[FRIAM] Societal collapse

[Steve Smith]

J -
> Is it possible to create agent-based models of societal collapse? This
> Nature article argues human societies have mind- boggling complexity,
> but I am not so sure if it is impossible.
I appreciate the link to the Nature article... I particularly liked the
caution about misuse of the "Retrospectoscope" , and the reference to
Hari Seldon and PsychoHistory.   "... societal spasms are cyclic" seems
nearly tautological, but a good reminder.    I appreciate that many are
now treating global socio-economic-political systems (coupled with the
earth-systems) as a truly complex system as best they can.

Of course it is possible to build an ABM in this domain...  bit as the
article gestures toward, there is no bottom to the possible complexity
(at least down to Glen's previous reminders to us that our individual
microbiome is a key part of our "selves" in more ways than simply
accounting for body mass or cell count).

Unfortunately we aren't just dealing with the risk of our multiple
(highly coupled, but nevertheless diverse) facets of societies and whole
societies collapsing and taking one another down like dominoes (or a
house of cards),  but the earth-systems our high-tech,
energy-and-minerals-and-plant-products-hungry  society depends on being
able to draw from (exploit?).  

We looked at an SEIR/ABM covid-model for NM at the individual level
which seemed (barely) tractable on a single machine (memory size)...   
I have worked with Systems Dynamics models which are highly aggregative
and we even ran 100,000 samples from the World3 model from 1900-2100 as
a test/demonstration last year.   The World3 model focuses on Economics
and Resource Utilization and was conceived around the idea of "Limits to
Growth"...  it doesn't really do justice to more subtle societal issues
(like social justice, massive political shifts, personal violence, etc.)
  Within the 10^5 parameter sweep we started with there are (naturally)
large subregions where human life becomes acutely miserable.   There are
lots of criticisms of the model and it IS very long of tooth.

  I'd be interested if anyone knows of ABMs or Discrete Event
Simulations that aspire to study more than the smallest of subsets. 

Our experiments with World3 were as much about studying high dimensional
ensemble-problem sets where intuition can be used to double-check the
results, as it was about the problem domain of impending collapse.

This 2D projection of a 3D "projection" based on an 11D Self Organizing
Map (SOM) was our "best shot" at analyzing this 100k ensemble.   Without
stereography or motion parallax, the 3D structure is probably hard to
see... it *may* be evident that one of the most notable features is
"continuity" that this appears to be a complex 2D surface "folded" into
3D.   The 2D continuity is at least partly a direct artifact of our
choice of SOM focused on preserving local distances.   The coloring is
on a red-blue spectrum with human population encoding population (ending
population 2100).  One of the surprising artifacts found in this
rendering is the relatively regular distribution of high/low population
peppered through the otherwise dominantly low/high regions.   An obvious
"positive" correlation between "good results" and "populations" shows
that the sooner we have a population collapse, the better the chance
that the remaining population will enjoy a high quality of life (by some
measure).    We have many hypotheses to test on this rendering, such as
whether the "1D edges" of the embedded surface represent interesting
(and relevant to the problem not our choice of encoding) samples.   One
partial result is that (within our sampling) these extrema don't have
any of the "contrary" samples (high among low or vice-versa)....

This work is temporarily on hold, but the same methods are being
explored on other problem sets (where there is funding)... 

The main point of this example is that complex models yield highly
complex results and it is not always obvious or easy to decide what the
truly interesting "trade space" is, and whether or not there are
interesting parts of these high-dimensional landscapes that allow for
some  useful intuition. 

- Steve
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