[FRIAM] Societal collapse

Wed Jun 24 12:26:36 EDT 2020

Jochen, below an excerpt from my chapter in the forthcoming book
"Transforming" to be published later this year by Lexington Books/Rowman &
Littlefield.  Thanks so much for the terrific Nature link.  Wish I had seen
it before I submitted my chapter.

"Archaeologist David E. Stuart writes that what archaeologists call
the *Chacoan
Culture *created the grandest regional social and political system in
prehistoric North America. (Stuart, 2014, 7). However, after seven hundred
years of development, the Chacoan society lasted only two hundred years
“collapsing spectacularly in a mere forty.” Stuart asks the questions: “*Why
did such a great society collapse?  If another catastrophe befell us in our
own time, who would survive and become a new future—the present*?” (Ibid.).
 Stuart surmised a lesson for our own time as he wrote about conditions
that worsened with the arrival of extended drought “that ripped apart the
very fabric of the Chaco phenomenon.” (Stuart 2014, 120).

>From Wikipedia:  “Others suggest that more developed villages, such as that
at Chaco Canyon, exhausted their environments, resulting in widespread
deforestation and eventually the fall of their civilization through warfare
over depleted resources.”

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 2:55 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> Here is another interesting Nature link
>
> https://www.nature.com/news/the-greatest-vanishing-act-in-prehistoric-america-1.18700
>
>
> The collapse of civilizations is a fascinating phenomenon, from the
> abandoned pueblo dwellings in the Mesa Verde National Park to the remains
> of the Minoan culture on Crete.
>
> Would you like to present parts of your work on Friday? Maybe you have an
> old PowerPoint presentation that you can show us via Zoom?
>
> -J.
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
> Date: 6/23/20 23:25 (GMT+01:00)
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Societal collapse
>
> 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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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefkoff at gmail.com <merlelefoff at gmail.com>
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
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