 | Peak asphalt: the return of gravel roads | The Oil Drum: Europe | The dark side of coal - some historical insights on energy and the economy |  |
How to Drive your Elephant - Dealing with Complex Problems
Posted by Ugo Bardi on April 9, 2010 - 10:20am in The Oil Drum: Europe
One thing that has always intrigued me about elephants is how the people who drive them manage to control the beast without a harness. There have to be ways, since it can be done, but it cannot be simple. So elephant driving may be seen as as a metaphor for controlling complex systems. What you'll find below is a talk that I gave on this subject at a recent meeting in Italy. It is not a transcription, but a version written from memory that tries to maintain the style and the sense of what I said.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen for being here today. I see that most of you are entrepreneurs or company managers and so it is a real pleasure to have a chance to speak to you. We, the academics, can only speak about what is to be done, but you are the people who can get things done. For this reason, I thought that I could tell you something that might be useful to you. So, I'll be speaking about elephants.
Now, of course this is a joke. This talk will not be about elephants; not as the main subject, at least. What I know about driving elephants comes mostly from a story by Rudyard Kipling that I read long ago and that, of course, is not enough for me to qualify as an expert on elephants. What I have in mind, instead, is to tell you something about control theory. But, since we were supposed to have parallel sessions today, if I had mentioned control theory in the title to my talk I was afraid that nobody would have appeared to listen to it. So, I mentioned elephants, instead. From this, at least, you have learned that even academics may know something about marketing.
The elephant is a nice metaphor for what I would like to tell you today. You see, you can't fit a harness to an elephant, at least not of the same kind that is used for horses. Then, how do the people who ride elephants tell the beast to start, stop, where to go and the like? The way it is done, I understand, is by means of such things as vocal orders, pressure with one's legs and also by a big pointed stick that is used to prick the elephant's head. I don't think the elephant is very happy about being pricked in that way; actually, there is probably a good deal of cruelty involved. But we'll be using elephant driving just as a metaphor for controlling complex systems, so let me just say that it seems to work: you can control an elephant by very small external influences. This is the core of control theory: you want to be able to control large and complex systems doing the smallest possible amount of work.
Control theory is a fascinating subject, often used for controlling such things as planes, ships, and other kinds of machinery. It might also be used for elephants, but there is a difference. With a car or a truck, you turn the steering wheel so much and the wheels turn of so many degrees. You don't need to make a big effort with the wheel to turn a large truck, but the point is that the result is proportional to the effort. On the contrary, the elephant may not like to go the way you would like it to go and may react in ways that are not at all proportional to what the driver does. That must make things much more difficult. Now, there is a whole class of systems, we may call them "complex systems," which are difficult to control because they react in ways that are not simply proportional to the intensity of an external influence. That means economic and social systems, for instance and - perhaps - also elephants. For what we are discussing here, we might consider that these systems are dominated by internal feedback effects.
The behavior of complex systems is often difficult to predict, but that doesn't mean it is impossible and there is a whole branch of control theory that deals with this problem. Sometimes, controlling complex system is defined as involving "cybernetics," a term that was proposed by Norbert Wiener in 1948. There are several definitions of cybernetics today, but Wiener was very interested in feedback dominated systems; that is, complex systems. That seems to be still the main aim of cybernetics, although nowadays the term has a bit faded from public consciousness. The term "cybernetics," anyway, comes from a Greek word which means "rudder" and that shows what Wiener had in mind when he coined it. A rudder is used to steer a ship and that may be a better term to use; rather than "control". Especially when we think of very large complex systems such as the economy or the state, "control" sounds like what the Soviet planners were trying to do and that, as you know, turned out to be not so successful. So, you don't want to control every detail of the system; you don't want to tell the elephant how exactly to move its legs. You just want to steer the elephant in what you think it is a good direction. Then, the elephant knows how to walk.
We don't have a general theory that tells us how to steer a complex system (nor an elephant), but we do have good models that allow us to understand how a complex system behaves. And if you understand how the system behaves, then you can think of what to do to make it go in a certain direction. One of the commonly used methods to describe complex systems is called "system dynamics." It was developed mainly by Jay Wright Forrester in the 1950s and 1960s. You may not have heard of Forrester, but the study known as “The Limits to Growth” was performed using the methods that he had developed. You may have read that “The Limits to Growth” is a set of wrong predictions, a flawed study, the work of a group of eccentric (and perhaps slightly feebleminded) academics who had thought that the sky was falling. That is not true – it is mostly propaganda and our tendency of believing what we like to believe. "The Limits to Growth" (1972) and an earlier work by Forrester himself, titled "World Dynamics" (1971), were pioneering works that showed that it is possible to understand the behavior of large and complex systems such as the whole world's economy and, within limits, predict their evolution.
Modifying the behavior of these large and complex systems turned out to be much more difficult. The authors of "The Limits to Growth" searched for ways to avoid the collapse that was predicted by their models. They found that it was possible to keep the system from collapsing if we could stop the world's economic growth and stabilize the world's population. That was easier said than done. Not only the suggestion was refused, but the authors were accused of being part of a conspiracy to take over the world, to be planning to exterminate most of humankind, and similar niceties. We are seeing a similar reaction nowadays with the global warming issue which, by the way, has to do with a large and complex system; that of the Earth's climate. So, it is very difficult to control very large complex systems, if nothing else because these systems tend to resist change and sometimes react violently against those who try to control them (maybe elephants do the same when they are pricked on the head).
But that doesn't mean that system dynamics is useless. If you reduce a bit your ambitions; that is, if you don't try to save the world, just a little bit of it, then system dynamics can give you good advice. So, what I'd like to tell you now is about an idea that Jay Forrester had; that of the existence of "critical points" (or leverage points) in complex systems. Points you may act on to steer the system without having to do a large effort. A little like pressuring or pricking the elephant in some specific points of the head. You can have a very strong effect on the system by a very small external influence.
This idea of Forrester can be found in his papers, especially those dealing with "urban dynamics," where he reports that most of the commonly implemented policies in urban planning generate results that are opposite to those intended by the policymakers. But Forrester's ideas were also described and discussed in a paper that Donella Meadows wrote in 1999 with the title "Leverage Points, places to intervene in a system" . It is a rather famous paper, also very interesting. I strongly suggest to you to read it when you have a moment. But let me describe its main points for you.
Donella Meadows says that it is easy for most people to identify critical points (or leverage points) in a system; points which strongly affect how the system behaves. If you think about that for thirty seconds, I am sure that you can think of several of these points in your life, in your career, in your company. Elements that either push you onwards or prevent you to do so. Say, your boss stops you from doing what you would want to do, or maybe your husband or your wife are not doing what you would like them to do; that kind of things.
And here is the interesting point. Sure; people are good about identifying critical points; but very bad about doing something about them. What Forrester had noticed is that people tended to act on these points; but pulling the levers in the wrong direction. They would mostly act on the critical points in such a way to worsen the problems, rather than easing them. That sounds strange at first; but let me give you a few examples and I think you'll agree with me (and with Forrester) that people do tend to pull levers in the wrong directions.
You are all involved in managing companies, so I'll try to give you examples that have to do with industry. Let me start with an old story, that of the whaling industry in 19th century (this talk seems to be concerned a lot with big mammals!). In 19th century, people used whaling technologies that may appear to us a bit primitive: sailing ships and hand-held harpoons. Nevertheless, they were efficient enough that whales were captured faster than they could reproduce, at least for some kind of whales that were relatively easy to capture. By mid 19th century, there was a depletion problem: too many whalers and not enough whales. The result was something similar to the reaction that we have today with of crude oil depletion. You heard the cry: "drill, baby, drill." It means drill more, drill deeper, drill in places where no one had drilled before. In the case of whaling, we could say that the reaction was something like: “hunt, baby, hunt". Get more whaling ships, better equipped, going faster, and go chasing as many whales as you can. But that worsened the problem. The more whales were killed, the less there were in the ocean. By the 1880s, whalers had run out of whales, at least of the kind that was hunted in that period. So, the whole whaling industry collapsed. Whalers should have agreed to hunt fewer whales, not more. They should have placed quotas on the number of whales that could be captured. That would have given time to whales to reproduce and give the whaling industry a chance to survive. That was the right way to pull the lever; but; as Jay Forrester and Donella Meadows tell us, that is very difficult.
This kind of behavior has to do with the gut reaction of industry managers when they see sales going down. Their reaction is often the same: lower prices in order to maintain one's market share. That may involve being more efficient, lowering the quality of the product, laying off "unnecessary staff" and, in general, cutting corners wherever possible. That may work in the short run, if the problem is only temporary. Then, when sales pick up again, those people who have maintained - or increased - their market share, will emerge as the winners. But if the problem is structural, as it was in the case of whaling, then it is a suicidal strategy. Everyone tries to keep a constant share of a market that keeps shrinking and the end result can only be collapse.
Let me make a modern example: years ago I stayed at a seaside hotel in Italy. They have me in their mailing list and they keep sending me leaflets with their special offers. I notice that this hotel is becoming cheaper and cheaper as time goes by. If they keep that trend, at some moment it will be cheaper to stay there rather than eating at home. How long can they go on reducing prices without going out of business, I can't say, but surely it cannot be forever. As I said before, lowering prices is a suicidal strategy in the long run.
Now, let's examine the problem with Forrester's ideas in mind - the critical points of the system. Clearly, the manager of that hotel has correctly identified a critical point: many people can't afford any more long vacations. So, suppose you are in charge of the hotel, what would you do? I think there is something here in the idea of doing exactly the opposite of what that manager is doing; that is raise prices. It looks a bad idea at first, but think about that for a moment. If you can improve service, then you can gain a share of the high-end of the market; and that fraction of the market will probably survive the crisis. In times of crisis, rich people tend to become richer and if you want to survive in the hotel business it is the kind of customers you should aim for. But you don't necessarily have to stay in the tourist market. In the end, what Forrester says is to be creative. Don't just fight to stay where you are. Find new roads; new ways of doing things. So, stop thinking about tourists. Think instead of transforming your hotel into a school where people can be re-trained for new jobs in a changing economy. Train people, say, in installing solar panels. That is something that will be needed in the future. It is just the first idea that comes to my mind - but I am sure you understand what I mean. You are all creative people and - if you were hotel managers - you would surely think of other possibilities.
But, unfortunately, creative people seem to be just what we are missing. Everywhere, people are fighting as hard as they can to stay where they are. And, as I said, that is a losing proposition. Think of the automotive industry. They have a lot more clout than the hotel industry and they managed to convince the government to subsidize their sales with taxpayers' money; it is what they call the "cash for clunkers" scheme. But our problem is not that we aren't making enough cars - we are making too many of them! Here in Italy, the cash for clunkers scheme has ended in December of last year and car sales have hit rock bottom. That wasn't a good idea, surely not in the long run. Car makers should think in different ways and move to something else. Windmills or bicycles, I don't know, but surely we can't afford any more to make so many cars. And there are many more examples that you can think of by yourselves.
But I don't want to be too gloomy. I can make for you at least one example where I know that some of your group have been pulling the levers in the right direction: waste management. You see, it is possible to make the right choices by being creative and seeking new ways.
As you know, waste management is a critical point of the economy; especially for us in Italy. Small country, lots of people and lots of waste. It is a real problem, even though some people are exaggerating it a little. You know that most Italian politicians, independently of whether they belong to the left or to the right, seem to agree on what is to be done. It is, “burn, baby, burn.” Build incinerators to get rid of waste and get energy as a boon from the combustion. It is what is called the “waste to energy” scheme which, in Italy, has been given the fancy name of “thermovalorization”. Now, I think that this is another example of pulling the lever in the wrong direction. If you use incinerators to produce electric power, then you'll find that you need waste. Not just that, you also need that specific kind of waste which contains a lot of plastics, which has a high heating power. So, you'll be in trouble if there is not enough waste of the right kind. And that is what is happening right now: with the contraction of the economy there is less waste and it is waste with a smaller content of plastics. So, you have invested in all those expensive incinerators and there is not enough fuel for them. You didn't solve the problem, you created a bigger one.
Fortunately, some people have understood what the real solution of the waste problem is. It means to pull the lever in the right direction: reduce waste; generate as little of it as possible; zero, if you can. “Zero waste” may be an impossible goal, but if you aim in that direction you will always reduce the size of the problem, never increase it. Of course, there are many ways to reduce waste production – some of you are more expert than me in this field, so I am not going to discuss this point. But I think waste management is a good example of how society may react to a problem. At present, the bad solution - incineration - seems to be winning, at least in Italy. But I think that in the long run what is to be done will appear clear to everyone and, at that point, even politicians will start pushing in the right direction – some of them are doing that already.
So, I gave to you just a few examples of Forrester's idea about critical points. It is a very powerful mental tool and not just for the kind of problems I described. It may work even for your everyday life - even if you are not an elephant driver. You probably are engaged in such things as finding money, finding a job, getting a degree. Maybe you have problems with your relation with your children, your spouse, your boss, your coworkers. Sometimes these problems seem to be enormously difficult. Now, consider that one reason might be that you are pushing in the wrong direction. I am not saying that changing that direction will work every time, but you may at least consider it. It is, in the end, about being a bit creative. Try it.
I wish to thank Costellazione Apulia for giving me the possibility of giving this talk in a nice and friendly environment at the meeting "Raccontami una Storia" in Martina Franca, Italy, on March 19th 2010.
References
The paper by Donella Meadows about leverage points is at (http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf)
The story by Rudyard Kipling that I have mentioned is titled "Toomai of the elephants" and you can find it, for instance, at http://www.authorama.com/jungle-book-11.html
As I mentioned whales in addition to elephants, you can find a paper of mine on the subject at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3960
About the negative reaction against "The Limits to Growth" you can give a look to a paper of mine titled "Cassandra's curse: how "the limits to growth was demonized" at www.theoildrum.com/node/3551
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2010 (3)
- October 2010 (6)
- September 2010 (4)
- August 2010 (7)
- July 2010 (6)
- June 2010 (7)
- May 2010 (2)
- April 2010 (8)
- March 2010 (4)
- February 2010 (6)
- January 2010 (3)
- December 2009 (5)
- November 2009 (8)
- October 2009 (12)
- September 2009 (6)
- August 2009 (5)
- July 2009 (11)
- June 2009 (8)
- May 2009 (16)
- April 2009 (10)
- March 2009 (7)
- February 2009 (10)
- January 2009 (15)
- December 2008 (9)
- November 2008 (9)
- October 2008 (9)
- September 2008 (13)
- August 2008 (10)
- July 2008 (14)
- June 2008 (23)
- May 2008 (16)
- April 2008 (12)
- March 2008 (16)
- February 2008 (9)
- January 2008 (13)
- December 2007 (13)
- November 2007 (16)
- October 2007 (22)
- September 2007 (8)
- August 2007 (9)
- July 2007 (16)
- June 2007 (8)
- May 2007 (7)
- April 2007 (7)
- March 2007 (10)
- February 2007 (10)
- January 2007 (12)
- December 2006 (9)
- November 2006 (15)
- October 2006 (4)
- September 2006 (5)
- August 2006 (5)
- July 2006 (9)
- June 2006 (5)
- May 2006 (10)
- April 2006 (9)
- March 2006 (13)
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Thanks Ugo, for a very interesting post!
One thing that strikes me is that it is also very important to know where your leverage points are relative to tipping points, in determining appropriate courses of action. For example, you say:
Back at the time the analysis was done, the statement with respect to economic growth and population was certainly the right answer, because the world was on an upward trajectory. But once we are past the tipping point, and already entering into the beginning stages of collapse, I would argue that the approach needs to be fairly different. It would still seem sense to stabilize (or better yet, lower) the world's population. Instead of "stopping the world's economic growth," once collapse has started, I think our focus needs to be on not accidentally making the collapse worse. If the tendency of the economy is already for decline, we don't want to push it further toward decline (unless we want to kill off people quickly.) Instead, we want to "bring the nose up" --that is, again aim for a flat economy, but against a background force of falling economic growth, in the absence of any action.
This is probably the main reason I see "Drill, Baby, Drill" differently than Ugo. If we were still far in front of the tipping point, and bringing down economic growth were still a concern, I would agree that there would be no point in drilling. But if the economy is already on a downward trajectory, we need to do what we can to keep stability, including drilling oil that happens to be relatively inexpensive to drill near the US shores. I expect opening the outer continental shelf will for all practical purposes make very little difference in the amount of oil produced. But to the extent it does, it may help prevent economic nosedive, for a bit, so I think that is the right thing to do. We won't be able to afford more than fairly inexpensive oil (say $100 or less), so the very deep oil will likely never get drilled.
Nice discussion, Ugo. Thought provoking.
Gail. On "drill, baby, drill", it seems to me that you're starting a journey at the half way point. I think the first step should be to accurately establish what maximum price the economy can safely pay for oil, and to not go to step 2 (increase local eg. in-economy vs. imported production) until the import market price reaches that point, or better just far enough ahead of that so the new discoveries will just come online when the import price begins to exceed "that point". Of course you may have already satisfied yourself that we are at or near enough that point, which I find disconcerting and which doesn't come through explicitly in discussions here, as I think it should.
"I think the first step should be to accurately establish what maximum price the economy can safely pay for oil,"
So, who handles this? The Supreme Soviet? or the Politburo?
We can't safely consume oil. Surely that should figure somewhere.
TOD frustrates me with the repeated head-in-the-oil-sands response to the reality of climate change.
*sigh*
Well, in the short to medium term, we can't safely not consume it either. There's the rub. Things are tough all over.
Gail, I am not so sure on this point. I remember Colin Campbell's proposal, that he called the "Rimini protocol" or the "oil protocol". The idea was of voluntarily reduce oil production in such a way to have oil last longer. It was - in my opinion - the right way of pulling the levers. Colin is, by the way, a very creative person who understands very well the dynamics of complex systems; including the oil production system. As we stand now, trying to maintain, or even increase, production might lead us to disaster. This is a controversial point, I understand, but the models I have say that at some point we'll start on the way down and it will be a nose dive. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. So, we should strive to slow down now. It is not different than the story of the whales. If whalers could have agreed on slowing down, at any point of the production trajectory, they might have stabilized the system. But, of course, we have no control system able to steer the levers in any direction, so.....
Ugo Bardi says in a reply,
"As we stand now, trying to maintain, or even increase, production might lead us to disaster. This is a controversial point, I understand, but the models I have say that at some point we'll start on the way down and it will be a nose dive. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. So, we should strive to slow down now."
I say this with the reminder that I am not a doomer: But to me "slowing down" on oil consumption is simply non-viable as a path forward. I am not saying we shouldn't, I am simply saying it will make essentially no difference IF you accept (as most folks on TOD and TOD Europe seem to) the models of the "big voices" and thinkers of peak oil. If you average the projections of Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, the export land models and production models of westexas, etc, then "slowing down" will be essentially pointless.
I have made this case many times before, but once more won't hurt: If you accept the decline rates and export decline rates of major oil producers as put forth by the above peak oil thinkers, then you could stop every single automobile and truck on the road in the United States tomorrow and burn it where it stands, and it would have essentially no effect on the outcome and little impact on the timing of peak oil IF you accept the models accepted above. Or you could leave the vehicles of the U.S. running and burn those in Europe and you would still be no better off...
The United States, Japan and Europe are essentially flat on oil consumption growth, or declining. As the developing nations grow, the percentage of world oil consumed by these richest nations will decline as a percentage of world consumption faster with each passing year. Soon enough it would be like trying to alter the outcome of peak oil by ordering the citizens of Switzerland or Denmark to stop driving...totally ineffectual.
The only possible choice is to abandon fossil fuel as the driving engine of growth from this point forward...admit that the oil age is indeed over as the driver of new wealth and further development. For those who say "but there is no scalable alternative" all we can say is (a) there better be, and (b) if there isn't than KYAG (Kiss Your Ass Goodbye) and enjoy the band as the Titanic goes under the waves...such is life.
Slowing down...forget it. I recently saw a news clip from the control cabin of a locomotive hitting a pickup truck stalled on a railroad track...the engineer could see it was going to happen...he threw on the brakes...and then watched and rode the train as it crashed right on into the pickup truck...knowing what was going to happen was of no help, trying to slow down or even stop was of no help...the terms were already set. The only way out would have been to jump the track...perhaps a greater catastrophe than hitting the truck, but it would have been the only way to avoid what was a pre-determined outcome. It is time for us to take the chance and jump the track.
RC
Of course, from the standpoint of standard economics, there can be no "slowing down," that is, the only alternative to growth is absolute devastation. But this is only a model, and standard economists have not been very good at predicting actual economic slowdowns, so perhaps they and they're theories are not the only ones we should be considering.
We do, in fact, need an economic theory that is not growth oriented, not even steady state oriented, but is instead based on declining energy and resource inputs, declining industrial output, and general shrinking of the whole capitalist industrial enterprise--limiting, rather than expanding, humans' power over the rest of the world's community of living things.
I guess there is a bit of confusion, here, on what we SHOULD do and what we CAN do. "slowing down" on oil consumption would involve an international authority that could set quotas and force producers and consumers to agree on limiting extraction and use. That's utterly unfeasible right now and will remain unfeasible forever. But, just as a thought experiment, if we ever were able to find an agreement and do that - well - then it would avoid the abrupt collapse that some models predict. Oil produtction started from zero and will - eventually - arrive to zero. It would be much nicer to get there not too fast!
"It would be much nicer to get there not too fast!"
And thanks to peak demand, we are not likely going "to get there too fast". Peak demand is the 'international authority' that is limiting extraction and use. To be clear, the evidence supports the assertion that peak demand is geo-physically driven and culturally mediated (financial system, trading system, etcetera). Peak demand is another important facet of the Peak Oil Era. It has emerged, not coincidentally, after other critical junctures of the POE including peak conventional oil and peak net oil exports.
If I read the reports correctly, it would seem that Colin Campbell has joined the ranks of those recognizing the significance of peak demand.
Peak demand shifts the viability of numerous oil extraction projects to some unknown date in the future, thereby extending the time to zero (read minimal) production. Demand for oil will peak at progressively lower levels as net energy from oil extraction declines and as the substitution of alternatives increases. I expect that negawatts will provide the bulk of substitution for the foreseeable future.
I know that some people expect that once the volume of extracted oil begins to decline, the economic system will collapse, vaporizing the 500 channel universe, and putting in-ground/under-water resources forever beyond reach. These people suffer from a failure of imagination. It is the limiting factor in their cognitive apparatus. They are unlikely to ever figure out how decades old, baling twine and chewing gum Russian rocket technology will be taking astronauts into low earth orbit long after the last Shuttle has been hauled off to the Smithsonian. Or to appreciate that the mobility of labour, and not the number of cars on the road, drives economic efficiency and growth. Or to grasp the social basis of financial capital and therefore the significance of the human capacity for reorganization.
"an international authority that could set quotas" And that is not only not "utterly unfeasible right now" but actually exists as OPEC; since non-OPEC countries are collectively in decline, OPEC is in the driver's seat. They can decide to do what ever they want to for whatever reason they choose. Of course, it is far from water tight, right now, but to say such an international authority does not and could never exist seems a bit...odd.
The same could easily happen with coal, since only six nations produce some 80% of the world's coal.
But asking the OPEC cartel to cut back on their oil production would be the same as asking the trading banks to regulate themselves. Its something they just cant do when the goal is to increase profits. An International agency like the UN or a new agency on a similar scale needs to get tough on member countries. Membership should include tough quotas on renewable and non-renewable resource production. This will help allieviate waste production which should also be monitored closely. Any country not complying with the rules should be on the recieving end of tough sanctions to bring them back into line.
If you want to solve a global problem you need a global agency with the clout to deal with it.
I guess there is a bit of confusion, here, on what we SHOULD do and what we CAN do. "slowing down" on oil consumption would involve an international authority that could set quotas and force producers and consumers to agree on limiting extraction and use. That's utterly unfeasible right now and will remain unfeasible forever. But, just as a thought experiment, if we ever were able to find an agreement and do that - well - then it would avoid the abrupt collapse that some models predict. Oil produtction started from zero and will - eventually - arrive to zero. It would be much nicer to get there not too fast!
I guess there is a bit of confusion, here, on what we SHOULD do and what we CAN do. "slowing down" on oil consumption would involve an international authority that could set quotas and force producers and consumers to agree on limiting extraction and use. That's utterly unfeasible right now and will remain unfeasible forever. But, just as a thought experiment, if we ever were able to find an agreement and do that - well - then it would avoid the abrupt collapse that some models predict. Oil produtction started from zero and will - eventually - arrive to zero. It would be much nicer to get there not too fast!
We need a new narrative as an alternative to economic growth but not to economic contraction as that clearly has negative connotations. I have propsoed before that we need to start measuring things in terms of progress i.e how healthy are we, how happay are we and how fulfilled as creative, expressive and learned human beings. The human mind has an unlimited capacity for learning, and none of us can possibly learn everything in our allotted time on this planet. We need to replace consumption of stuff with consumption of knowledge as the most important pursuit.
It seems to me (without any verifying evidence) that there is enough resources on Earth to feed, clothe and house us all, along with the ability to provide adequate transportation and other public institutions necessary to enable us all to pursue the happiness so famously declared in 1776. The narrative of greed and economic growth and glorious riches must end and be replaced with resilience, personal spiritual growth and appreciating the true glories of nature and our unique intellignece.
My point is to try to prevent a nose dive.
I don't really see any possibility of voluntarily reducing oil production to make it last longer. That might have worked 15 years ago, but it is basically too late now. It seems to me that any oil we don't get started on soon (and maybe most of the oil we do get started on soon, as well) will simply be stranded, because the system won't hold up well enough for us to get it out. This could happen because there is so much interdependence in high tech work of any kind, that a disruption in international trade could prevent getting that needed high tech parts or transportation of technical experts, that the system would fail, and we would not be able to extract, refine, and ship the oil as we do today.
Voluntarily reducing oil consumption today seems to me to likely make the fall more of a nosedive, unless somehow one can still preserve the same utility--for example, increasing the mileage a vehicle can travel, or insulating a house so it burns less oil for heating.
Our big goal needs to be keeping the system going (interconnected financial system). If we start losing that, it will be hard to prevent a nosedive.
** Warning: Economic Doomer View Ahead **
I'm with Gail. I see the global economy failing rather quickly: within the next decade most likely and within two, in my view, guaranteed.
So at some point the resources that are close at hand are (mostly) all we're going to get. On the downslope of the economy, we need to 1) assess all our available resources and 2) use them judiciously. We will do #1 as a matter of course and of course #2 is far from assured.
Still, it's some relief to me to live in North America with:
* 5.5mb/d of domestic production in the U.S. and close to that in Canada
* access to tremendous fresh water supplies
* access to the vast grain and corn fields of the Mid West
It's a whole different ball game on the downslope.
That actually sounded quite cheery, to me ;-)
I agree with many of Gail's analyses, but we differ in our goals.
I think a sudden, precipitous drop in oil production is just what the real world needs, especially if it is not replaced by something dirtier.
I accept Quantum physics and have a vague notion of how it works.
I follow String theory.
I sense the deep mystery in the connection between mathematics and reality.
No-one has been able to explain money to me.
It is to do with a ridiculous number of zero's and a decimal point and lives in a computer's mind.
It is a fantasy that governs our lives, created by the Prince of Illusion.
Is this His greatest work?
Or has He something even more potent?
An illusion so powerful that we are blind to it.
Hi Ugo,
How do you define 'complex'?
I am more than a bit concerned by the lack of precise definitions.
If a complex system is one where there is an essential interdependence, then it is not clear that modern society fits that definition.
My hunch is developed countries enjoy far greater resiliency than the Armageddon crowd believes. Market substitution is a fact of life.
I would be far comfortable if you provided a mathematical definition of complexity.
- R.
Good question Roderick. I searched the internet for a definition and I didn't find one that was universally accepted- I think you did the same. Often, people discuss complex systems at length without specifying what they mean. In the end, I am using my own definition: a complex system is one that is dominated by feedback effects - I mentioned this point in the elephants post. So, the classic control valve of a steam engine is a complex system, even though it is very simple, mechanically. Of course, such things as large economic systems are complex because there are zillions of feedback effects, inside. I have also a corollary of the definition: a complex system which is dominated by negative feedbacks tends to homeostasis. I can't prove it - and I can't pretend that my definition is universal. But I believe it catches the essence of the "entities" that we call complex
First time I speed read you comment to say "... I think our focus needs to be on......making the collapse worse." Which made me think of how they put out an oil rig fire using explosives.
If we make the collapse as bad as possible economically, creating massive demand destruction, collapse can be easier to manage.
In other words it's easier, or more possible to manage the rate of collapse from an artificially low point than it would be to try and manage collapse in realtime. You have a degree of control over the variables in the first scenario, and no idea whats coming next in the second.
Sure you run the risk of triggering greater collapse but you will have more resources to work with in dealing with it.
Don't mean to sound too conspiratorial but it sure looks to me like the global economic situation was a bit contrived.
Also IMO the global economic collapse is almost a non issue in that the vast majority of the money at issue was created out of thin air, not attached to anything tangible, money begets money, there is no such thing as multiple claims on the same slice of pie, so it could all, or most of it, just be canceled. There is no physical reason for the existence of most of the debt out there.
Also It seems to me to be the hight of hubris to have dieoff tied to debt based monetary system.
Just a thought.
Delightful post, thanks!
If one were bored enough to go back and read all the posts I've made at TOD, there would be some puns, some silly comments on-the-fly, some gallows humor, and various & sundry misc points made under various levels of sleep deprivation. But what would emerge out of this background noise would be my recurring theme of steering large-scale complex systems as a practical matter, and the existence of general techniques which may be used to do just that.
Despite promising Nate I would, I never did a campfire on it and I probably won't anytime soon. My own theories along these lines are homespun and have been in use by me since the early '80's in the service of large-scale environmental campaigning. They seem to work quite well, but are also so seemingly counter-intuitive that I long ago quit mentioning methodology when I had the attention of rooms full of people. The principles didn't require being understood by other people to work in any case.
Indeed, one of the counter-intuitive aspects that other activists didn't care for was that it's often easier for a small group of people - or a single person - to undertake solving a problem (regardless of its scale) than it is when you get a bunch of people involved with it, which is rather the opposite of the default incrementalist approach, and even the standard-issue version of common sense.
I suspect there are deep reasons for this which filter all the way down to such things as ricepile experiments, but I won't make that claim until and unless I ever translate what I do into a written set of principles. (I think visually, and probably have a bit of autism in the mix since my screaming, head-banging childhood).
This post has me sitting up and saying howdy because it's very similar in feel to the sort of thing I've spent the last quarter-century doing, albeit as an activist. I expect that due to my preferred relative anonymity here and the somewhat odd nature of this comment, it will be met with skepticism by all but a few, and that's OK. I approve of skepticism, and the few are who this note is for; my email in is my user profile.
Elephants seem to be good metaphors; Nate has aptly used "steering the elephant" in past posts here as a metaphor for what we might hope the neocortex of our triune brain would do, although it seems it's generally the elephant in charge with the mahout saying "yeah, I wanted to go this way anyhow, because..." and rationalizing a rogue beast as a steered elephant.
But it's also a pretty good image for steering other sorts of complex systems. I'd suggest that with sufficient knowledge of the system, (indeed, the class of the system), one can know the limits of what you can and can't get the elephant to do, and construct a reasonable plan to go about working within those limits. And the elephant can, in principle, be the entire human/earth complex system and ultimately must be. There's also a probabilistic aspect which may or may not be analagous to steering actual elephants; perhaps steering an elephant for the first time would be a closer approximation.
The elephants are all around us. Learning to steer them can be useful.
cheers.
Excellent post, Ugo! It makes important points in a memorable way.
Forrester's observation that when people try to control complex systems, they usually end up "pulling the levers" in the wrong direction is surprisingly valid. A good place to see it is in the game playing strategies of amateurs vs. experts in complex games like chess and go.
An amateur's play will be characterized by straightforward strategy of "atack when you can, defend when you must". That can work against other amateurs, but it's disasterous against an expert. An effective attack requires contingency planning and positioning with moves whose purpose is often obscure. Only in retrospect, several moves later when the trap is sprung, will the logic behind a particular set of moves become apparent to the boxed in and outmaneuvered amateur.
It's perhaps not surprising that in games involving clever human players, the obvious and straightforward game moves are so often counterproductive. You're up against other players who have their own ideas of how they want the game to go. But the same principle seems to be at work in complex systems where there's no human agency working to oppose one's control efforts. A complex system has a particular way that it "wants" to behave, and if you don't understand it well enough, the system itself can conspire to defeat your efforts to control it.
That's something that really worries me about our current political systems and attempts at governance. The level of public discussion of issues sinks ever lower, and important decisions are made on the basis of the most superficial emotional considerations. Makes one wonder where the adults have gone off to.
Thanks Roger: a very interesting analogy with the game of chess. I used to play chess a lot and I understand very well what you mean. This subject is very rich and once you start thinking in terms of leverage points, well, chess gives you plenty of food for thought!
Hey greenish, I happen to agree with you on so many levels.
BTW I first read Leverage Points by Donella Meadows about 8 years ago and it fundamentally changed the way I looked at world forever after. It was a quite a few years later that I really became Peak Oil aware and grasped the full implication of its consequences. It was because of how Leverage Points had already changed my world view that it all made sense and fit.
While I myself tend to often take the lone wolf approach to problem solving at some point you still have to either lead the pack or accept being led, possibly to where you don't want to go.
Cheers and I hope one day you change your mind about doing that post.
feel free to drop me an email sometime if you like, I'm a fan of your posts.
and RE leading or being led, see my post farther down. Sometimes it's more practical just to grab the steering wheel.
cheers
Well, it seems to me there indeed is an elephant in the room.
And "elephant" is that is that in modern societies competition for viable mates occurs in the context of conspicuous consumption.
Having taught sustainable lifestyles for about 15 years now to hundreds of young guys and 2 young women-- it's absolutely impossible to miss the trend-- they are immediately captivated by the hopeful vision of living in harmony with their ideals and the planet and roll ahead great guns. The problem is that if they take on the task in earnest, they find very rapidly they've stepped outside of the "appropriate" means of role and status definition we use in our society. Alienation results. This comes as quite a shock to many, because they've assumed that especially in the realms of the "socially conscious" or "environmentally concerned" crowds that there were many that shared their ethical position. Not so. Unfortunately in most cases these "issues" for most are simply fashion statements--with the same kinds of trappings and consumerism as one might find in the mainstream culture. It simply comes down to different brands-- is it Bebe/or Patagonia -- is it BMW/ or Volvo? Is it flying to Cancun/ or Bali? It's very hard for those who attempt to "do the real thing" to fit in, as doing the real thing will inevitably clash with dogmatic positions of the "mainstream" counterculture--as again most of those positions are fashion statements and you're required to be anti GMO and pro weed and free Tibet and all that in the same manner that one might be required or belittled for wearing the wrong kinds of designer shoes in other circles. Fashion. In either mainstream culture or our "counterculture" it matters not at all what the reality of what you do is--you've simply got to dress the part. Few have the integrity to look behind the costume, and too many have a vested interest in not doing so. Of course all this plumage costs money.
The result is most become jaded and abandon their ideals. The only one's I've really seen succeed at carving out real lifestyles of integrity are those who are either so naturally amazingly studly that they really don't need any extra plumage(very rare) or those who are so amazingly NOT that all the plumage in the world wouldn't help them. LOL. I'm hardly kidding. The rest drop out and get a regular job after a year or so. They get tired of being single.
The most important goad I could see would be this: since young women set the value of the market-- we must convince them of the reality of a choice to choose a "non-sustainable" mate is a choice to murder her future children for the economic pleasures of the moment.
I think that is Mr. Darwin's job.
Isn't Nature wonderful?
The Herd is irrational.
Irrational control might work.
Reason doesn't.
"The rest drop out and get a regular job after a year or so. They get tired of being single"
Single...and relatively poor...and relatively powerless in comparison to their peers...and relatively bored and knowing they are missing the experiences their peers are enjoying...and knowing they are getting older every minute with no security for old age...and being deprived of much of the things that matter most in life, i.e., ART.
It is more than just plumage...it is LIFE they worry about missing out on. Back to the endlessly fascinating subject of women...whatever happened to those great 'earth mother" types of the late 1960's, who modeled themselves after Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers and would live on nearly nothing in pursuit of freedom and the lure of liberal meaningful causes, for whom poetry was as good as currency...man I mess those gals...:-)
RC
Interesting Ugo, especially the sharp pointy stick part. Where can you 'insert' enough sharp pain to redirect the system while really doing it no debilitating harm?
Now unless you subscribe to the 'divine being' driver point of view, there is a second problem. Who 'inserts' the point stick?
Apparently 'who' is the worldwide market the pointy stick is going to do its most effective work by pricking the spot where it raises the price of oil. It may take repeated pricks as the elephant really wants to get to rather badly worn but familiar fields that it is knows are ahead, but the driver is aware of the far green pastures through the thorn thickets and over the next big rise. One little difficulty with this picture is that the worldwide market is both the driver and the elephant, which merely underscores the difficulty of the problem.
Not to worry though, Gail and Aangel's view isn't likely to come to pass. They seem to not quite grasp how it goes down with boys and their great big toys. IF repeated pricks from high oil prices don't redirect the elephant big blasts from all the boys firing up there great big toys will. The only force that keeps us from falling into regional wars is world wide commerce and the fact that is essentially has only had one or two strong guards-since WWII-to help make sure it is maintained. IF the that commerce substantially deteriorates as oil becomes less available regions will coalesce around their resource bases and expend more of their collective efforts to insure the defense of those resources. There will be plenty of oil left to fire up war machines for a couple good blasts as the newly united (not necessarily a nice unification process) regions vi with one another for control of what is left. The end result of such conflict will be far less population pressure on the resources. So like I said, not to worry.
Peter Blume captured a lot with this.
Well, THAT's reassuring! ;-)
Well, interesting comment, Luke. Not so reassuring, indeed, but in the end I think you are right......
Hi Ugo,
interesting thoughts thanks for posting them.
for:
Actually I think the decision to place quotas would have been also wrong! Perhaps worse
as the slaughter would have just continued slower but still unsustainable as can be seen in many other cases.
(people tend to ignore quote in "criminal" ways).
In fact the right decision would have been to stop whaling forever by declaring them being "holy animals" for example.
this perhaps would have created a different mindset!
regards
michael
Personally, i would agree on declaring some resources sacred or "taboo". One of the few ways to save something. But I don't think it would be easy....
I've been musing on this one for years.
If all our rational attempts to get mankind to "do the right thing" fail, we may have to resort to "irrational" solutions like "green" religions as an answer.
In my experience, no rational aim is achieved by society without a predominantly irrational narrative attached.
Pity, but it seems to be the case.
Sure, not easy!
But what is easy these days?
And shouldn't want realize first what is wrong,
or what the problem with unsustainable living is, or why it is unsustainable?
Next we can think about how a solution should look like
avoiding all the past errors and perhaps
one can try to look for solutions.
Otherwise we head quickly towards the cliff and the elephant might get crazy....
even more dangerous no?
michael
ps.. what if we realize that in most regions we are already too far advanced?
Quotas have their problems but are still better than being left to prices or taxes to control. We have brought several species back from the brink of extinction by total bans (eg elephants and rhinos)but it would be impossible to impose a total ban on some fish stocks for example when people are dependent on them for their primary source of nutrition.
Correct, the only way to solve that problem is to bring the population of people that depend on those fish stocks down to a level that allows the fish to maintain a stable population. Barring that, the fish population will crash and then the people will starve regardless.
I guess that's why this is really a dilemma and not a solvable problem... it also underscores why we must start to accept that we are a part of the complex dynamics of the ecosystem, neo classical economists' arguments to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Placing whale quotas didn't really work that well either. Right after WWII a treaty body (the IWC) was set up to set quotas on whale internationally. It presided over the near-eradication of one species after another since there was no way to effectively police infractions. Even after full-on bans went into place, the USSR and Japan created a bilateral deal to keep killing every whale they saw; keeping one set of books between them and another for the IWC. This was only exposed after the collapse of the USSR, when Russian scientists 'fessed up.
My wife and I orchestrated a forensic-DNA sweep of Japan's markets in '93 and found fresh meat of whale species which had been "protected" for decades under plastic wrap in supermarkets, as well as widespread substitution of small cetacean meat which is relatively toxic in heavy metals. Now that those techniques have been accepted internationally it's a lot harder to cheat; but international treaties may not fare well in postpeak times.
There's something to be said for establishing something as culturally abhorrent. That's one reason I spent a fair bit of time engaging Japan media firms to show dolphins using computer programs, etc. Such concepts may convey a potentially deep message without the nationalism-triggering slap in the face.
Still, it's a tough sell.
"We are seeing a similar reaction nowadays with the global warming issue which, by the way, has to do with a large and complex system; that of the Earth's climate. So, it is very difficult to control very large complex systems, if nothing else because these systems tend to resist change and sometimes react violently against those who try to control them."
You also need the right sized stick for your elephant. Copenhagen was a failure because we had multiply riders (nations) trying to control one large elephant (the climate). Not only were their sticks not big enough but it was clear some were trying to drive it in completly opposite directions (Saudi Arabia Vs the Madives).
Over the last 10 to 20 years, after I passed the age of thirty, I began to believe that "control" is not the correct path, and in the case of large complex systems is not possible. Attempts almost always lead to the law of unintended consequenses, and what was hoped to be gained is instead lost (witness the various attempts to "rationalize the markets" and the resulting complete irrationality).
The variables are simply too great to be able to "control". I belive more each year that the correct analogy is that of the surfer, simply moving with the waves as they come one after the other, and riding as long as possible. Or if handling large animals is more to your liking, think of the rodeo bull rider, who rides an out of control bull . His goal is not to control the bull, which is not possible, but simply to stay in the saddle as long as possible up to 8 seconds. After 8 seconds it is considered a successful ride and scored (I like the logic, there is no attempt at lasting forever, which is also not sensible...many firms in the world would be well served by simply declaring themselves a success, liquidating and leaving the world alone...I think of many banks...:-)
In the 20th century many thinkers began to think this way, and once more the artists were there first. The genius of Jackson Pollock's "action painting"...Pollack did not try to control the painting, did not try to "drive" the painting but instead let the painting drive him, control him.
Is this usable in business or government (?)...the willingness for example of a business leader to let the market drive him instead of trying to drive the market? Letting his own employees "drive" the corporate culture of the firm instead of trying to impose an artificial grafted on culture(?)...investors not trying to "control" the markets with artificial theories of what is "rational" but simply learning to get a feel for the direction of the market and the changes and riding with it...at what point would it pay to let the employess, investors, etc. simply have a sense of "play" the way a surfer plays with the sea, and learning it and watching it becomes sport? Sport that allows the surfer to survive and even enjoy conditions that would cause panic and terror in others...it's an interesting set of thoughts...much more sane than giving a surfer a pointed stick and telling him to try to control the sea.
RC
But then again, is everything around us ocean?
Are we so totally out of control?
I think more like this...and yes, most of us are totally out of control!
As for the ocean, I kayak dive out on the ocean and I can tell you you had better learn to go with the flow because there is not much you can control out there. BTW good planning helps if you want to come back!
You got your shtick
And I got mine:
___________________
The Big Kahuna Stick
Atrophied legs.
Doesn't walk much.
LOL! Hey, I'm 57 but I think I'll try that, bet I can still it ride it too.
Step back asked,
"Are we so totally out of control?"
No, I think that mistates the issue: We can be very much in control of OURSELVES (or not) and can very much be in control of our reactions and out understanding of the larger reality (or not), and can be very in touch with the limits of our own power (or not), but it is when we assume we can control the larger universe that we find our ability to "control" (as oppsed to simply change) the larger environment is greatly limited.
There is no doubt we can change things...we do it all the time (mountaintop removal blasting, deforesting whole regions, changing the chemistry of the atmosphere potentially changing the climate) but do we delude ourselves when we believe we can safely predict the outcome of what we do? Can we make "control" a permanent situation? I don't think history indicates we can.
In other words, we can often control what we choose to do (I know that is a controversial point, but I am taking the side of nurture over nature...it is arguable I know, but I have taken my side on this, I believe we are more than just our evolutionary biology, but then I am a mystic at heart)but I do not believe we can control the eventual outcome...again, the variables are just too great.
I am a fan of the chaos theory and the so called butterfly paradox, tht the wind displaced by the wings of a butterfly can change the world at just the right moment and just the right place...which means the actions of one human being can be potentially catastrophic...or potentially miraculous (which is both inspiring and terrifying when you think about it) but the said individual cannot possibly know which of the two above outcomes will prove true. He or she must simply act on best knowledge and inspiration or view of divine guidence, or whatever they use to drive their actions at that moment in time. And not acting is in itself an action.
Brief aside: It was Kierkegaard who woke me up to this...the first time I read his words I shuddered. Kierkegaard was for me the "action painter" of philosophy:
"It was I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both."
"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."
"The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived."
Soren Kierkegaard
Allow us to ask: Why would a man or woman surf? Why go out on the sea on a small board and attempt to ride waves for no other purpose than to ride them? At the end of the day, the wave will not have changed...the sea will have no marks left on it by the surfer, it will never know the surfer was there. Why risk life in such a pointless pursuit? It is an allegory of life. By the way, I cannot swim and never surfed, and probably never will...
Think of sand painting, not the type preserved in some way, but the type practiced for centuries by Navaho ritual sand painting or Tibetan ritual sand painting...temporary constructions of great beauty and symbolic content and craft...and then at the end of the ceremony they are swept away, never to exist in that particular form again. These art pieces are designed to be swept away, the acceptance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" built right into their construction. This partially explains the difference between the Western view and the more ancient tribal views of existence: The implications of "Ozymandias" are terrifying to the Western mind (Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" has the poem in it's forward preparing the reader for the warning to come) while the ancient sand painter and the surfer build the transitory nature of their activity right into the activity, accepting the lack of control of outcome, accepting the temporary condition of what they are doing to help dictate the activity. It is the most ancient form of "action painting".
When I was 20 and still so full of myself I believed I could pretty much rule the roost if I decided to I would have said to the above logic (or trans-logic) "what a bunch of mystical crap". With each passing decade however I have come more and more to be willing to accept the temporary nature of "control". Control is not by its nature something that can be had for long.
RC
With the kidding put to the side, I agree with your sentiments and at that same time with the sentiments of FMayger (that we are, for most of the time, just small surfers floating on a big ocean and hoping to catch that one good ride but usually having little control over the ocean or our luck).
We don't control the timing of our birth, or the genetic heritage that we acquire, or the myths and lies that our parents unknowingly pour into our heads.
And yet, every so often an individual transcends nature and nurture; and all by him or herself, changes the world; for the better or for the worse.
We can probably start making a list of individuals who radically changed the world almost single handedly:
1. Charels Darwin (Theory of Evolution)
2. Thomas Edison (Innovation Factory)
3. Albert Einstein (Theory of Relativity)
4. M. King Hubbert (Theory of Peak Oil)
5. Jimmy Carter (Short lived theory of a President Telling the Truth)
6. Ronald Reagan (Redirecting the Herd back to the Shining Hill
--with a cliff on the back side)
7. Alan Greenspan (Perfecting the Art of Double Speak)
8. George Orwell (Warning us about the threat of Double Speak)
9. Sir Isaac Newton (Physics, calculus, a genius extraordinaire)
10. Professor Goose and other Founders of TOD (the last bastion of civilized and rational discourse in this vast Internet ocean of flame outs and appeals to the baser emotions)
_________________________
If I have kept my balance longer, it is because I stood on the shoulders, and heels, of giants in the fair balance and spin game.
Couldn't resist this visual: Kite-Boarding : a mixture of mastery over and subservience to the powers of Nature:
Thanks Ugo,
the tipping point issue is just what I have been thinking about recently:
I think that the central question that decides if a Domino chain of tipping points is starting to run is if the speed of the decline of oil imports in a region is faster than the speed of adaption.
For example voluntarily reaching the annual target of reducing climate gases (= fossil fuel consumption, roughly) by 2% is not enough if the oil production goes down by 3% per year. The missing 1% will mean reduced economic activity, so there will be less money available neither for drilling more nor for investing in alternatives. This is when the vicious circle of tipping points begins.
Furthermore I'd like to make remark about the "burn, baby, burn" idea of managing waste in Italy: A short glimpse across the Alps should suffice to see that this will almost certainly result in a failure. In Germany, in the 90s there was a similar waste panic and - supported by public monies - lots of waste incinerators were built. Now these incinerators have so big overcapacities that huge amounts of waste are imported from abroad - including Italy. So brace for a waste incinerator bubble in Italy!
BTW: It is not easy to make an elephant "steerable". Once I saw a film how wild elephants are trapped and captured in India. They really don't like it but eventually they get used to their fate in captivity.
Yes, drillo. It is exactly as you say. German incinerators survive mainly on Italian waste. And we'll have a waste incinerator bubble in italy. One point that I didn't mention in my post is that waste incineration in Italy is supported by government with taxpayers's money in a scam that involves the labeling of electric power made by incineration as "renewable" (by law, if there ever was a greewashing scheme, this is one, actualli it is the mother of them all). So, the taxpayer is skinned in multiple ways to pay for a disastrous scheme that feeds on waste and that is a stumbling block to recovering precious commodities from waste and, at the same time, prevent valuable commodities from being used in less wasteful ways. This elephant is totally wild and impossible to tame.
"This elephant is totally wild and impossible to tame"....
It is all relative. And it is all thermodynamic. The problem is decreasing by degrees.
I live in Japan. For thirty years following WWII there was cement sprouting naturally everywhere at high speed, courtesy of mother nature`s abundant oil reserves.
Then oil prices went up and the govt "stimulated" the economy to continue the huge manipulation of cement at the high speed rate. But that was not possible thermodynamically anymore and the "bubble" burst....
so...
the govt tried to keep a portion of cement generation going at a somewhat speedy pace in the 1990s. The highways to nowhere, the public works with no purpose (incinerators, anyone???). The whole generated amount of cement was much less than in preceding decades. But it took ohsomuch more effort! All the politics! All the tax revenue chanelling! The activity could nevertheless be funded and this generated more economic activity, a kind of churning that basically lasted until.....
The Financial Crisis of 2008!
Now the govt is really down to its last bullets. It is nevertheless funding some further cement construction projects, carefully targeted to benefit city elites (now its govt buildings) and some lucky contruction companies. The activity hasn`t tailed off to zero but compared to 30-40 years ago it is MUCH LESS!! Of course there is a drastic cutting of construction activity overall. No more dams (hardly at all) no more highways, very few bridges.......I think secretly many in the govt are happy about this. Actually Seiji Maehara (the Minsiter of Trans and Infrastructure) looks all smiling and satisfied when he discusses dam cancellations.
So you will have to wait a few more years before the cement manipulation activities cease to be profitable for anyone. Right now, because there is still too much oil left, the cement generation/manipulation economy is still profitable for certain people at the top. They do benefit from these contracts. The fees, licenses, hiring, etc.
The key point is that there is not enough oil left to fund a lot of unnecessary economic activity. All of the unnecssary activity used to generate tax revenue for the elites and kept them quiet. But now the elites want to keep a larger proportion of the (oil-based) economic activity under their thumbs, otherwise they`ll have to go. They need to pay more for food, just like everyone else. So they are doing what they have to to keep material flowing down the gradient....where they can profit from it.
It is all part of the bigger transition process. Japan is just a few decades ahead of other economies...why? Not sure.
It is actually an amazing thermodynamic phenomenon playing out over decades that we are somewhat fortunate to be able to witness.
I disagree that you can control it at all. You can try to manage your own life so that by the time the cement/auto economy finally rolls to a stop you have already made the transition away from that paradigm. On the other hand, if you make the transition too quickly before it is really necessary for you to do so then you risk being powerless and incomeless. Balancing your own transition carefully is the difficult part.....
Thank you Pi.
The Japanese had their accelerator down harder than the rest of the world. Therefor they are ahead of the pack.
The Japanese are the second cleverest ethnic group.
It will pay to ask them to describe the road ahead.
Aye.
And there's the rub.
Ok, I'll bite. Just who do you think is the cleverest ethnic group and why?
BTW, I have a pretty strong opinion on why ethnic mutts, preferably multi-racial and multicultural beat the purebreds by a long shot. Being one myself, I am obviously somewhat biased ;-)
Hybrid vigor doesn't really exist in humans... On the other hand, some individuals would argue that eugenic pressures have shaped some population groups, Ashkenazi Jews being one.
Not quite sure what you mean with regards "hybrid" when talking about a single species.
However I was talking about cultural and ethnic hybrids and while I can't point to any studies or empirical data, my own anecdotal experience gives me reason to believe that this is so.
I mention race only as an example of a mitigating cultural influence and not something that I personally accept as a biological factor in any kind of human hybridization. Homo Sapiens is still very much one species.
And yes, there are probably many evolutionary pressures acting on cultures and ethnic groups, the Ashkenazi being a good example but I don't think that they are in any way more clever than say Australian Aborigines. Different environment. Perhaps Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel would be a good starting point for a discussion about this subject.
Now a cultural hybrid of Ashkenazis with Aborigines would be a very interesting mix indeed, however unlikely...
Because I work in Silicon Valley and intermingle with people of many nationalities, I can honestly say that there are very bright and earnest people in the Gaussian distribution curves of all ethnic groups.
With that said, yes, Jared Diamond's basic premise in Guns, Germs and Steel is a good starting point for understanding what got us to where we (the collective we) are today and where we might be heading as the herd continues its maddening stampede towards the edge of the cliff. What understandings of ecology and neuro-science can we muster to turn the herd from its self-appointed destiny?
_________________________
Yes. Be fruitful and multiply. But I meant that in the innovative and mathematical abilities sense; not in the base animal sense. To serve God was not meant to be a do-it-to-yourself cook book.
Inuit.
Go figure.
Interesting how you choose Inuit, a world away from the Aborigines a little closer to where you live. Have you spent much time with big sea mammal hunters of the north? I really didn't get to know many until after oil was being pumped from their neighborhood, and 'Kabluna' as good as it was, didn't give me insight enough to make judgment on their relative cleverness.
Now living in near dark a few months a year in a frozen, wind blown world will certainly make a mark on a people. But the adaptations to the region did not happen over night. It really is no great wonder that arctic sea coast dwellers came to thrive. Big chunks of meat frozen for nine months gave a far steadier food supply than many in more temperate regions could ever have hoped for, if the hunters could find those sometimes very widely separated mammals when they were still swimming. Somehow they managed to know where to find them. I've spent much time with another Eskimoid people, the Aleut. Not a soul in the village I fished from had ever been in a kayak, but they were right handy with diesels and outboards. I always was fascinated by how quickly news could travel within the village and to points quite far from it with no traceable communication route. Twenty-five years of marriage to an Aleut woman has left me no less amazed.
I found your 'right brain' link very intriguing. The video didn't play for me so I ended up reading the transcript-very left brained input. One thing I found especially interesting is Jill's play by play time indexed narrative of the experience. It would seem the left brain must have been indexing and ordering the events at some point though that could have been part of her post stroke reconstruction process. Has she a book out?
The Japanese may be clever. I am not sure. I`ve lived in a few countries and I can`t say where people are the most clever.
But Japan didn`t get modern until very late.
It all happened so suddenly.
They didn`t have any FF resources of their own. So when there were a lot of FF resources around, they still couldn`t use them as much as other countries. They were always into recycling. They love modernization but they also seem to hate it and want to get it over with ASAP but naturally. There are new sections in big Tokyo bookstores---special "Japan culture" sections set off by little traditional curtains that have books devoted to the topic of garbage: recycling, energy for it, etc. Japanese are fascinated by material cycling. Is this a sign of cleverness? It is a sign of environmental sensitivity.
Japan has a Sun God (Amaterasu). IMO this is one sign of their sensitivity to what is running the show (energy). I`m not saying that this makes one religion correct or not.
This country has a lot of rain but no oil. People here are in tune with nature in some way. But that is true for many other people elsewhere too.
Draining the oil energy gradient may take a long time, longer than one human lifespan. We are only circling the drain in tighter concentric circles but we haven`t yet reached it yet.
The really big elephant in the room is the global climate and ecological systems that make life livable. We have steadily been driving this elephant insane, and we seem to have now hit the big tipping point--the climate elephant is now no longer steerable. It is a runaway elephant.
Changing albedo with the total loss of think Arctic Sea ice
Tundra melt with consequent massive release of CO2 and methane
Even more massive release of methane from sub-sea methane hydrates
Warming and acidification of ocean surfaces reducing their ability to absorb CO2
Desertification (soon to reach 70% of land) releasing further carbon from soils
.
.
.
There is no controlling, or even staying on, this mad elephant. But it would be advisable, at long last, to stop further tormenting her.
The metaphor here is dependent on the assumption that a trained elephant is a complex system. But the elephant is tormented for several years, which simplifies the once complex system of a free elephant.
Here is the true complexity of the elephant and fits our current complex system perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viti_JHSft8
No, to me the metaphor is a bedtime story told to children.
There is no controlling complexity.
"There is no controlling complexity."
Agreed. Here's how the US controls its elephant. Warning. Some disturbing content:
http://www.wikileaks.org/
Note to TOD Staff. Please watch this before you delete. People really need to know.
This the camera half the entourage was carrying in what I believe was Sadr City...
"suburb of New Baghdad"
The first "weapons identified" were cameras and a tripod. You didn't watch the video, did you Flo? There was an RPG produced later. I'm not passing judgement here....that's not my intent. I feel it's important for thinking Americans to seek clarity about the things we do. Not you, it seems. You don't want to be responsible for your elephant.
Well, the American govt is definitely trying to ride the elephant--war generates profits and economic activity for some of its biggest corporations---and it`s not pretty, of course. The human face of oil energy dissipation is so very very sad. I don`t know anyone who is happy about oil dependence. It seems like a bad love affair. Luckily it is almost, geologically speaking, over. Then we can go back to dedicating ourselves to the sun. I think we will all be happier then. I know I will be.
And here's your RPG looking round the corner.
By the way this was discussed in a recent Drumbeat. Comments still open so there's no need to clutter up this topic.
I considered it important enough to revisit (many may not have seen the earlier thread). Also, this discussion provides a different (important, IMO) context. We tend to simplify/justify complex situations/subjects that we find disagreeable at our convenience. The level of oversimplification I've witnessed from many (most?) about our wars for oil/security has been extraordinary and disturbing. People do it with politics, energy, AGW and war. "Decomplexifying" our ultracomplex problems/predicaments is tantamount to lying to ourselves. "Drill, baby, drill" is a classic example.
Don't disagree with you.
I find this especialy true of those who focus on energy and alternatives while those who take a more general environmental view seem to understand the predicament more clearly.
Many US readers especially will have seen this but here's another example where things went horribly wrong. In this case all US personnel involved sense something is badly wrong but end up agreeing with trigger happy Peruvians to proceed.
Even after a US voice can be heard to say incredulously "(the pilot) is talking to (air traffic control) on VHF", no abort is issued. Only as the pilot screams "They are killing me" as they come under deadly fire, is an abort issued by the CIA.
And this was just in the "war on drugs".
Result a plane carrying US missionaries is shot down and two innocent Americans, a mother and her baby ,killed.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/video/cia-shoots-missionary-plane-97...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29487634/Centcom-FOIA
Two rpgs and one AKM rifle were recovered.
Nobody has denied there was activity in the area.
I notice that you don't point out that the report clearly states that the activity which prompted the firing (RPG at the corner) was conclusively shown to be a photographer as the images were recovered from the camera.
Floridian, no offense but there are things that can be justified and things that can't.
This is one of those things that falls into the "can't" category.
Back then, the use of the terms cybernetics and computers were interchangeable. Yet, the use of cybernetics to describe computing started going out of favor by the late 1960's. My theory is that the computers started solving these previously deemed "complex" problems, and people finally realized cybernetics was just an empty phrase.
So complex system theory is just a crutch for not analyzing the problem correctly. As an example, consider the use of the Lotka-Volterra equations to describe "complex" ecosystems. Recently, Bill Shipley (who knows some French) dug out Volterra's original work and interpreted his findings:
So even the originator of the equations points out their inadequacy, yet people continue to use them!
I believe the key to recasting all the complexity arguments is to recast them as stochastic (governed by probability&statistics) problems and start using entropy arguments properly. Look at this post I wrote yesterday and you can see how much progress one can make on seemingly intractable problems:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/entroplet-species-area-relation...
I basically derive the Species Area Relationship that has essentially evaded a good understanding since Volterra's day.
Jay Forrester's work on Systems Dynamics is of very marginal and limited use because he applies variation of the Lotka-Volterra equations and never applies the stochastic elements that are critically important to gain a good understanding of the complex problem he deems to solve. For this subject area at least, this limitation has kept us from making progress and explains why we need the crutch of complexity.
I had a quick squiz at the Lotka-Volterra equations.
They seem to resemble feedback and control loops on instrumentation circuits.
With ordinary PID controllers one can get chaotic regulation.
This is bad if population numbers chaotically go below zero.
(Poof.... Extinction.)
Correct read of the equations but as always this gives the wrong interpretation for what may happen.
LV equations are deterministic and they do not allow a spread or any probability elements. That was Volterra's gripe against their potential misuse way back in 1931.
Most of the time things don't just go poof because of the role of entropy, which adds probabilistic disorder to the system.
Electronics is a case of being able to control the disorder and noise selectively so that you may not see these events.
Noise is removed from a digital signal using Block Check Characters
But nature is analogue. Is there some way of removing noise from an analogue signal?
I have read that a healthy mind dances along the very edge of chaos. How does it maintain it's balance?
well it looks you're back do definitions, this time its 'healthy mind' and 'chaos' ?- ) All looks rather 'foamy' to me ?- )
Depends on how strange your attractors are... Link
This image not part of the linked paper but it looks cool!
Talking past each other at this point. Noise is something that may get in the way of something you are trying to measure, whereas disorder and randomness may be a property of the system.
Thanks for trying WHT.
I shall dwell on it and see if anything emerges.
And examples of unhealthy minds are catatonia and epileptic fits etc.
Healthy minds are functioning coherently. (if a bit dimly)
Web -- I'm sure you delved into the world of "chaos theory" back in the day when it was THE topic. Though not a dedicated student I dug into to a degree. Perhaps I missed it in this thread but the one aspect of complex system I didn't notice was "adaptive". As I understand the theory it is the adaptation capabilities which account for much on the complexity of systems. Much of the discussion here has dealt with methods to force beneficial changes. The obvious counterpoint to such forced changes (greatly assuming they do actually achieve the goals) is that we're still dealing with a complex ADAPTIVE system. The system will, in theory, adapt to any forced changes. it will adap[t if we do nothing. The adaptations may be very unpleasant on a personal level but the system doesn't really care about that. Never has...never will IMHO
Not that practical changes shouldn't be considered. But most thoughts along this line seem to ignore potential reactions to such changes. I suppose some might classify these as unintended consequences. Simplistic, though well intended, attempted modifications might look good on paper but the reality might be very different.
Adaptation is also about mutations and these mutations have an element of disorder.
That is taken care of for example in Species Area Realationships.
People understand determinism but they can't comprehend non-determinism.
Talking about chaotic systems makes a deterministic system on the surface look like an entropic system. But that is not at all what is needed.
People can get disabused of this notion, it just takes a paradigm shift in the people studing the problem. Other disciplines have this but geologiusts amd ecologists don't because of the nature of the discipline which is mainly empirical.
Mobjectivist, I know that you don't like the Lotka-Volterra approach, but you should not be so dismissive. It is one of the tools we have - not perfect, but not useless, either. The future in impossible to predict, we can only try to be prepared for it. And I think that the Forrester approach gives us exactly that: ways to be prepared for the future.
Of course I want something better to work with.
Much of this is not about predicting the future, it about analyzing what exists. Forrester apparently leaped across the fundamentals to create a mess.
You can't pussyfoot around the issues when you realize the huge amount of sunk costs that went into prior analysis. They will do anything they can to defend their work.
So I basically tell it like it is concerning the limitations of Forrester's approach.
Since you bring it up I'll take it back a step. What kind of odds (I know probabilities are what you work with but my upbringing put me more in contact with the 'Racing Form' crowd) do you give on our ever figuring out how all that exists expanded from nothing (if I understand the current state of things some Planck number/s set/s the earliest/smallest limits of mathematical explanation for now)? Methinks there may be more (or maybe a whole lot less) here than meets the 'eye.'
Since you are in in the "Racing Form" crowd, get a load of this analysis. This has to do with the notion of odds, which I assume you are familiar with if you bet on horses or dogs.
Why do the rather simple arguments always seem to work so well, and, extending that, could dispersion work everywhere? The odd thing is that the odds function may hold a bit of the key. Everyone seems to understand how gambling works, particularly in the form of sports betting, where just about any lame-brained man-off-the-street comprehends how the odds function works. Odds against for some competitor to win is essentially cast in terms of the probability P:
Odds = (1-P)/P
When plotted the odds distribution looks like the following curve:
Which then looks exactly like the rank histogram of any scaled entropic dispersion process:
So we can give the odds of discovering a size of a certain reservoir in comparison to the median characteristic value just by taking the ratio between the two values. This equates well to the relative payout of somebody who beat the odds and beat the house. Pretty simple.
As a provocative statement, we intuitively do understand this all too well, because since we can understand gambling, then we should understand the math behind dispersion. What likely gets in the way is the math itself. People have a math phobia in that as long as they don't know that they need to invoke math, they feel confident. So the odds function becomes perfectly acceptable, as it has some learned intuition behind it. As Jaynes would suggest, this has become part of our Bayesian conditioned belief system. Enough processes obey the dispersive effect that it becomes second nature to us -- if we deal with it on a sub-conscious level.
The odds-makers don't really have to think, they just make sure that the cumulative probability sums to one over the rank histogram. Then, since the pay-outs will balance out in some largely predictable fashion, they can remain confident that they won't get left holding the bag. Why can't the oil punditocracy make the same sense to our oil predictions, I only have a hunch.
This is all so simple and you really do not need to start invoking bizarre mathematics to explain anything. The math is all there, just that the sunk costs and embarrassment of those people (geologists, etc) who don't want to acknowledge its simplicity prevent this POV from getting accepted.
This is an analysis of what exists. And that is what is missing from our idea of controlling our environment. We don't even acknowledge that we understand in the sense of a model what is going on (save for myself and a few others like Sam Foucher on TOD), so how can we pretend to be able to control our environment?
Are you familiar with Robert Rosen's definition of complexity as relates to life and ecosystems in contrast to man-made systems (machines)? (It seems everyone's definition of complex systems are different from everyone else's)
I think it sheds much more light on a truly "quantitative" difference between complexity and simplicity that isn't just a difference of stochastic and deterministic systems. "Quantitative" in quotes because it does use a lot of "abstract nonsense"... but mathematical nonetheless.
The internet has an element of disorder. TCP/IP delivery times follow fat-tail statistics and people haven't even scratched the surface of what this means.
From my blog:
Lots of things go through the entropy ringer. I don't know much about Rosen but it won't take me to long to figure if he has anything insightful to say.
Good luck with that! Category theory isn't a cakewalk to me, but maybe you'll figure it out quickly.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Category_Theory/Categories
I read Rosen's paper "On Models and Modeling"
He says "Good mathematicians often make bad modellers", and then goes into a complete dissection of Volterra's work on the nonlinear equations.
Very interesting what he says and it confirms my suspicion that that approach is totally wrong.
Rosen mentions Volterra in good light (as good mathematician and good modeller) but savages everyone who uses it incorrectly "Names will be withheld to protect the guilty"
Ugo should dig up this article via Google Scholar and digest it.
I haven't got to category theory yet.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to a free source, would you? I haven't read that paper, but I don't know if I want to spend 30 bucks on it at science direct...
Go to Google Scholar and search for that title in quotes.
A PDF will come up for free.
Indeed, it's there... just buried a bit. Thanks.
http://www.lce.esalq.usp.br/aulas/lce164/modelos_modelagem.pdf
Interesting, that link is from the University of Sao Paulo. Looks like it was probably scanned by some student and posted, Normally a sanctioned PDF copy would be text not scanned pages.
Disclaimer I studied at the University of Sao Paulo for a while and know that there was quite an underground business in illegal copies of documents and books going on.
On the subject of Rosen's category theory, I appreciate what Rosen tried to accomplish and find it very worthwhile at some grand level.
However, there are enough areas that people do stuff completely WRONG at the conventional level, that progress can still be made without resorting to category theory and a new level of contextual model. The case in point is all the System Dynamics rubbish and Hubbert Linearization heuristics that passes for math modeling of resource depletion nowadays. Unfortunately, I don't see a lot of support for my POV.
My understanding of what you are trying to say.
There is not enough cognizance of Chaos in Systems Dynamics.
And Entropy somehow dampens out Chaos, restricting the range of possible outcomes.
Therefor the Club of Rome's model is fundamentally flawed.
I see empirical evidence that it is embarrassingly accurate, so far.
It will be more interesting once we meet boundary conditions at the transition to another stable condition.
Expect to see flickering between the two states.
This flickering will be seen in the climate, financial markets,wars etcetra.
Interesting times, unfortunately.
The standard human reaction from prehistoric times. If you don't understand something, poke it with a sharp stick.
This generally worked out better for those who had a big rock or club to backup that point if things took a southerly turn ?- )
Thanks Hugo.
I liked your presentation because I understood it.
I am the only passenger in the car looking out the windscreen. The view is foggy and not encouraging. I wish it would slow down.
The rest of the passengers are studying each other's pink bits.
They don't like to be distracted.
Dmitri Orlov suggests I should have my bags packed so that I can step gracefully off when it stops.
You need to try poking the driver with a pointed stick either that or contact Toyota for further instructions ;-)
Below is a link to an article about Norbert Wiener from the science section of Time Magazine, Dec 27, 1948. I still recall the night I was supposed to be studying but encountered that article. I tried to read Cybernetics. subtitled On Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and later bought his somewhat easier book The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener was also known for the Wiener Spectrum, a concept of importance when DuPont and some other companies began reducing the amount of silver in xray film during the price explosion of the late 1970's. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,886484-1,00.html
Thanks Ugo.
This is partly right, at least insofar as the steering part is concerned. But there is actually some good theory about control IN complex systems. It is called hierarchical control and breaks down the cybernetic (feeback and feedforward) loops in a hierarchy of control objectives in layers. The lowest layer involves relatively simple operational control of the basic internal work processes. The next higher layer is coordination control in which a coordinator works (with information and leverage points in the operational control loops) to make sure the whole collection of operational subprocesses work in a coordinated way, as when the output of one operation is an input to another. This layer involves two kinds of coordination, actually. The coordination between internal processes is logistical control (e.g. budgets are a kind of logistical control mechanism). The other kind, tactical control, involves coordination of the unitized complex system (the entity) with other entities in the environment to assure access to resources and depositing wastes.
The highest layer of control is planning or strategic control. In humans this is accomplished by the prefrontal cortex and has reached a rather high level of success in 'controlling' the rest of the brain and indirectly the body. But it is also the reason that complex systems like society and its economy are almost impossible to control. Each entity (human) is an autonomous agent and not always a particularly rational or sapient one at that.
Governments and markets are part of the supposed hierarchy of controls for societies. They actually do sort-of work, but not nearly as well as the hierarchical control structures in living systems (cells to humans) do. Societies as they exist today are very new kinds of complex systems that have not yet evolved, that is self organized internally, to a point where a clear and consistent hierarchical control system has emerged. We thought, for a while anyway, that democratic institutions, representative governance, relatively free markets (with a little regulation here and there), in other words, the American model, was the ultimate form of internal self-control. But it hasn't turned out to work all that well given that all of the component agents making up that society still think they need to maximize their own well-being by having more stuff.
This whole notion of hierarchical control is written up in my systems science book outline and as a blog here.
The reality of life is that society is a still emerging complex system (with no guarantees of success) that has not yet completely organized into a clean hierarchical system. We can't really even say what such a system would look like or how it would work, though many thinkers have tried to imagine it in some utopian vision, e.g. Plato's philosopher king. The emergence of a hierarchical control system that keeps a large social system together in balance with the rest of the Ecos is an evolutionary process, not an engineering design process. And like all evolutionary processes, subject to fits and starts and failures.
George
Absolutely great comment, George! See, you are telling me exactly the kind of things that I was mulling over in my head all by myself and that I was SURE someone had already thought out but that I couldn't find - yet - over the web. You are making me a happy man! I am going to read every post of your blog and - the book you mention - what's the title?
My gosh, I am always amazed by the high level of the comments in TOD. Fantastic!
Wow. Thank you. Coming from you that is a greatly appreciated compliment.
The book is in process (Springer) and probably won't be out for another year. The working title is "Fundamentals of Systems Science" with possibly a subtitle nod to complex adaptive systems. An early outline version of the book's contents (or at least a large bit of it) can be found via this link. It is an index of several series' of related research materials that I am developing. The bottom of the page contains links to all of the pieces in the systems science series.
I still have to finish the last piece in this series. This one will complete my ideas for a systems typology -- Eco-Systems, of which social systems are an example. But the #9 paper explains the basic ideas of the typology so it should provide a sense of what will be included in the final paper.
Regards
George
As I said, you are making me a happy man - this is exactly the book I was looking for - I was sort of thinking that I would have had to write it myself, but you are saving me quite a lot of work :-) By the way I am listening to Brandi Carlile right now!
More seriously, the critical point in all this discussion is the internal organization of systems. In order to be steerable, a system must be hierarchical. This is - I think - the basic failure of the "free market" economy: every agent is free to maximize his/her economic return. That makes for a very efficient exploitation of the available resources. But the end result is the destruction of these resources - it is the Hubbert cycle. A completely free market system behaves like a bacterial colony - it is so efficient that it destroys itself. On the other hand, a hierarchical system may react consistently in a completely wrong way. We have had attempts of central control of the economy; like in the Soviet Union and it wasn't a great success, to say the least. A planned economy could have - theoretically - avoided the overexploitation of resources, but look at what they did to the Aral sea. So, we badly need new ideas: systems which can be steered in a "sapient" or "wise" way.
An equivalent of Plato's philosopher king? It is a dream that I am sure many of us have: if one of us, TOD readers, were the king of this planet, and everyone were forced to do what he/she says, then surely many things could be fixed: restore the Amazon forest, refill the Aral sea, green the Sahara desert, stop wars.... .... but perhaps the great TOD king would turn more into Nero than into Hadrian....
Few who have spent their lives outside of the ivory tower would call that a dream. Just the smallest amount of self analysis-I believe Plato had but one commandment, 'know thyself'-renders any such scenario a the most dismal of nightmares.
But one must remember, Plato got just about everything wrong.
Well he did warn you. At the end of one dialogue, I forget which, he says 'never trust the poet.'
I don't know that he meant that as a self disclaimer but I certainly took it that way the instant I read the line.
Another problem that some of these fanciful views run ito is that "You can't control what you can't measure".
Tom DeMarco said that with respect to software but it applies just as well to control theory via observability.
So what are the model-based metrics? What is the entropic or noisy content versus what is deterministic?
If we don't have a good understanding of the underlying fundamental behavior, what you are trying to construct or control may not have a good exit criteria.
I have a completely different view of things than Forrester and now Mobus. It seems that we need to understand the observables first.
Wait Wait Wait!.
We have forgotten to include the right brain!!
TED talk.
For some reason I watched that video and find nothing really revelatory about it. The problem is that she recounts her experiences but we all know that it is impossible to separate what the mind can dream up from reality. If her mind was that messed up, how can she even remember it. The whole thing is pure marketing BS.
My your are in a combative mood today. Having taken a shot or two into Mr. Leary's shortcut approach to this realm a long while back I will tell you that the messed up mind can remember. Colors, tones, scents, emotional states are recorded but their intensity fades when they are gridded on to a timeline and remembered in story fashion. Another event can trigger an emotional state that at least feels to be identical to the ones felt when the mind was messed.
As a child and young man I had a series of more or less identical recurring nightmares (the scene would sometimes change but the anxiety from the inability to resolve or exit the situation was identical or near enough so that over the course of over twenty plus years every time it happened I felt I was in exactly the same state). This nightmare would recur when I had a high fever that was about to break while I slept. My mind was no doubt messed at those times but earlier occurrences could be recalled after I awoke. This series of nightmares finally resolved itself while I had a severe case of pneumonia when I was just over thirty. I still remember the scene. I walked down the stairs in my nightmare state--I always got up and walked when in this nightmare state--and as I reached the bottom floor out of the dark colors and unfriendly sounds a stretched slinky appeared and recoiled itself--the sound it made is much clearer than the picture near thirty years later. I was relieved without first truly waking the first time ever in this series. Then as always before I awoke and my fever had broken but the nightmare has never returned. The messed mind can remember, and deeply 'emotionally colored' memories will remain more or less unchanged much longer than others.
No doubt Jill has had to reconstruct an order into which to index her stroke event, but a brain event of that magnitude could very well leave recallable 'accurate' memories of its sensory inputs/interpretations. No great importance should be attached to the quote marks around accurate as the accuracy of any memory is to some extent in doubt, they are accurate enough to be of use and help us get on with our lives. I wonder how much different my response to Jill's story would have been if I had viewed the video instead of reading the transcript?
Thanks for your 'odds' response upthread, I started to fiddle with it but I tend to drift (to this post today) to something I'm more comfortable with every time I try to get a real good handle on your maximum entropy stuff. I actually very much liked math and had some aptitude for it but...unexercised math skills atrophy incredibly quickly. I was a little baffled by the areas under the histograms you posted at first glance but then realized the scale was exponential, which is not what my mind's eyes grasps intuitively when I think spatially. With luck I will actually bang at some of your many postings on the subject when I'm having a good learning day--there may be still a few left ? -)
I am only usually only combative to illicit some good responses.
I always thought that animals are not supposed to remember their dreams or semi-conscious episodes. Let's say a rabbit remembered its dream of being best friends with a fox, then woke up and next time a fox ambled up it wasn't as cautious and then got eaten.
Somehow lots of this stuff gets wiped out and we are left remembering partially snippets and we all know that those snippets usually mean nothing. I just get very suspicious of the weird things the mind is able to conjure up in altered states. The fact that Dr. Jill never placed that into context is too bad because that is what a scientist really should do.
Good luck with the odds ideas.
If you look at my commment on the Inuit to Arthur a few threads up you'll notice at the end of it I commented on his right brain link. I mentioned that it was interesting Jill had related this right brain experience in a play by play fashion, and was curious wherher or not she had actually written in depth about it, but no response was forth coming and I didn't feel intrigued enough to pursue her story any further. We are not in that much disagreement here. And as for animals remembering dreams that seems a tough enough one to get data on, curious how it was done. It is thought that humans are a lot more into using a past, present future framework than other critters so we may well have coding and indexing methods that would give us a lot more latitude on what we remember and how we remember it. As for my comments on some of the Aleut communication systems (in my reply to Arthur), take them for what you think they are worth but I've no ready explanation for what I have encountered.
I will look through the other comments.
I bet the animal dreaming is a case of inference. They know that animals dream but only infer the connection that they remember nothing from their dreams.
I know that after my pet cat (as a child) had an obvious hunting dream (characteristic head, front and rear paw movements), she wanted to go outside as soon as she woke up.
Alan
I agree that uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism is a disaster in the long term, because it places minimal to no value on non-renewable resources in situ, when those resources should be valued in place undisturbed at the cost of producing their replacement from hydrogen molecules with only solar energy as the energy input (or science's best estimate of that given it may be yet impossible). I think the greatest impediment to implementing such a system of valuation is the question of "who should collect and benefit from the fee = value to be paid?" To now, that has always been whatever human polis happens to live nearest the resources, eg. a state government, a provincal government, a national government etc., so the result of exhorbitant resource extraction fees would be huge unearned income inequities. The clear solution to that problem is a single world government responsible for collecting the fees for resource extraction and for re-distributing them equitably on a per-capita basis, perhaps with some part going to support a fair share of natural habitats for other species on some equitable basis as necessary. Much work required to figure out how to not interfere with the normal process of natural selection, natural extinctions due to species having evolved into dead ends on their family trees etc.
The great advantage of this system is that it places a huge (and accurate) value on recycled resources, and enormously encourages substitution of genuinely renewable inputs for non-renewables.
Given that, and a powerfull police to enforce the rules (?), then capitalism as an economic organization should be a fine method of operation. Of course there should likely also be developed in parallel a system of genuine non-representative democracy, using present communications systems freely provided (to avoid use of power to influence the polis) to implement the lawmaking part of the system, but that's really another topic.
Imagine how nice it would be to only need to resolve the problems this system would create! With three billion under-employed people in the world, mostly living near to the resources whose extraction needs to be controlled, policing should not be a serious issue.
"By the way I am listening to Brandi Carlile right now!
More seriously..."
Ugo, there is little that matters much more than listening to Brandi Carlile and her ilk when it gets down to the basics of things that matter...a young poetess who is part Dylan and part Sappho, a singer who is part Janis Joplin part Sheryl Crow part country girl at heart...yeah, take a break from the intellectualism and enjoy life for awhile...
Einstein was once asked about the results of a nuclear war. The questioner was expecting Einstein to give a view based on his great scientific knowledge. Einstein answered the question thusly: "Alas, we shall not be listening to Mozart anymore." Einstein was a man who knew what mattered most.
RC
Nor will I advance one here. But if we stick with the elephant, I'll note two more concepts which might be assigned to extend the metaphor: behaviorism and landscape.
Complex adaptive systems which have reached a semi-stable state within the mesh of competing adaptive systems they interact with, tend to become somewhat consistent in their reactions to given perturbations by doing what most easily resolves the border incursion. This is true with a trained elephant, and it's also true of other complex adaptive systems of many classes. (I realize I haven't defined these classes or where they come from, another day maybe). The elephant system and the mahout system then develop a fairly stable interface which is largely predictable - without knowing exactly what the elephants motivations, feelings, or internal processes are. I'm calling this "behaviorism" for the purpose of this post, although I mean to extend it beyond biology in keeping with the metaphoric world we're taking a walk in.
Landscape is a matter of being able to visualize and exploit the critical topographies upon which these adaptive systems play out their games. It can at its most straightforward be an actual physical landscape, but in keeping with the metaphor I also mean it to include abstracted representations of the sort biologists refer to as "fitness landscapes", and not just for "fitness" per se. Different qualities or characteristics one might wish to work with have different landscapes associated with them, in a similar way that one might overlay different sorts of information on a GIS map. I realize I'm probably not being very clear here, I've never been very good at describing this.
One example which precisely fits into this extended metaphor is the practice of chasing bison (or mastodons?) off a cliff. This was an immensely useful hunting technique for some early north americans, and it was predictable across many generations. Humans used their abstracting abilities to simultaneously consider the aggregate behavior of the critters and the physical topography of the system, and clearly figure out what sort of small controlled perturbations would have the likely result of a lot of dead prey at the bottom of a particular cliff.
I note as an aside that there would really be easy no way to derive the above strategy verbally or even mathematically. It may favor a 'broadband' visual abstracting abstracting approach which is possibly a bit of an anachronism to those of us far-removed from paleolithic days; of limited use to agriculturists.
If you get to know the complex systems (adaptive and otherwise) around you and see their organizational structure as opposed to their substance, you are struck by how relatively few "kinds" of structure underlie these systems, and that adaptive systems which seem utterly disparate, even hopelessly abstract, may have deep structural similarities which offer useful "behavioristic" parallels with more-familiar systems.
And abstract landscapes, in turn, can show an analagous ubiquity of usefully-familiar 'topographic' features and implications. When you put these together in different ways, you find that timing, sequence, and "location" on the relevant topography are critical, and that most of what humans do in most fields of endeavor amounts to random noise, trying to get elephants to spontaneously drop dead someplace there isn't a cliff.
Admittedly, I have never met anyone else who thinks about things this way so I must be insane. Then again, I've piled up a lot of mastodons over the years.
ok, that's my odd comment of the morning, off to have coffee.
So, is this a fitness liability when different topographical landscapes become involved?
(As it appears our evolved traits for fitness as a species are now a liability)
Well, that's where the "adaptive" part comes in. I may not have communicated what I'm trying to get across very well. The landscapes are an imaginary construct to help visualize different aspects of reality which don't overtly present that way to our senses.
For instance, a species of coral may have different interactions on one border than it has on a different border, depending on what it is competing against, and these are drawn from its evolved repertoire. Any system which is competing with others winds up in a sort of metastable balance on its borders, and this extends to borders beyond those which are visible or even tangible.
Certainly, if you put a piece of coral in a different context, such as within a human body, its repertoire would not be all that well matched to its needs. (Although I once had a housemate who claimed he got coral polyps in his bloodstream from a scratch while diving and that his doctor said they were trying to colonize him. I remain skeptical, but who knows? That'd be some hardy freakin' coral.)
Our evolved traits are certainly hosing us and the planet. My point today, if I manage to get it across at all, is that steering the whole mess becomes more tractable if one sees a bit deeper into the way things happen, and that there may be ways human brains can learn to do that.
The Origin of Wealth - Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics by E.D Beinhocker speaks a lot to complex adaptive systems.
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Economics/dp/14...
Interesting read on many levels as many around the globe consider applying controls on human activity
As a surfer and diver of tropical origin, I can assure you it is true. The nurses continually dug coral out of my body, before it tried colonization, which was a common hazard for those thrown on reefs trying to make tight sections in barrels over reefs. Nutrient rich 98 degree blood makes for good growing medium.
I hope you are right about human brains.
Thanks for the intuitive work.
Thanks for the coral reality check; I purposely didn't google it beforehand since it's more fun to have someone educate me. For that matter, I've dug a little coral out of myself in years past and got quite an allergic response, but thought the "internal coral reef" might be just a beach legend.
Human brains don't seem to do it automatically. Maybe I'll develop a training regimen for Jedi.
keep trekkin'
For all kinds of bacteria, yes. For coral polyps, not a snowball's chance in hell. Try growing a live reef in an aquarium...
Now I'm not up to enough math speed to jump into the meat of some of this conversation but as I understand a snowball does have a chance, albeit a very slim one, in hell ? -) Cool pictures by the way.
Sounds like the kind of thing that Rosen's Category Theory could help model. However I think that there would need to some way of analyzing what happens at multiple resolutions within those borders, sort of like a mandlebrot set of ever smaller borders but with the same laws applying at finer and finer resolutions to the interactions, maybe going down to biochemistry of the cellular level of the different organisms and their interactions within the borders, which in and of themselves are dynamically changing all the time.
Now imagine what happens when climate and ocean acidity are also changing and we are introducing invasive species and causing a mass extinction at the same time. The problem of controlling a wild elephant is peanuts in comparison... I doubt that most economists would understand this ;-)
I don't disagree, except that as with weather, one would quickly run up against limits to computation if trying to apply reductionist tools and massive iteration, though it'd be cool to play with. However just like the weather, the emergent stuff would not be easy to get at that way, to put it mildly. One satellite photo of the status of a hurricane 15 minutes ago has more immediate utility than any simulation.
As a practical tool for humans who might wish to affect things, I think a human brain is sufficient for a lot of useful modeling, indeed is the best thing available. In a way, it's one thing our brains specifically evolved to do. Here I'm not talking about coral reefs, but about steering the course of human (and related) events at various scales. Human societies and their intersections/interactions with the world are not unlike coral reefs in that sense.
I will now lapse briefly into paragraphs most may skip. Nothin' to see here, move along. These aren't the droids you're looking for. ahem.
One sort of thing we can choose to consider is the "degree of steepness/stability" of chosen qualities within and across systems. In a system which has barriers to what may be broadly considered as information flow and it flows steadily as opposed to abruptly, a landscape of criticalities evolves naturally and creates one sort of topography. Sorry for being abstruse early in the morning... just woke up... this would be analagous to a heavy snowfall in the mountains leaving poised avalanches across many scales, with the complex wind/water/gravity/slope interaction leaving a similar but different assortment each time. There may be other systems "downstream" from them, such as forests, human habitations, critters, etc. To the extent the current state of the system can be characterized, one can in principle devise inputs which produce somewhat-predictable output responses by the system, and on the systems 'downstream'.
Part of my point is that analagous "criticality landscapes" may be generated in any iterative system dealing with barriers to information flow and interacting with other topographies, except those words I just typed before the comma are just a stab in the dark at what I'm trying to convey. So I'll back off and note that in addition to "elephants" (our metaphor du jour for complex adaptive systems) which can be behavioristically characterized, the world is also full of poised avalanches of various kinds, and these are what we have to work with in volitionally steering the direction of systems.
Seeing them is a matter of training oneself to see them, and they can often be collapsed with very small inputs in preplanned sequence, with many predictable downstream effects and disparate but connected systems. In such a relatively instantaneous cascade, the complexity of the systems is largely irrelevant, the dynamics are simple. As in, trigger a large poised snow avalanche at exactly the time your estranged wealthy husband is briefly beneath it. This has quite predictable downstream implications for some trees, the divorce proceedings, the boards of directors he sits on, the prenup, his chances of serving in congress, his carbon footprint, etc etc. Very few of these things have much overtly to do with snow.
Now extend the concept to poised avalanches in other systems, and it still applies. That's why something considered an "expose" is bigger news to humans than a steady march of events to the same place, it triggers an immediate mental reframing, such as the Tiger Woods infidelity, and the larger size of that perturbation will in turn trigger others which are downstream. That's how Hitler devined a route to power in the beaten-down headspace of post-WWI Germany; there was potentially a set of nested phase transitions, self-organized criticalities, of human belief and behavior poised to be triggered to any ends.... or to be defused. He learned his elephant very well.
I don't kid myself that many people are following what I'm describing poorly here. Basically that the nature of the way things happen is not as most people think. The incrementalist view, that free flow of information - blogging, say - will necessarily educate the people of the world until unseen "tipping points" of enlightenment and positive appropriately-altered behavior are reached, is fundamentally flawed. Tipping points many not exist, even if they do they may be nothing like what one wishes for, and the standard way of finding them is like wandering randomly in a mine field. "tipping points" in general (when applied to humans and similar systems) are a retroactive way of characterizing a few kinds of cascades, and poorly. This would be depressing if it didn't also imply that activism can be much easier and more effective than it usually is.
yep.
I suppose if it was easy, everyone would do it. We're in a pickle, no joke... but a pickle with huge degrees of freedom in how it all plays out.
gotta go, cheers. pardon the kludgy writing, this is a quickie...
may the force be with you.
Much of what you say resonates with me, although I would have phrased it very differently.
Take my own case.
1970s - We will face a oil and related energy & resource shortfalls. Think, analyze, plan.
1990s - Note that renewable energy is getting lots of "play" but other viable alternatives are not. Explore other alternatives. Conclusion: Most viable "unsung" alternative is electrified rail + bicycling + walking. Focus on that but keep others on back burner.
2005 - Decide that Peak Oil is finally arriving. Peak Oil will expand it's impact. Review available sites and chose TOD as base to establish a new meme. Success in part there.
2008/9/10 - Use "Power of a Good Idea" to work with those searching for good ideas/mitigation strategies. Hans Herren and then United Nations "Green Economy Initiative" (as yet incomplete, but I will likely be listed as a contributor).
2010/11 - Foreign Affairs magazine article and leverage that.
Pre-plan and pre-position for moment when USA panics. Have the best solution set at point of high visibility so less effort will be used grasping for worthless straws.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I generally don't read stuff by human authors - saves time - but just took a break and read a little about Rosen in the wikipedia entry for him. Sounds like he thought in somewhat similar directions, and not reductionist as I inferred from your "finer and finer" comment, sorry. In particular, this sentence jumped out at me:
"He went, however, even farther in this direction by claiming that when studying a complex system, one "can throw away the matter and study the organization order" to learn those things that are essential to defining in general an entire class of systems."
Bingo. This is darn near a verbatim sentence from some of my own past notes and postings, which are based on my own little pile of theories. Wish he was alive, I'd go buy him lunch and chat.
Rosen claimed that there were biological models which existed in some organized space in which we could not simulate with our machines/computers. I infer the reduction could occur but not in any meaningful way until we enter that specific organized space with its own customized computational paradigm.
This is an existential idea and not extremely helpful to make progress with.
I am a pragmatic sort and did learn something from Rosen but prefer to make progress where I can. Rosen tried to make a breakthrough by taking a gigantic leap but didn't make it, presumably because he ran out of time.
Admittedly, I've just skimmed a wiki and know nothing else about him.
However, it seems he was looking at the organizing structure and not the particles, which is certainly a different way of looking at things. Going back to a sentence I liked,
"Rosen said that organization must be independent from the material particles which seemingly constitute a living system. As he put it: "The human body completely changes the matter it is made of roughly every 8 weeks, through metabolism and repair. Yet, you're still you-- with all your memories, your personality... If science insists on chasing particles, they will follow them right through an organism and miss the organism entirely"
The patterns of organization can be very similar for very disparate sorts of systems, probably due to the relatively simple ways information propagates through them and is embodied by them. Thus in useful 'behavioristic' ways a religion may be similar to a virus, the interaction between news media and those seeking to make news similar to the interaction between insects and plants, a corporation may be subject to Liebig limits, poised avalanches may exist in completely intangible systems, etc. This sounds like rhetorical raving even to me, but there's power in it.
And of course we see power laws cropping up in size distributions from that of meteors, to stock market fluctuations, to earthquakes to forest fires to human wealth distribution, the populations of cities, the fractal character of biological scaling and a million other places... this must be an due to deep structural similarities these radically-different things have in common. I'm saying that power laws like this are only one special case of deep similarity, and that there are many fewer kinds of organization than one might suppose even when we graduate to adaptive systems. And from that point, I take it a step further out on the limb to propose that there are 'behavioristic parallels' between such seemingly-disparate systems which may be usefully applied to (as the structure allows and dictates) steer them; and that I have done it.
I realize this isn't rigorous; it simply works. It's in some ways a more powerful way of looking at things of direct interest to the human condition and the life systems of the earth, a way to get things accomplished or - conversely - to know when something will not be. I assure you I'm a pragmatist first and have only delved into this attempt at description since I have been unable to communicate what I do to anyone.
On reading this, I'm tempted to just delete, but what the heck, not more than two people will read this far anyhow... best
This topic is something I know a lot about and is the main emphasis on my blog http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com. I comment quite a bit on TOD and constantly refer to my power-law findings which you may not be aware of.
With that said, there is absolutely nothing mysterious about power laws in earthquakes and population of cities or in bio/ecological scaling, all of which I have blogged about since the first of this year. This is not mystical fractal or chaos nonsense, but garden-variety entropic disorder. I just have a clever way of dealing with the math that apparently has slipped through the cracks over the years.
That is my sense of pragmatism showing through. So if you desire, you can continue to pursue some abstract notions to understand whatever interests you, or you can take a look at some of my recent blog posts. Like I have said before, all the pieces fit together and the simple math explains so much, including aspects of oil discovery, which is what got me interested in the topic.
What exactly works? I know that you prefer not to read other human's output, but if you dare, go through a few of my postings and it will open your eyes.
I'm quite aware of your posts, and I'm generally impressed by them. Indeed, the last time I mentioned power laws you dismissed me in substantially the same way. If there's something specific you'd like me to look at on your blog as opposed to the whole thing, I'll have another peek.
Actually, I didn't say they were mysterious, my contention is that the similarities across disparate systems are pretty straightforward but generally overlooked as a practical matter.
Labeling it "entropic disorder" doesn't particularly illuminate. You may indeed be the only person clever enough to have figured out the math, but I can't tell whether you're actually saying anything different than I am.
Sorry, you seem not to be actually reading what I've written. What I'm trying to do is come up with a general explanation for why my existing analysis techniques have worked well over decades of application in the field.
I appreciate things like your popcorn analogy, and you have some genuinely impressive math insights. I stand dismissed, dissed, and upbraided; yet one or both of us may simply be wrong or irrelevant, and it ain't necessarily me.
Reading your blog may or may not constitute a panacea for the world's ills, I'll remain agnostic there. I intend no intrusion upon your niche in the coral ecosystem here. You remain the TOD power-law savant with my blessing.
If I dare? Really? Please feel free to take or leave anything I've said, and I'll extend your blog the same courtesy. I'll quit discussing my thoughts along these lines here, it was just a way to kill time while getting past my morning entropic disorder.
I don't post as often as often as I used to, so they all have deeper tech content. I had a post on population last month. I did a post on species just this week and one on earthquakes in late February.
Strange, I don't see any math on your part, only musings. I looked up the last time you mentioned power laws on TOD (having to do with income distribution) and I didn't dismiss you at all, basically supporting you (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5891#comment-552685). At the time you also said you were not a numbers person. And now you admit that you can't seem to articulate anything very well. How am I supposed to figure out if you are saying something different than I am saying if you only use abstract spatial descriptions or the vague "structural similarities". I don't invoke structural similarities, only dispersion using the Maximum Entropy formulation for variation in rates. So as a short-hand, I call it entropic dispersion.
Do you have a web site or anything with any kind of more formal outline of your ideas? I know this may sound pedantic, but math and physics is a great universal language if you wish to use it. By not being a numbers person, do you mean that you just want to speak in abstract terms?
You at one time said:
Sounds bizarre to me.
What else am I to take away from this other than you may be a ... poseur. But on the TOD info it says that you are a former oil industry geophysicist. I don't quite get it.
I can't claim to be a math person these days, so I don't claim it. Sorry you find it strange.
You did previously give me a hard time when I mentioned power laws. As long as "elephant pricks" are on-topic, I'll note that your dismissals are about that subtle, and thus memorable. Perhaps it was the time before last, or the time before that.
Well, truth be told, I don't think you articulate particularly well either. That doesn't mean you don't have worthwhile things to say sometimes.
News flash. I haven't signed up for a class under you or accepted you as an intern. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I laid out some rough descriptions to see if they resonated with anyone I might hone them further with. Guess not, and I can end that experiment.
This is a general forum. Not sure how to express that mathematically for you, it's more of a concept.
Nope. And I probably never will, particularly if they are made more rigorous. I realize you won't be able to make sense of that.
potayto, potahto. I said that in response to a person who was turned off by math. Do you contend it isn't a concept?
Well, if I'm a poseur, I certainly could have made up the geophysist thing. TOD lets you write down anything you like.
This was certainly unpleasant.
Reading this entire discussion wasn't much fun either. I really appreciate both yours and WHT's very different approaches to conceptualizing and communicating ideas.
One of the things I like about this forum is that a lot of sometimes apparently unrelated and even half baked ideas are thrown onto the table for discussion.
While advancing any scientific theory requires rigorous analysis of empirical data and mathematics is the language which is needed to accomplish that task, I don't believe that TOD is intended to be a scientific journal where every commenter's ideas have to be subject to peer review based on their mathematical expertise. While I myself barely passed college calculus and would not dare to challenge WHT on any of his mathematical analysis That doesn't mean I can't understand concepts or the big picture or that I shouldn't be allowed to be part of a particular discussion.
I would hope that we are all able to forgive each other's trespasses and appreciate each other's strong points and talents.
Perhaps TORTOISE's quote from the "Minds I" that I posted up thread earlier could be used as a starting point for a more pleasant and productive dialog...
Some of us are better able to see things holistically and others are better able to work out the details by reducing them, It would seem to me that we need both kinds of talent if we are to get the true full picture.
Now if the two of you would just cut each other some slack, shake hands and go have a beer!
Sheesh!
Sorry, but sometimes I treat this stuff as seriously as a heart attack.
I will do whatever I can to get that last little bit of insight and apply it to the Bayesian knowledge base that I have built up. This thread has been worthwhile because I got the reference to Robert Rosen's work through KW. On the other hand, sometimes it leads to a dead-end of abstractions.
I make no claims that anyone will listen to what I say. I remember monitoring operating systsm newsgroups back in the day and seeing the first postings by a fellow named Linus Torvalds. He became successful because he had a neat toy that other geeks got interested in. This academic route is a much tougher slog to get through and by definition can't get a bandwagon effect, NIH and all. Perhaps TOD isn't the best arena but it certainly has the melting pot of personalities that can drum up the occasional innovative idea.
I agree that that alone was worthwhile. I googled category theory and spent some time introducing it to my high school aged son who is orders of magnitude more mathematically inclined than I ever was at his age. Actually that is always a head fake because it usually ends up that I'll end up going back to him at some later date and have him explain it to me ;-)
Cheers!
Thanks Fred. Feel free to email me if you like. I'm done with this here.
Lets see..... Masses 80 kg. Eats 1 kg solids per day. In 14 days eats 14 kg, or perhaps 1/5th of mass. ??
A lot of unsupported "stuff" and quasi-existential "" going on above.
I've no way to support or deny the claim but eight weeks is 56 days (14 days came from?) and last I heard we were mostly water of which I manage to consume about 3-6 litres a day depending on season and activity level (but then I weigh a little under 100kg). There certainly seems enough going in and out to make the exchange, but fully measuring and verifying such an exchange would seem problematic to say the least. Now given that analysis of teeth from people thousands of years dead yields information on locales they lived in and the portion of life spent there, it would seem at least a small amount of material does not exchange but is retained for life and well beyond.
Now you are starting to sound like a Saussurean structuralist (except for the mastodon part). Are you familiar with him? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure
nope, and I can't say the wiki struck any major resonances; could you elaborate? Thx.
He noted that language and other humans (and other systems) are defined by their structure, whereas up to that point, people were much more focuses on describing the properties of the elements that made up the system as crucial to understanding the larger structure--in other words, the systems defines the elements in it, the elements don't define the system.
His posthumously written book, "A Course in General Linguistics" lays out the basics. I agree that the wiki article is disappointing.
Structuralism influenced everything from psychology to sociology and anthropology. Claims of "post-structuralism" are really just reactions to rather narrow interpretations of his originally more nuanced approach, IMHO.
Perhaps we should spend more time studying how social insects such as ants and bees have evolved with their ecosystems for some insights and parallels to our own social evolution and how it might progress.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/termite-social-insect-evolution-bts-1...
Termite Battles May Explain Evolution of Social Insects
http://www.jstor.org/pss/986579
The Evolution of Caste Systems in Social Insects E.O. Wilson
absolutely, and don't stop with the social ones. Insects are an amazing resource for having tried a bunch of stuff and gone with what works.
I'll bet they've discovered fire more than once, but it didn't work out well for them.
and hey, here's a blast from the past: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R8UN9zGD04 The Hellstrom Chronicle, on youtube. Nice apocalyptic slant for '71.
It is interesting how ideas shuffle in and out of the TOD comments board. Yesterday night I went to bed thinking that social insects are something that should be studied. Then, I wake up this morning (I am in Italy) and I find that we are discussing exactly that!
Choosing to model your recommendations for social structure of humans on social insects it giving up. Back to princes and feudalism. I prefer to investigate further into true democracy rather than representative democracy.
For years I have been commenting that humans are the first clumsy attempt of a sentient species with the power to control their environment and confronting limits to growth. Your research focusing on society as a still emerging complex system is really putting this observation under a microscope. I also look forward to your upcoming publication.
If our present circumstances could be adequately modeled, perhaps we could run an evolutionary algorithm whose goal would be to maximize desirable outcomes.
Imagine The Rome Report re-hashed through an evolutionary program, with cognizance of Chaos Theory. Perhaps there is an Island of Stability overlooked by the original report.
The authors of the report to the club of Rome did identify islands of stability. But in order to reach them, you must act on the system and change some parameters - population, industrial output, the like. The system is really non chaotic - dominated by simple physics. It is like a rocket shot up - its trajectory can be nicely described by non-chaotic, Newtonian physics. It goes up, then it goes down. Maybe it can chaotically oscillate a bit, while falling, but you can't beat gravity by flapping wings that are too small to fly.
I really don't think rocket science is quite enough, my gut feeling is that a model of our current system would probably look much more like the visualization of the physics of Quantum Chromodynamics
http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~dleinweb/VisualQCD/Nobel/
This animaton was featured in Prof. Frank Wilczek's 2004 Nobel Prize Lecture.
Action density
Topological charge density
He discusses The Large Hadron Collider (Now there is an elephant(complex system) in need of control if ever there was one)and Unified Field Theory and his Nobel prize work here
http://fora.tv/2008/09/25/Frank_Wilczek_The_LHC_and_Unified_Field_Theory...
Well the first link was cool but the second wanted me to login somehow. Not setting up more logins is a filter that gets me off this thing. It probably leaves what I see to chance little more than the Don's turning the direction of his travel over to his steed at crossroads did. Rocinante was pretty much going to head for the smell of food or other horses. Still one must have filters ? -)
That's strange I didn't log in nor does it require a login when I click the link from here...
Edit, mystery solved I originally logged in using my facebook account so when I click the link it automatically recognize me from this computer. The Video is probably worth a log in, in this case.
I can see the video without logging in.
Glad I took your advice and viewed The LHC and Unified Field-Frank Wilczek video. After a couple abortive attempts at sites that either didn't like my domain or wanted me to log in I found it on YouTube in eight parts and after I designated which part I wanted to view a few times the next part loaded in sequence automatically. It was worth the effort.
"It's an enchanted world, and it's an enchanting world, and to me that... that makes it more bearable." Frank Wilczek while refering to his book 'The Lightness of Being' at the begining of part eight.
Two points:-
1. Cybernetics takes it's name from Kybernetes, meaning more stearsman than rudder. A rudder is a simple thing, wheras a stearsman watches the flow and movment of the boat (takes in information) and makes ajustments. Cybernetics is about the flow of information and the use of that information to control systems, or understand natural systems based on the flow of information (energy can be seen as information in this context).
2. Mahouts grow up with their Elephants, and despite what wikipedia tells you, don't often use pain to train their beasts, the Elephants are as attached to their 'master' as they are to them, It's a lifetime bond between mahout and elephant, and they both need each other to survive. (A mahout who loses the trust of his elephnat is just another kid in the indian slums).