don't think the trade deficit is that political.   No one is
rooting for it, for sure, and no one seems to know what to really say
about it either except it is very strange to have something so
fundamental go so suddenly lopsided.   It doesn't seem like a
fluctuation that'll flip back the other way, but something that reverses
as a consequence of major events.   It's just odd that we're balancing
the books by giving away assets and not doing much to stop it. 

 

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.



One of the most stressful things you can do to a machine is stop it and
start it again,
unless it needs repair or particular maintenance.
[PH] Well, an explosively expanding machine being run by rather short
sighted humans may be a special case.    Our machine is essentially
blind and groping along.   At the moment were about 50 years behind in
responding to global warming.   It's not because the problem wasn't
understandable from a 20's 30's 40's 50's or 60's point of view, but
because we just were not thinking that we might need to look anywhere
near the horizon of our impacts.  That concept was surely well within
the sophistication of business planners even well before that.   We just
didn't do it.
 
I would think we'd want less cross-coupling of different parts, and
instead to have
some pieces changing while others are quiescent. Do we all have to take
off on
Sunday for society to function? Or do we all simply need a day or two of
rest every
week or so, and stagger the particular days? Is there an innate problem
with the world
going faster? The earth is spinning some 1000 miles/hour, and yet I
hardly notice it
except when the sun goes down.
[PH] The marvelous thing to me about natural systems is their
flexibility and resilience and how they work so smoothly even while
networking vast collections of disconnected parts.   They mostly work
with an 'any ol time' delivery schedule and use it with amazing
efficiency where every last thing gets used.   We don't know how to do
that yet, but the potential is there.    Our approach tends to be to
focus on a single output and pull out all the stops, use it up and build
something else.   I guess I'm making both a kind of aesthetic value
judgment and just a simple practical observation.   If you're not in a
hurry, everything's relaxed, but most humans are always in a big
hurry,...   How that tendency translates into our having built a life
support system designed to change ever faster until we make enough
mistakes to stop it is very concretely traceable.   It could, if anyone
wanted, be redesigned with some free market complex systems design to
work in new ways that would be both more creative and actually
sustainable.   



We get back to Al Gore's question.   We've got the knowledge and a clear
mission with otherwise unacceptable consequences.   Why does that not
provide us with the information we need?   I think it's partly that no
one is yet saying we should also correct the underlying.   Investing for
sustainability is not an investment objective. 


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.   



Re: Germany, I think I was referring to modern Western-like
non-critical-crisis governments, i.e. since 1952 or so. As far as
modeling governments,
I think it has less to do with open expression and more to do with
competing sets of beliefs or even power-bases and how they align, and
how the system
allows them to align. 
[PH] I look at the complex system glue that animates and holds together
power centers and social movements as a definite physical reality.   My
observation method does not tell me everything, but provides a framework
on which other particulars and generalities can be hung and connected.
It's how I organize system observation based on the rudimentary model
for the four developmental curves.  [ ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ]   It works
pretty well.
 

Cheers,
 

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave 
NY NY 10040                       
tel: 212-795-4844                 
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>     

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