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

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Carlos,

>
> > Well, yes, that's the advantage of creative homeostatic systems
> > like the
> > global economy.   The question, though, is whether pushing such a  
> > system
> > to grow exponentially toward critical response time failure is  
> > dangerous
> > or not.
>
> It would be difficult to tell, because we don't know how the future  
> will be. But taking the sandpile avalanche analogy, if things break  
> down every now and then, there will be a low probability that they  
> will have drastic effects, because they "release tension" (the same  
> with earthquakes).

Well, that's true enough for a sand pile, assuming you're referring to a
steady shower of sand being added to the top of a pile and occasional
collapses of the sides.  That's not a model of growth though.  If a
natural system considered to allow continual growth is involved then
you're talking about successive jumps in organizational state as
successive scales of system domain are crossed and the explosively
expanding web of relationships evolves.  Biological evolution, economic
systems, languages and thought processes do that sort of thing, jumping
numerous levels of organization one after another sometimes.  

> Maybe it is not such a correct analogy, but my  
> guess is that there will be failures through history, lots of small  
> ones and only few big ones. And since the probability of having a  
> failure would be inversely proportional to its size, the probability  
> of having global-scale failures almost vanishes.
I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.
Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and failings,
there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections, and
stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
relationships fails.

And if something  
> that big comes, anyway we wouldn't be able to do anything about it  
> (e.g. huge asteroid smashing against our planet).
Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of
seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an
entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure
that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of the
system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a major
failure of imagination it seems to me.  

>
> > I do systems design too, designs for government competence,
> > self-correcting health care, etc.  There's most certainly a
> need.    
> > Are
> > your models designs for adaptive business systems or something?
>
> Last week I submitted a paper on "Self-organizing
> bureaucracies": http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0603045
> maybe you would find it interesting.

I like your approach, and will read more!   I definitely think we should
make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and don'ts
regarding performance measures, but if departments developed concepts of
productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal groups
competing would be highly very productive.   If you also wanted to
attract people who enjoyed the creative challenge of providing good
adaptive service you'd need to make government a stimulating place for
just such people and collaboration.   You'd need to give them time for
professional research and involvement, giving them status when their
work gets used, etc.   Creative people like money, but really need a
place to feed their curiosity and express themselves it seems to me.

Phil
> Best regards,
>
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
>
>    ?Tendencies tend to change...?



Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com    

[Carlos Gershenson]

> I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
> statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.
> Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
> transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and failings,
> there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
> bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,  
> and
> stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
> relationships fails.

I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.  
Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't.
Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from  
LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small  
catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that  
wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would suck, for  
sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we  
humans are a persistant little vermin...
In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely  
that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't  
collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and  
all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still  
around. So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe  
us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth,  
but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than  
extinction by catastrophe.

> Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of
> seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an
> entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure
> that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of  
> the
> system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a  
> major
> failure of imagination it seems to me.

If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization  
collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on  
increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.

> I definitely think we should
> make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  
> don'ts
> regarding performance measures, but if departments developed  
> concepts of
> productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  
> groups
> competing would be highly very productive.

Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people might think  
that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case  
when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will  
try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too  
slowly), but surely, we're getting there...

Best regards,

     Carlos Gershenson...
     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/

   ?There is no game in which you cannot cheat?

[Bill Eldridge]

1) We have large parts of earth working with non-evolved systems.
A recent description I saw of women in the Congo for example, carrying
200 lb. bags
on their backs. Perhaps they are the future if our complex oil-based economy
collapses. Darwinism isn't very predictive, it just says the winner was
the best.
But it seems unlikely that any calamity would result in complete global
significance,
whatever the scenario.

2) While we try to improve our governments, perhaps we should at times look
at the possibility that this is about as good as it gets, that a
middlin' compromise
or a small swing between not very enlightened poles is our optimum
equilibrium.
It's undoubtedly better than the worst we've seen out of human systems
in the
last 100 years (or even the last 10), yet I don't see any quantum leap
over say
Britain's government in 1870. Perhaps it's the people who might evolve more
than the governments, but that remains to be proved as well.

Carlos Gershenson wrote:

>> I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
>> statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.
>> Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
>> transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and failings,
>> there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
>> bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,  
>> and
>> stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
>> relationships fails.
>>    
>
> I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.  
> Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't.
> Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from  
> LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small  
> catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that  
> wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would suck, for  
> sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we  
> humans are a persistant little vermin...
> In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely  
> that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't  
> collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and  
> all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still  
> around. So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe  
> us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth,  
> but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than  
> extinction by catastrophe.
>
>  
>> Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of
>> seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an
>> entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure
>> that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of  
>> the
>> system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a  
>> major
>> failure of imagination it seems to me.
>>    
>
> If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization  
> collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on  
> increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.
>
>  
>> I definitely think we should
>> make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  
>> don'ts
>> regarding performance measures, but if departments developed  
>> concepts of
>> productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  
>> groups
>> competing would be highly very productive.
>>    
>
> Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people might think  
> that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case  
> when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
> democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will  
> try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too  
> slowly), but surely, we're getting there...
>
> Best regards,
>
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
>
>    ?There is no game in which you cannot cheat?
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>  

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

   
Bill, see also my reply to Carlos,

1) We have large parts of earth working with non-evolved systems.
A recent description I saw of women in the Congo for example, carrying
200 lb. bags
on their backs. Perhaps they are the future if our complex oil-based
economy
collapses. Darwinism isn't very predictive, it just says the winner was
the best.
But it seems unlikely that any calamity would result in complete global
significance,
whatever the scenario.
[PH] One of the fascinating complex system application attempts is the
UN program called MDG, (Millennium Development Goals) which envisions
both that new technology ladders can be built which will have a better
organic fit with the societies of primitive peoples in the BOP (bottom
of the pyramid) the modern world has left behind, that that 75% of
humanity can be the main economic growth resource for the world in the
century (paraphrasing).  I give it high very marks for serious wishful
thinking.

2) While we try to improve our governments, perhaps we should at times
look
at the possibility that this is about as good as it gets, that a
middlin' compromise
or a small swing between not very enlightened poles is our optimum
equilibrium.
It's undoubtedly better than the worst we've seen out of human systems
in the
last 100 years (or even the last 10), yet I don't see any quantum leap
over say
Britain's government in 1870. Perhaps it's the people who might evolve
more
than the governments, but that remains to be proved as well.
[PH]  It's hard to accept such disappointing truth, but people do
occasionally find ways to show up and do useful things when they're in a
jam.  One certainly wonders though.    I saw a HBO series on Rome,
Cesar's game of invading the great republican civilization it was with
it's own army, and was just fascinated by the seemingly well researched
up-close and personal portrayal of life on the streets and in the houses
of Rome.   Certainly there could be some failure of both the writers and
myself in trying to imagine anything but modern ideas about human
relations.  Still the strong impression is that in a great many ways
nothing in human experience has changed.   I guess the upside of that
may well be that we are indeed 'safe' from having life drastically
altered by what changes around us.

Carlos Gershenson wrote:

I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is

statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.

Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really

transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and failings,

there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever

bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,  

and

stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental

relationships fails.

   



I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.  

Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't.

Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from  

LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small  

catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that  

wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would suck, for  

sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we  

humans are a persistant little vermin...

In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely  

that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't  

collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and  

all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still  

around. So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe  

us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth,  

but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than  

extinction by catastrophe.



 

Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of

seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an

entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure

that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of  

the

system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a  

major

failure of imagination it seems to me.

   



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

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

increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.



 

I definitely think we should

make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  

don'ts

regarding performance measures, but if departments developed  

concepts of

productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  

groups

competing would be highly very productive.

   



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

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

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

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

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

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



Best regards,



     Carlos Gershenson...

     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium

     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/



   ?There is no game in which you cannot cheat?


 
 
 

Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail:  <mailto:pfh at synapse9.com> pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations:  <http://www.synapse9.com> www.synapse9.com
 

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Carlos

>
> > I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
> > statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be
> the case.
> > Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
> > transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts
> and failings,
> > there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
> > bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,
> > and
> > stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
> > relationships fails.
>
> I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.  

Yes indeed, we frequently get caught by surprise and don't see which
excesses do and don't matter.

> Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't.
The evolutionary record is chock full of things with long successful
track records that suddenly disappear.  Statistics on past performance
is not necessarily a good predictor of future results. (as they say in
the market)

> Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from  
> LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small  
> catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that  
> wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would
> suck, for  
> sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we  
> humans are a persistant little vermin...
Absolutely agree.  Our tiny appreciation of the power and durability of
complex systems hides from view a great deal of what is really happening
to us.


> In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely  
> that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't  
> collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and  
> all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still  
> around.
The thing that's different now is that we're in what has become a
strongly institutionalized 600 year exponential growth process, and have
not asked whether taking that to its natural limits is benign or
dangerous.  The earlier limits to growth investigation usually used a
'stock & flows' analysis and failed because economies are organized
around 'values flows'.   My approach is different.

So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe  
> us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth,  
> but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than  
> extinction by catastrophe.
Certainly, I'm just pointing out that one general vulnerability of all
homeostatic systems, whether relying on stocks and flows, or creative
evolution, or organizational complexity, is that they can probably all
be pushed to a crisis in which the entire network of corrective systems
can fail at once, like Katrina.  One fairly easy way to understood that
vulnerability is from considering human learning and response patterns
and whether they are capable of making ever more rapid competent
decisions about ever more far-reaching environmental impacts, for
example.  

The direct cause of the present global warming crisis is just that,
after all, a learning/response lag in which the way investors chose how
to build our economies over the last 200 years did not take into account
what would be sustainable on earth.  The good science on the subject is
that the time available for redirecting those investment decisions to
redirect the evolution of the whole life support system without
significant harm occurring has been exhausted, and for avoiding major
harm is quite short, 5-20 years.   These are things no government or
group of governments has ever done before, consistent long range science
led aggressive economic planning that successfully exploits the dynamism
of the free market.   It's all got to work, or we're in deep trouble,
and it's just one of many such problems I think.

>
> > Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination
> might be of
> > seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and
> built an
> > entire civilization, business plan and government financing
> structure
> > that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of
> > the
> > system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a  
> > major
> > failure of imagination it seems to me.
>
> If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization  
> collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on  
> increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.

Oh yes, there are options if we respond to the danger on the horizon.
At present stability requires constant % increases in investment and
returns = exploding complexity.  That's what growth is, and has been for
a few hundred years.  Humans being creatures of habit and unable to
imagine the complexities of the physical systems that were doing it get
used to such things.  There's also an interesting special deception,
that throughout the growth process it has appeared 'the sky is falling',
to conservatives and older people because economic growth is a
continuously revolutionary process which upsets old ways of doing things
without clearly displaying what new ways are being built.   I get my
comfort in discussing growth system dynamics from 30 years of closely
watching all kinds and figuring out why its so hard to build models of
them.

>
> > I definitely think we should
> > make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  
> > don'ts
> > regarding performance measures, but if departments developed
> > concepts of
> > productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  
> > groups
> > competing would be highly very productive.
>
> Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people
> might think  
> that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case  
> when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
> democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will  
> try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too  
> slowly), but surely, we're getting there...

Yes, but only half way.   One of the fascinating aspects of our societal
response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right
over the past 40 years.  People had the choice and were drawn into the
illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity
of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the
government response, rather than finding a better way to address our
growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some
validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.

Trusting investors in a free market guided by maximum profit to make all
the important design decisions for mankind's permanent occupation of the
earth isn't working right.  There's really no softer way to say it
that's truthful.  I'm still waiting for truthful observations and useful
knowledge to become relevant in politics.   Perhaps the old Missouri
mule solution is more appropriate, since the real world seems to be
getting too complicated and putting people to sleep.

>
> Best regards,
>
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
>
>    "There is no game in which you cannot cheat"
>
>
>

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:

> Carlos
>  
>
>> If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization  
>> collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on  
>> increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.
>>    
> Oh yes, there are options if we respond to the danger on the horizon.
> At present stability requires constant % increases in investment and
> returns = exploding complexity.  That's what growth is, and has been for
> a few hundred years.

There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to improve
efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality movement
is about gains
made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead having
quality as an
up-front and intrinsic effort. Major layoffs by large companies these
days are often
a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with
additional hiring
of different types of positions). Certainly there's the traditional
investment-driven
growth, but I think a lot of people are trying to reduce complexity
while maintaining
the gains and responding faster as a result. I remember Leary commenting
that in
2012 all this exponential growth would come to a head, but I don't see
it as just
willy-nilly growth.

>   Humans being creatures of habit and unable to
> imagine the complexities of the physical systems that were doing it get
> used to such things.  There's also an interesting special deception,
> that throughout the growth process it has appeared 'the sky is falling',
> to conservatives and older people because economic growth is a
> continuously revolutionary process which upsets old ways of doing things
> without clearly displaying what new ways are being built.   I get my
> comfort in discussing growth system dynamics from 30 years of closely
> watching all kinds and figuring out why its so hard to build models of
> them.
>
>  

In some ways, the sky is falling, and falling faster and faster.
The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that change, and
getting more used to
continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a philosophical
outlook antithetical
to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a
barrier to progress.
I'm not sure that old people are that worried anymore - I sense more of
an attitude of
wonderment and possibility. But also to put things in perspective, the
developments
from around 1860-1920 impacted the lives of Westerners much more
radically than
anything since.

>>> I definitely think we should
>>> make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  
>>> don'ts
>>> regarding performance measures, but if departments developed
>>> concepts of
>>> productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  
>>> groups
>>> competing would be highly very productive.
>>>      
>> Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people
>> might think  
>> that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case  
>> when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
>> democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will  
>> try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too  
>> slowly), but surely, we're getting there...
>>    
> Yes, but only half way.   One of the fascinating aspects of our societal
> response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right
> over the past 40 years.  People had the choice and were drawn into the
> illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity
> of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the
> government response, rather than finding a better way to address our
> growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some
> validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.
>
>  

We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have at
dampening political
cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic impressions of
what government can do,
which is good, but now we have idealistic impressions of what government
can't do. Instead
it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
effective government in the
real world, including the recurring motions of balances and corruption
of power, . I imagine it would
also fall into the "sky continually falling" motif, and without too much
stasis or unilateral motion. If that's true, a biparty system tends to
drift off into the extremes too
often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at
balancing and instead of a heavy
pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the zone. But then
maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much faster than
if stayed a center
course.

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Bill

Phil wrote:

Carlos

 


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

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

increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.

   

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

At present stability requires constant % increases in investment and

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

a few hundred years.

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

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




  Humans being creatures of habit and unable to

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

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

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

to conservatives and older people because economic growth is a

continuously revolutionary process which upsets old ways of doing things

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

comfort in discussing growth system dynamics from 30 years of closely

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

them.



 

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



I definitely think we should

make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and  

don'ts

regarding performance measures, but if departments developed

concepts of

productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal  

groups

competing would be highly very productive.

     

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

might think  

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity

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

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

growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some

validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.



 

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


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[Richard Harris-2]

I'm just now picking up this conversation, so forgive me for coming  
in late.

This all reminds me of a book I'm sure other people here have read,  
Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies." His thesis, basically,  
is that societal complexity, however you measure it (diversity of  
artifacts and technology, education and specialized skill sets,  
social structures), represents an investment of energy that allows  
for more intensive exploitation of resources. As this investment  
increases diminishing marginal returns are unavoidable and the  
surpluses required to address new problems disappear, making the  
society susceptible to collapse. He also talks about how collapse can  
be the rational decision on the part of a societies members. He gives  
the example of how Romans living on the frontiers of their empire  
would invite in hoards of marauding tribes because they were less of  
a blight on their lives than the Roman tax collector.

In this conceptual model, the only thing that can at least  
temporarily increase these marginal returns and hold off a society's  
collapse is the discovery of additional sources of energy.

One thing I felt was interesting was his sometimes detached view on  
whether or not complex societies are good or bad things. He had  
criticized lots of other work on collapse as being too heavily laden  
with value judgments to be scientifically credible, so I guess he was  
being extra cautious about his own.

But one thing it did impress upon me, is that humanity has spent the  
vast majority of its time in very simple, band level societies. As  
such, we should probably think of complex societies as deviations  
from this norm, an experiment.

 From this perspective, I think we, as humans, are pretty robust, but  
the complex societies we're so enamored of are extremely fragile.  
Since we are the very bacteria inhabiting the metaphorical Petri dish  
of this experiment, its hard to take such a detached point of view.

Rich

BTW,

Since we currently put more energy into agriculture than we get out,  
I wonder if agricultural energy crops and byproducts can really save  
us. Does anyone out there have an opinion?



On Jun 4, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Carlos Gershenson wrote:

>> I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
>> statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to be the case.
>> Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
>> transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and  
>> failings,
>> there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
>> bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,
>> and
>> stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
>> relationships fails.
>
> I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.
> Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't.
> Last week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from
> LANL people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small
> catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks out, that
> wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would suck, for
> sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we
> humans are a persistant little vermin...
> In any of these cases society would change, for sure, but precisely
> that is part of the adaptation. It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't
> collapsed, and there have been plenty of wars, famines, plagues, and
> all other things mentioned in the Apocalypse... and we're still
> around. So I find it extremely unprobable that something would wipe
> us out. I am not suggesting that mankind will be forever on Earth,
> but that evolving into something else seems to me more probable than
> extinction by catastrophe.
>
>> Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination might be of
>> seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone and built an
>> entire civilization, business plan and government financing structure
>> that relies on continual exponential increases in the complexity of
>> the
>> system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous, it's quite a
>> major
>> failure of imagination it seems to me.
>
> If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization
> collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on
> increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.
>
>> I definitely think we should
>> make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and
>> don'ts
>> regarding performance measures, but if departments developed
>> concepts of
>> productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency, having internal
>> groups
>> competing would be highly very productive.
>
> Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people might think
> that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case
> when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
> democracies). But if there are competing political forces, they will
> try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too
> slowly), but surely, we're getting there...
>
> Best regards,
>
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
>
>    ?There is no game in which you cannot cheat?
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:

>
>     There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to
>     improve efficiency,
>     workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
>     movement is about gains
>     made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead
>     having quality as an
>     up-front and intrinsic effort.
>     [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself in
>     lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return endeavor,
>     like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and then
>     successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>

Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality. In some
ways it sounds like
the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma crowd -
that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area (technical
only, say),
while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might have a
spruced
up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs a
better sales force.
Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business processes
with
enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to sales
support in
the field, better customer ability to configure and order...

Certainly the progress from dragging a hoe, letting a yak do it, letting
a machine do it
has been more than "diminishing returns". It's been exponential returns.
If you extend
the refinement to across-the-board: getting the crops to market (Kenyan
roses through Amsterdam to the
US and Britain), improved crop survivability through fertilizer and
genetic modification, etc.,
better handling of the company's finances through other methods, better
user service
through automated info & purchases via the Internet, etc., you get
something completely
opposite of "smaller gains taking increasing work". Now, at some point
maybe that
efficiency process hits a wall, but 10 years ago that wall would have
been predicted
as much closer.

Watch microprocessor development. Yes, its current way of improvement
has some
expected diminishing returns, but combining those with hybrid
techniques, going off
into nanotech, biocomputing, etc., there are still a few tricks up their
sleeves. Progress
may stop being linear - it may become much more discrete as we shuffle
around looking
for disruptive methods vs. enhancements - but it will quite likely continue.

I remember hand-soldering shops 25 years ago, which were completely
replaced by
wave soldering, which is now being replaced by reflow soldering. Aside
from the little
issue of inhaling lead fumes, it makes the electronics business much
more flexible and
affordable.

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

>
>      Major layoffs by large companies these days are often
>     a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with
>     additional hiring
>     of different types of positions).
>     [PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had for
>     the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by innovation
>     has had an net effect of putting everyone to work at higher
>     wages.   That stopped in 1970.   Check the charts.
>

I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as offshoring
continues.
I won't say it's all roses, but in general, it's producing wealth and
more better-paying
jobs. We're also putting the rest of the world to work at better wages.
Maybe we'd
rather be sending them charity checks, but this version is more
sustainable, and they
get to grow their own economies as well. But it's not evenly spread.

>     The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that
>     change, and getting more used to
>     continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a
>     philosophical outlook antithetical
>     to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a
>     barrier to progress.
>     [PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game.  Only
>     our images of it are purely a game, however.   For example, the US
>     is presently transferring the ownership of our productive assets
>     overseas in exchange for current consumption at an accelerating
>     rate now my rough guess around 3% a year (a state and a
>     half).   It's bringing us a lot of prosperity.   Is that good?
>

This is more a political issue that's separate from the complexity issue
(IMHO), so I'll leave it to the side.

>
>      
>>     Yes, but only half way.   One of the fascinating aspects of our societal
>>     response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right
>>     over the past 40 years.  People had the choice and were drawn into the
>>     illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity
>>     of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the
>>     government response, rather than finding a better way to address our
>>     growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some
>>     validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.
>>
>>      
>     We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have
>     at dampening political
>     cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic
>     impressions of what government can do,
>     which is good, but now we have idealistic impressions of what
>     government can't do. Instead
>     it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
>     effective government in the
>     real world, including the recurring motions of balances and
>     corruption of power, .
>     [PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're driving ever
>     harder to perform miracles go turbulent.   No doubt better
>     government would result from combining the insights into common
>     problems from different points of view.   I think it's directly
>     symptomatic of our being pushed over the edge mentally by the
>     collision of growth and earth that we've settled on a government
>     that builds grand fantasies from a single view instead of
>     investing in research and planning.   The business cycles of the
>     past were irritating but they gave us pause and a chance for
>     change.   The fact that now we can go ever faster without
>     interruption has a hidden drawback in that it lets things get much
>     further out of whack before the correction.
>

One of the most stressful things you can do to a machine is stop it and
start it again,
unless it needs repair or particular maintenance.
I would think we'd want less cross-coupling of different parts, and
instead to have
some pieces changing while others are quiescent. Do we all have to take
off on
Sunday for society to function? Or do we all simply need a day or two of
rest every
week or so, and stagger the particular days? Is there an innate problem
with the world
going faster? The earth is spinning some 1000 miles/hour, and yet I
hardly notice it
except when the sun goes down.

>
>     I imagine it would also fall into the "sky continually falling"
>     motif, and without too much
>     stasis or unilateral motion. If that's true, a biparty system
>     tends to drift off into the extremes too
>     often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at
>     balancing and instead of a heavy
>     pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the zone. But
>     then maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
>     Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much
>     faster than if stayed a center
>     course.
>     [PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to observe those systems but,
>     didn't Germany have a parliament and get a little carried away a
>     while back?   I think the core problem is not entirely solved by
>     having an open hearing of diverse points of view.    If social
>     movements develop with a winner-take-all attitude powered by a
>     long term campaign of character assassination for its opposition,
>     no structure will protect.  
>

Re: Germany, I think I was referring to modern Western-like
non-critical-crisis governments, i.e. since 1952 or so. As far as
modeling governments,
I think it has less to do with open expression and more to do with
competing sets of beliefs or even power-bases and how they align, and
how the system
allows them to align.

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[Carlos Gershenson]

> Trusting investors in a free market guided by maximum profit to  
> make all
> the important design decisions for mankind's permanent occupation  
> of the
> earth isn't working right.  There's really no softer way to say it
> that's truthful.  I'm still waiting for truthful observations and  
> useful
> knowledge to become relevant in politics.   Perhaps the old Missouri
> mule solution is more appropriate, since the real world seems to be
> getting too complicated and putting people to sleep.
>

I agree completely.
I really don't think that many countries (especially those depending  
strongly on spoiling the planet for their economy) will do the  
necessary changes to stop global warming until it is "too late". By  
too late I mean when victims will start falling (well, you could  
count Katrina already here...). What I mean, we already see lots of  
effects of global warming, but there's little change in the way we  
spoil the planet. But finally, when our cities are all flooded, the  
people left will adapt... It would be great, as you say, if we could  
come up with mechanisms to change the decisions before it's too late,  
but we humans tend to learn by spoiling. We need to burn our hand to  
learn to keep it away from the fire. I mean, how many wars and  
millions of lifes it took to have the UN. And not that it prevents  
all wars... So maybe after doomsday (tomorrow? it's 06.06.06... the  
day of the beast...), we'll do something about it...

Best regards,

     Carlos Gershenson...
     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/

   ?Tendencies tend to change...?

[David Breecker]

I half agree.  Jared Diamond would say that merely the fact that this
conversation is taking place on a listserve puts us in a different state
than in prior, historical catastrophes, with *potentially* different actions
and outcomes.  See "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

I've been trying to start a non-profit called the Center for Social
Enterprise Technology, to enlist scientists in crafting solutions to urgent
problems.  (Tried to get SFI involved with no success.)  Is there anything
the FRIAM community can do to help avoid a catastrophic outcome?

David

dba | David Breecker Associates, Inc.
www.BreeckerAssociates.com
Abiquiu:     505-685-4891
Santa Fe:    505-690-2335


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carlos Gershenson" <[hidden email]>
To: <sy at synapse9.com>; "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
<Friam at redfish.com>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 1:31 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ** this Wednesday** Lecture May 31 12:30p -
CarlosGershenson: A General Methodology for DesigningSelf-Organizing Systems

>> Trusting investors in a free market guided by maximum profit to
>> make all
>> the important design decisions for mankind's permanent occupation
>> of the
>> earth isn't working right.  There's really no softer way to say it
>> that's truthful.  I'm still waiting for truthful observations and
>> useful
>> knowledge to become relevant in politics.   Perhaps the old Missouri
>> mule solution is more appropriate, since the real world seems to be
>> getting too complicated and putting people to sleep.
>>
>
> I agree completely.
> I really don't think that many countries (especially those depending
> strongly on spoiling the planet for their economy) will do the
> necessary changes to stop global warming until it is "too late". By
> too late I mean when victims will start falling (well, you could
> count Katrina already here...). What I mean, we already see lots of
> effects of global warming, but there's little change in the way we
> spoil the planet. But finally, when our cities are all flooded, the
> people left will adapt... It would be great, as you say, if we could
> come up with mechanisms to change the decisions before it's too late,
> but we humans tend to learn by spoiling. We need to burn our hand to
> learn to keep it away from the fire. I mean, how many wars and
> millions of lifes it took to have the UN. And not that it prevents
> all wars... So maybe after doomsday (tomorrow? it's 06.06.06... the
> day of the beast...), we'll do something about it...
>
> Best regards,
>
>     Carlos Gershenson...
>     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
>
>   ?Tendencies tend to change...?
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Bill

Phil wrote:

There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to improve
efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality movement
is about gains
made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead having
quality as an
up-front and intrinsic effort.
[PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself in lots of
ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return endeavor, like polishing.
You do the easy gains first and then successively smaller gains take
increasing work.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 Major layoffs by large companies these days are often
a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with
additional hiring
of different types of positions).
[PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had for the past
500 years, that putting people out of work by innovation has had an net
effect of putting everyone to work at higher wages.   That stopped in
1970.   Check the charts.



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



The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that change, and
getting more used to
continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a philosophical
outlook antithetical
to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a
barrier to progress.
[PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game.  Only our
images of it are purely a game, however.   For example, the US is
presently transferring the ownership of our productive assets overseas
in exchange for current consumption at an accelerating rate now my rough
guess around 3% a year (a state and a half).   It's bringing us a lot of
prosperity.   Is that good?

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

 

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

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

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

illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity

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

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

growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some

validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.



 

We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have at
dampening political
cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic impressions of
what government can do,
which is good, but now we have idealistic impressions of what government
can't do. Instead
it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
effective government in the
real world, including the recurring motions of balances and corruption
of power, .
[PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're driving ever harder
to perform miracles go turbulent.   No doubt better government would
result from combining the insights into common problems from different
points of view.   I think it's directly symptomatic of our being pushed
over the edge mentally by the collision of growth and earth that we've
settled on a government that builds grand fantasies from a single view
instead of investing in research and planning.   The business cycles of
the past were irritating but they gave us pause and a chance for change.
The fact that now we can go ever faster without interruption has a
hidden drawback in that it lets things get much further out of whack
before the correction.



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



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


I imagine it would also fall into the "sky continually falling" motif,
and without too much
stasis or unilateral motion. If that's true, a biparty system tends to
drift off into the extremes too
often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at
balancing and instead of a heavy
pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the zone. But then
maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much faster than
if stayed a center
course.
[PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to observe those systems but, didn't
Germany have a parliament and get a little carried away a while back?
I think the core problem is not entirely solved by having an open
hearing of diverse points of view.    If social movements develop with a
winner-take-all attitude powered by a long term campaign of character
assassination for its opposition, no structure will protect.  



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

Cheers,
 

Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>    

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Rich,

>
> I'm just now picking up this conversation, so forgive me for coming  
> in late.
>
> This all reminds me of a book I'm sure other people here have read,  
> Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies." His thesis,
> basically,  
> is that societal complexity, however you measure it (diversity of  
> artifacts and technology, education and specialized skill sets,  
> social structures), represents an investment of energy that allows  
> for more intensive exploitation of resources. As this investment  
> increases diminishing marginal returns are unavoidable and the  
> surpluses required to address new problems disappear, making the  
> society susceptible to collapse. He also talks about how
> collapse can  
> be the rational decision on the part of a societies members.
> He gives  
> the example of how Romans living on the frontiers of their empire  
> would invite in hoards of marauding tribes because they were less of  
> a blight on their lives than the Roman tax collector.

I haven't read it yet.  Thanks for the suggestion.   I tend to think
there are several natural causes for sudden system failures and deaths,
and we don't know much about them.   My two favorites are the collapse
of the USSR and the collapse of the NYC crime wave in 1991.  They booth
just seemed to go whoosh.   The system failure I've been talking about
is when stress is pushed to overwhelm the internal response mechanisms
of a system driven to endlessly grow.  The demands on the response
network increase exponentially and it fails, something like the response
to Katrina, but in slow motion is what I'd expect.

>
> In this conceptual model, the only thing that can at least  
> temporarily increase these marginal returns and hold off a society's  
> collapse is the discovery of additional sources of energy.
In fact there are lots of things that can change the course of growth
system events.   That's the problem with the older Limits Of Growth
studies.  They used stocks and flows of measurable commodities, and
there are lots of important immeasurable commodities.

>
> One thing I felt was interesting was his sometimes detached view on  
> whether or not complex societies are good or bad things. He had  
> criticized lots of other work on collapse as being too heavily laden  
> with value judgments to be scientifically credible, so I
> guess he was  
> being extra cautious about his own.
Well, was it probing story telling, just good journalism?  That counts a
lot.  Malcolm Gladwell does pretty well playing with simple ideas and
telling stories about real world systems of different kinds.

> But one thing it did impress upon me, is that humanity has spent the  
> vast majority of its time in very simple, band level societies. As  
> such, we should probably think of complex societies as deviations  
> from this norm, an experiment.
>
>  From this perspective, I think we, as humans, are pretty
> robust, but  
> the complex societies we're so enamored of are extremely fragile.  
> Since we are the very bacteria inhabiting the metaphorical
> Petri dish  
> of this experiment, its hard to take such a detached point of view.

Sure, in a way I agree humans would be better off planted far enough
apart so they couldn't harm anything.  I don't think there's any chance
of our discarding cities though.   This behemoth occupation of the
planet might be another  question perhaps, but I think we like cities.  

What do you think will be the end of our explosively accelerating
economic expansion, figuring out a way to let it ease off that's healthy
and sustainable, or letting it go to systemic collapse?

Phil

> Rich
>
> BTW,
>
> Since we currently put more energy into agriculture than we get out,  
> I wonder if agricultural energy crops and byproducts can really save  
> us. Does anyone out there have an opinion?
>
>
>
> On Jun 4, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Carlos Gershenson wrote:
>
> >> I think that assumes that cause and effect for any one system is
> >> statistical across all systems.  I don't believe that to
> be the case.
> >> Given a cellular system like an economy, where you can't really
> >> transcend the basic cells, the humans with all our gifts and
> >> failings,
> >> there seem likely to be response time failure thresholds where ever
> >> bigger repercussions get ever slower and less reliable corrections,
> >> and
> >> stabilizing the rapidly changing internal and environmental
> >> relationships fails.
> >
> > I think that it is common to think that human society is fragile.
> > Well, the fact that we're still around shows that we aren't. Last
> > week, I learned about two competing "doomsday theories" from LANL
> > people: bird flu, and peak oil. They both assume that small
> > catastrophes trigger chaos. But even if nuclear war breaks
> out, that
> > wouldn't erase mankind from the face of the earth. It would
> suck, for
> > sure, and all these scenarios make profitable blockbusters, but we
> > humans are a persistant little vermin... In any of these
> cases society
> > would change, for sure, but precisely that is part of the
> adaptation.
> > It wouldn't collapse. It hasn't collapsed, and there have
> been plenty
> > of wars, famines, plagues, and all other things mentioned in the
> > Apocalypse... and we're still around. So I find it extremely
> > unprobable that something would wipe us out. I am not
> suggesting that
> > mankind will be forever on Earth, but that evolving into something
> > else seems to me more probable than extinction by catastrophe.
> >
> >> Asteroids might be a problem, and failures of imagination
> might be of
> >> seeming equally stubborn nature.  I mean, if we've gone
> and built an
> >> entire civilization, business plan and government
> financing structure
> >> that relies on continual exponential increases in the
> complexity of
> >> the system,... and that turns out to be really dangerous,
> it's quite
> >> a major
> >> failure of imagination it seems to me.
> >
> > If the complexity growth would fade away, I don't see civilization
> > collapsing, so I don't understand why do you say that we rely on
> > increasing complexity, nor why this might be dangerous.
> >
> >> I definitely think we should
> >> make government competent by design.   There are lots of do's and
> >> don'ts
> >> regarding performance measures, but if departments
> developed concepts
> >> of productivity beyond just bean counter efficiency,
> having internal
> >> groups
> >> competing would be highly very productive.
> >
> > Indeed, there are many things to be improved. Some people
> might think
> > that there is no pressure for improving services. That is the case
> > when there is no political choice (like in dictatorships or pseudo-
> > democracies). But if there are competing political forces,
> they will
> > try to improve government to gain more votes. So, slowly (maybe too
> > slowly), but surely, we're getting there...
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> >      Carlos Gershenson...
> >      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
> >      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
> >      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
> >
> >    "There is no game in which you cannot cheat"
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures,
> > archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:

>
>     If you extend
>     the refinement to across-the-board: getting the crops to market
>     (Kenyan roses through Amsterdam to the
>     US and Britain), improved crop survivability through fertilizer
>     and genetic modification, etc.,
>     better handling of the company's finances through other methods,
>     better user service
>     through automated info & purchases via the Internet, etc., you get
>     something completely
>     opposite of "smaller gains taking increasing work". Now, at some
>     point maybe that
>     efficiency process hits a wall, but 10 years ago that wall would
>     have been predicted
>     as much closer.
>     [PH] Well, yes, that's related to my mention that historically it
>     has always appeared that the new system taking over the old one
>     was on shaky foundations.   I fully accept that there are deep
>     perceptual problems in judging where the limits to explosive
>     change actually are.   I'm just quite convinced from what I think
>     is an set of principles that completely avoid the perceptual
>     problems, that pushing a growth system as a whole to a point of
>     failure is highly dangerous.  
>
>     [PH] Can you say that pushing exponential growth to failure is
>     a benign means of approaching our limits on earth?
>
>     [PH] As I understand it there is still considerable room for
>     increases in raw computational power, even without the radical
>     increases some talk about conceptually.    That may facilitate a
>     greater ability to respond the the exploding side effects of
>     growth, or just help explode the side effects leaving everyone in
>     the dark as to how to respond.    It really depends on our intent.
>
>     [PH] Think about what limits the growth of living things.   An
>     animal's organs don't stop growing because they grow till the
>     animal starves or can't walk, or because the skin gets so tight it
>     prevents animals from eating.   It's not from outside causes.
>      Living systems very largely stop their growth at some internal
>     point of completing the design, when they do in fact switch from
>     explosive growth to maturation and refinement.   It's that 2nd
>     step after the 1st that our global system is built to be unable to
>     take.   The unified world master plan is to encourage investors to
>     build whatever they think maximizes their profits, compounding
>     returns to build their wealth exponentially.   It's that magical
>     trick for creating revolutionary change, the compounding of
>     returns, that I think is truly dangerous to push to it's natural
>     failure limit.
>
>     [PH] yes, we can see long chains of positive sign exponential
>     increases in productivity from emergent new systems.   It's been
>     going on for 5-600 years  ( with an accumulative productivity
>     increase on the order of 1 billion!! ) and we're kind of used
>     to it.   Still, I think I can build a case of physical necessity
>     as strong as the ones for entropy or conservation of energy that
>     it's a dead end into an impenitrable wall of complexity if we
>     pursue it to failure.
>
>     [PH] all absolutely correct, but we still can't find peace as the
>     sorcerer's apprentice.   We've got to know when to cool it.
>

There are different definitions of "failure". You seem to take it that
we're trying to
grow until we explode. Many would think of growing until it stops pleasing.
I like a big car but I hate finding parking. I like a big house but I
hate cleaning.
I see us as growing, refining, culling. I don't see problems on the
horizon as
"failure" - I see them as more issues to deal with in normal
progression. Nuclear
war between governments is less a problem, global warming is more of one.
But if we run out of fossil fuels, global warming's not a problem. In
any case,
possibly half the world's population understands that fuel supply and global
warming are important issues, which should be enough to get something useful
happening.

Other than that, I'm not convinced fast growth is a problem. I'm waiting for
digital paper to make my books more portable (I'm halfway there, half my
books are digital, but my laptop's too bulky). I'm looking forward to the
next more usable wave of search engines, Web 2.0 features, mobile
devices and electronics. Cheaper, better color printing - that would be
good.
Banking is solved, I have ATM's and on-line banking. Secure, honest digital
voting with a paper trail - that will help. Faster, more modern trains would
help (mag-lev in every pot?). Other than that, needs are basic, and little
more rushed than those of 100 years ago. When I want to walk or go
to the country, I go. When I want a city scene, I stay here.

>>          Major layoffs by large companies these days are often
>>         a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand
>>         with additional hiring
>>         of different types of positions).
>>         [PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had
>>         for the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by
>>         innovation has had an net effect of putting everyone to work
>>         at higher wages.   That stopped in 1970.   Check the charts.
>>
>     I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as
>     offshoring continues.
>     I won't say it's all roses, but in general, it's producing wealth
>     and more better-paying
>     jobs. We're also putting the rest of the world to work at better
>     wages. Maybe we'd
>     rather be sending them charity checks, but this version is more
>     sustainable, and they
>     get to grow their own economies as well. But it's not evenly spread.
>     [PH] It's the average wages I was thinking of.   Women's wages,
>     though still lower than men's, have a mildly positive exponential
>     shape over the past 35 years, but real men's wages are virtually
>     flat.   Of course an aggregate figure hides many stories, but the
>     lofty theory that making investors rich by putting people out of
>     work actually makes everyone richer was only true before 1970.  
>     We've continued to pour money into the hands of investors for them
>     to fix the problem, ignoring that they seem not to be investing in
>     that way anymore...
>

So are men subsidizing women in the workplace? Cool. Are more women
choosing to stay home
in a return to 1960's norms? Are we prospering not through pay but
through more lifestyle choices,
better access to health care, more gadgets and information? I remember
having about 1-2 pairs of
shoes at a time in a middle class family. Now my kids have 8 or 9,
though it's affordable (okay,
a lot come from second hand shops, but that's wealth as well). My, kids
now have skateboards, snowboards,
ice skates, roller blades, bikes. Every house has 2-3 TVs, a hundred
channels, walkmans with large
music collections, DVD & VHS players, computer games, etc. There are
even large health food
supermarkets now, much more affordable than the small vitamin-focused
shops of 20 years ago.
Ain't progress grand? Wages may be flat, real purchasing power isn't. A
2006 van blows away a
1970 van in so many ways. And while we may not appreciate it, the work
that we do in 2006 is
a lot less sweaty.

Part of our wealth went into security. I'm here in Prague, there's no
worry about Russian troops
from the east, and there's little need to worry about a general
all-encompassing conflict.
Any terrorist attack is pretty well assured to be small potatoes in the
scheme of things - painful
for those affected, but much less than an Indian Ocean tsunami in both
intensity and duration.
A Russian invasion or similar wouldn't have been.

>>         The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that
>>         change, and getting more used to
>>         continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a
>>         philosophical outlook antithetical
>>         to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability
>>         becomes a barrier to progress.
>>         [PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game.
>>         Only our images of it are purely a game, however.   For
>>         example, the US is presently transferring the ownership of
>>         our productive assets overseas in exchange for current
>>         consumption at an accelerating rate now my rough guess around
>>         3% a year (a state and a half).   It's bringing us a lot of
>>         prosperity.   Is that good?
>>
>     This is more a political issue that's separate from the complexity
>     issue (IMHO), so I'll leave it to the side.
>     [PH] I don't think the trade deficit is that political.   No one
>     is rooting for it, for sure, and no one seems to know what to
>     really say about it either except it is very strange to have
>     something so fundamental go so suddenly lopsided.   It doesn't
>     seem like a fluctuation that'll flip back the other way, but
>     something that reverses as a consequence of major events.   It's
>     just odd that we're balancing the books by giving away assets and
>     not doing much to stop it.
>

I meant that I don't see it as having to do with complexity theory or
technology growth, that it has more to do with politics in DC,
and I don't really want to talk politics of that sort.

>
>>          
>>
>     One of the most stressful things you can do to a machine is stop
>     it and start it again,
>     unless it needs repair or particular maintenance.
>     [PH] Well, an explosively expanding machine being run by rather
>     short sighted humans may be a special case.    Our machine
>     is essentially blind and groping along.   At the moment were about
>     50 years behind in responding to global warming.   It's not
>     because the problem wasn't understandable from a 20's 30's 40's
>     50's or 60's point of view, but because we just were not thinking
>     that we might need to look anywhere near the horizon of our
>     impacts.  That concept was surely well within the sophistication
>     of business planners even well before that.   We just didn't do it.
>      
>     [PH] The marvelous thing to me about natural systems is their
>     flexibility and resilience and how they work so smoothly even
>     while networking vast collections of disconnected parts.   They
>     mostly work with an 'any ol time' delivery schedule and use it
>     with amazing efficiency where every last thing gets used.   We
>     don't know how to do that yet, but the potential is there.    Our
>     approach tends to be to focus on a single output and pull out all
>     the stops, use it up and build something else.   I guess I'm
>     making both a kind of aesthetic value judgment and just a simple
>     practical observation.   If you're not in a hurry, everything's
>     relaxed, but most humans are always in a big hurry,...   How that
>     tendency translates into our having built a life support system
>     designed to change ever faster until we make enough mistakes to
>     stop it is very concretely traceable.   It could, if anyone
>     wanted, be redesigned with some free market complex systems design
>     to work in new ways that would be both more creative and actually
>     sustainable.  
>
>     We get back to Al Gore's question.   We've got the knowledge and a
>     clear mission with otherwise unacceptable consequences.   Why does
>     that not provide us with the information we need?   I think it's
>     partly that no one is yet saying we should also correct the
>     underlying.   Investing for sustainability is not an investment
>     objective.
>

First, Al's focused on 1 problem - good for him, but...
1) If you're in the Congo, you've got more pressing problems than global
warming - you have
a war that's killed more than 3 million people in the last 6 years,
rapes every day, literally backbreaking
work, extreme poverty, etc. Global warming also might help most of
Africa's climate if it brings more
rain, which it seems to be doing. And you might have little to change to
effect Global Warming.
2) If you're in Europe, Global Warming seems to be bringing more rain
and more cold. Kind of odd,
but seems to be not the most beneficial change for the economy (as well
as people's comfort, including mine).
But if you use mostly public transportation and recycle and pay
$6/gallon of gas, what else are you supposed to do?
3) If you're in Indonesia, even though rising waters would be a big
problem, earthquakes and tsunamis
are more pressing, as well as economic development.
4) If you're in China, you're spewing out gasses but you've got a mostly
backwards undereducated poor
population to deal with. Cut back on growth and you might easily get
revolution, and not necessarily
a pro-democracy everybody-happy-now one that leaves people more
prosperous. And you already
cut back on number of children.

I'm also not sure why you place this at the investor's feet. That's only
one part of the cycle.
Who's the buyer? How about "sustainable buying"? If your liver were
failing, you'd stop buying alcohol.
A free market is not the only "institution". John Dunning notes that
it's expensive to maintain a proper
free market, and that there are structural and endemic problems in
markets to deal with. Structural
problems should be solved if possible, whereas endemic ones should be
fixed only if the costs of
fixing are less than the cost of the problem. An externality like global
warming is an endemic problem,
but the issue with fixing it is that you incur costs in other areas. The
solution is non-obvious and painful
even if the problem is pressing. Sometimes the government should step
in, sometimes not.

What are the market costs and market gains of Sarbanes-Oxley? What are
the costs vs. gains on
the new hazardous substance law (RHoS) that's now in place in the EU?
Was that the right thing to
do for an economy that's been plagued with slow growth? How many jobs
will be lost, how many
products will be denied, how will that decrease competitiveness and
lifestyle - these are the real questions
that have to be answered in formulating policy.


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[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:

>
> Bill
>
>     Phil wrote:
>>
>>         There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to
>>         improve efficiency,
>>         workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
>>         movement is about gains
>>         made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and
>>         instead having quality as an
>>         up-front and intrinsic effort.
>>         [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself
>>         in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return
>>         endeavor, like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and
>>         then successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>>
>     Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality.
>     In some ways it sounds like
>     the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma
>     crowd -
>     that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area
>     (technical only, say),
>     while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might
>     have a spruced
>     up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs
>     a better sales force.
>     Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business
>     processes with
>     enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to
>     sales support in
>     the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
>     [PH] Well our scenarios are different.   You seem to be describing
>     a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
>     by creating emergent levels of reorganization.   I was assuming
>     that the difference between growth (positive exponent increase)
>     and refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem
>     to be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which
>     we're talking about.   My description was meant for the later.
>

I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many
processes.
China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or refine, target
new markets, find new
uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and factories onto something else?
I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but
both types
are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one flies off the
shelf and
one stays.  I can't be sure that refinement means negative exponent increase
unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are
negative exponent
increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead to exponential
growth with
little to no extra effort.

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[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:

>
> Bill
>
>     Phil wrote:
>>
>>         There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to
>>         improve efficiency,
>>         workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
>>         movement is about gains
>>         made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and
>>         instead having quality as an
>>         up-front and intrinsic effort.
>>         [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself
>>         in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return
>>         endeavor, like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and
>>         then successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>>
>     Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality.
>     In some ways it sounds like
>     the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma
>     crowd -
>     that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area
>     (technical only, say),
>     while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might
>     have a spruced
>     up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs
>     a better sales force.
>     Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business
>     processes with
>     enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to
>     sales support in
>     the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
>     [PH] Well our scenarios are different.   You seem to be describing
>     a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
>     by creating emergent levels of reorganization.   I was assuming
>     that the difference between growth (positive exponent increase)
>     and refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem
>     to be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which
>     we're talking about.   My description was meant for the later.
>

I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many
processes.
China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or refine, target
new markets, find new
uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and factories onto something else?
I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but
both types
are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one flies off the
shelf and
one stays.  I can't be sure that refinement means negative exponent increase
unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are
negative exponent
increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead to exponential
growth with
little to no extra effort.

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[Carlos Gershenson]

I forgot from whom I heard the following argument:
The problem with understanding economics is that commodities are not  
a conserved quantity (such as energy), but it can always increase...  
Thus, it would be difficult to reach a point where we "ran out" of  
money, simply because the market generates new niches and  
opportunities that generate more money...

Best regards,

     Carlos Gershenson...
     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/

   ?Tendencies tend to change...?


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[Bill Eldridge]

There are several issues particularly relevant when evaluating the "new
economy".
You can run out of oil or titanium, and you can run out of new ideas,
but they mean slightly different things.
People sometimes equate offshoring manufacturing with offshoring IT, but
you can create a useful, sellable
program in a coffee shop, while it's hard to produce a car without a
factory.
It's difficult to increase production of steel, but I can sell the same
version of Excel a billion times once it's produced once.
But software inherently creates obsolescence if done right - my car will
fall apart, but a 1995 version of Excel will
pretty much do everything I've ever needed a spreadsheet to do, and may
last me the rest of my life.
But software is not necessarily interchangeable. I can buy 10 pieces of
software and still have room for #11 if it does
something different, but my ability to accomodate manufactured goods is
much less.

And Financial Services is even more bizarre than the software field.

Carlos Gershenson wrote:

> I forgot from whom I heard the following argument:
> The problem with understanding economics is that commodities are not a
> conserved quantity (such as energy), but it can always increase...
> Thus, it would be difficult to reach a point where we "ran out" of
> money, simply because the market generates new niches and
> opportunities that generate more money...
>
> Best regards,
>
>     Carlos Gershenson...
>     Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>     Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>     http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ 
> <http://homepages.vub.ac.be/%7Ecgershen/>
>
>   ?Tendencies tend to change...?
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

I matters, but it's just an opening...  I do hope the question of
whether explosive change is naturally unstable will be useful, of
course.   I actually got the idea from noticing that almost anything of
interest in the world seems to begin with it.    I'm really here to
trade notes though.    
 
I use the normal sequence of growth phases (????.?? ? `?.????) as a
framework for organizing observations of complex systems, rather than
theories.   It just seems to work for me.  I've read a little about
computer worlds with evolving cellular automata, but I have a hard time
understanding it.   I read Lewin's 'Complexity' and he made it seem like
there were global principles behind it somehow that the researchers he
talked to didn't mention or something, but demonstrated with their
experiments they had some good control of.    I'm fascinated that people
with strong exposure to natural systems have been able to invent virtual
worlds that don't appear to involve any physical things of any kind, but
apparently display natural system behaviors.  
 
I guess my first question is why do you think it works?   Do you know if
emergence in a computer involves growth?
 
 

Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>    
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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Sorry I missed a couple days... someone installed (me) an overactive
spam filter..
 
Responding to Bill .............From 6/4/06 #1
 
>     [PH] all absolutely correct, but we still can't find peace as the
>     sorcerer's apprentice.   We've got to know when to cool it.
>
There are different definitions of "failure". You seem to take it that
we're trying to  grow until we explode.
[PH] Not that we're trying to, but that we're pushing growth with a real
contempt for the hazards, which amounts much the same thing.  There's a
global consensus growth policy, a master plan to change our lives and
the Earth ever more rapidly, making ever bigger decisions ever faster,
what they call "steady state".   Assuming we succeed in the plan
otherwise, the limit of growth is pushing the limits of decision making
until we make enough mistakes for it to stop.   It's a direct formula
for disaster by unexpected causes, like the surprise that we're facing
in global warming.

Many would think of growing until it stops pleasing.
I like a big car but I hate finding parking. I like a big house but I
hate cleaning.I see us as growing, refining, culling. I don't see
problems on the
horizon as"failure" - I see them as more issues to deal with in normal
progression. Nuclearwar between governments is less a problem, global
warming is more of one.
But if we run out of fossil fuels, global warming's not a problem. In
any case, possibly half the world's population understands that fuel
supply and global
warming are important issues, which should be enough to get something
useful
happening.
[PH] Sure, changing your mind about things as you go along is not
necessarily any kind of *failure*.   I'm more meaning 'failure' in the
traditional sense of things you're trying to hold together, falling
apart despite your best sincere efforts.   If you're a teacher and your
kids ask questions one at a time it's OK because you can answer them one
at a time.  If their rate of asking questions increases exponentially
you'll have a hard time saying when the class went out of control or
way, even though the actual point was where you failed to be able to
respond to so many questions in rapid succession.    Try it if you don't
believe me.

Other than that, I'm not convinced fast growth is a problem. I'm waiting
for
digital paper to make my books more portable (I'm halfway there, half my
books are digital, but my laptop's too bulky). I'm looking forward to
the
next more usable wave of search engines, Web 2.0 features, mobile
devices and electronics. Cheaper, better color printing - that would be
good.  Banking is solved, I have ATM's and on-line banking. Secure,
honest digital
voting with a paper trail - that will help. Faster, more modern trains
would
help (mag-lev in every pot?). Other than that, needs are basic, and
little
more rushed than those of 100 years ago. When I want to walk or go
to the country, I go. When I want a city scene, I stay here.
[PH] It's not a problem for the things we're paying attention to.
Those are what it is responding to.     The problem is with the things
we're not attending to, from which we're distracted or took for granted
but were wrong, or just didn't get the message, or that our limited
world view prevents us from considering...
 
>>         [PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had
>>         for the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by
>> innovation has had an net effect of putting everyone to work
>>         at higher wages.   That stopped in 1970.   Check the charts.
>>
>     I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as
>     offshoring continues.

>     [PH] It's the average wages I was thinking of.   Women's wages,
>     though still lower than men's, have a mildly positive exponential
>     shape over the past 35 years, but real men's wages are virtually
>     flat.   Of course an aggregate figure hides many stories, but ....

So are men subsidizing women in the workplace? Cool. Are more women
choosing to stay home in a return to 1960's norms? Are we prospering not
through pay but
through more lifestyle choices, better access to health care, more
gadgets and information? I remember
having about 1-2 pairs of shoes at a time in a middle class family. Now
my kids have 8 or 9,
though it's affordable (okay,a lot come from second hand shops, but
that's wealth as well).
 
Part of our wealth went into security. I'm here in Prague, there's no
worry about Russian troopsfrom the east, and there's little need to
worry about a general
all-encompassing conflict.Any terrorist attack is pretty well assured to
be small potatoes in the
scheme of things - painfulfor those affected, but much less than an
Indian Ocean tsunami in both
intensity and duration.A Russian invasion or similar wouldn't have been.
[PH]  What's hardest to keep straight in social evolution is the
dynamics.   Mostly the images we call up don't provide reliable
indicators of change.  They're mostly one shot pictures of an evolving
system taken from shifting perspectives.    I do agree with many of your
separate observations, though I wouldn't connect them the same way.
For one I don't think they eliminate the curious phenomena of the
splitting of the world in two with a shrinking middle and expanding
upper and lower.   Among other things that means the influence of money
in decision making is continuing to grow exponentially and the influence
of people is not.   That's only one of several ways in which decision
making (the critical homeostatic mechanism) appears to be failing as an
unexpected side effects of growth.  
 
...
>      It's just odd that we're balancing the books by giving away
assets and
>     not doing much to stop it.
>
I meant that I don't see it as having to do with complexity theory or
technology growth, that it has more to do with politics in DC,
and I don't really want to talk politics of that sort.
[PH]  That's fine, I just note the trade deficit as an absolutely huge
sudden structural change that no one seems able to say or do anything
about.   We don't seem to have any good idea of what it represents, and
are silent in response, a system phenomenon that I think is of
considerable significance.  
 
........ but most humans are always in a big hurry,...   How that

>     tendency translates into our having built a life support system
>     designed to change ever faster until we make enough mistakes to
>     stop it is very concretely traceable.   It could, if anyone
>     wanted, be redesigned with some free market complex systems design
>     to work in new ways that would be both more creative and actually
>     sustainable.  
>
>     We get back to Al Gore's question.   We've got the knowledge and a
>     clear mission with otherwise unacceptable consequences.   Why does
>     that not provide us with the information we need?   I think it's
>     partly that no one is yet saying we should also correct the
>     underlying.   Investing for sustainability is not an investment
>     objective.

First, Al's focused on 1 problem - good for him,  but...
[PH] but not just any problem.   It's a special problem of economic
development.   The investment decisions of the last 100 years have led
us to a showdown where we have to try to use government led by
scientists to make major changes in our life support system.   Our old
design principle, every man for himself, failed to build a sustainable
structure.  I don't think we'll find the door unless we face that wall.
It's only one of a torrent of similar failures on the path of making
ever bigger changes to the earth ever faster, because with that plan
there's physically no way we can see the consequences of what we're
doing.   It's not that *trying* to look at the consequences isn't good,
It's just that you can be certain, following our practice of multiplying
change, that such attempts will fail to reveal what the real
consequences are.
 
1) If you're in the Congo, you've got more pressing problems than global

warming - you havea war that's killed more than 3 million people in the
last 6 years,
rapes every day, literally backbreakingwork, extreme poverty, etc.
Global warming also might help most of
Africa's climate if it brings more  rain, which it seems to be doing.
And you might have little to change to
effect Global Warming.
[PH] The projections seem to say drought I think, but whatever, I think
teaching them competence in managing their own affairs is tricky
business, more likely to succeed by our demonstrating competence in our
own.

2) If you're in Europe, Global Warming seems to be bringing more rain
and more cold. Kind of odd,but seems to be not the most beneficial
change for the economy (as well
as people's comfort, including mine).   But if you use mostly public
transportation and recycle and pay
$6/gallon of gas, what else are you supposed to do?
[PH] The Gulf Stream slowed dramatically last year and stopped
delivering as much equatorial heat to Europe.   It's a predicted effect
of global warming in some scenarios, but I haven't heard anyone saying
that what's now happening follows any prediction.   I heard an
interesting comment from fishermen in the north sea that the huge
funnels of cold water heading for the deep they used to see don't seem
to be there, which would correspond directly to the cold water over warm
water cause of the European climate shift now being observed.   Some
things do go beyond the point of no return you know.   Once you're
beyond the point of no return, there's no point anymore.

3) If you're in Indonesia, even though rising waters would be a big
problem, earthquakes and tsunamis are more pressing, as well as economic
development.
[PH] I think they may be concerned with even more provincial matters
than those, and that failing to think globally, about how the whole
system fits together is just as big a mistake no matter how compelling
your narrow interests may be.

4) If you're in China, you're spewing out gasses but you've got a mostly

backwards undereducated poor  population to deal with. Cut back on
growth and you might easily get
revolution, and not necessarily   a pro-democracy everybody-happy-now
one that leaves people more
prosperous. And you already  cut back on number of children.
[PH] Just turning the steering wheel to your vehicle around one corner
doesn't mean you won't immediately run into another corner, no, of
course not.   Just because that might happen is still not a good reason
to give up and just run off the road.   My general point is that when
you accelerate change it brings about ever sharper corners to navigate.

I'm also not sure why you place this at the investor's feet. That's only

one part of the cycle.  Who's the buyer? How about "sustainable buying"?
If your liver were
failing, you'd stop buying alcohol.   A free market is not the only
"institution". John Dunning notes that
it's expensive to maintain a properfree market, and that there are
structural and endemic problems in
markets to deal with. Structuralproblems should be solved if possible,
whereas endemic ones should be
fixed only if the costs offixing are less than the cost of the problem.
An externality like global
warming is an endemic problem,but the issue with fixing it is that you
incur costs in other areas. The
solution is non-obvious and painfuleven if the problem is pressing.
Sometimes the government should step
in, sometimes not.
[PH] Yea, and really smart money is on the real sustainable future.
Without knowing it the consensus of investors for a hundred years was to
build an unsustainable future.  The really really curious part is that
one of the unsustainable practices is building wealth by reinvesting
earnings to make change and profit grow exponentially.   As long as we
do that we'll surely build things for which we fail to understand the
consequences.   We're stuck.
 
What are the market costs and market gains of Sarbanes-Oxley? What are
the costs vs. gains on  the new hazardous substance law (RHoS) that's
now in place in the EU?
Was that the right thing todo for an economy that's been plagued with
slow growth? How many jobs
will be lost, how manyproducts will be denied, how will that decrease
competitiveness and
lifestyle - these are the real questionsthat have to be answered in
formulating policy.
[PH]  And the complexities of continually accelerating development are
throwing issues at governments and their consultants that were never
dreamed of before and for which they have no track record of being able
to respond to.
 
.............Responding to Bill  From 6/4/06 #2
>>>         There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying
to
>>>         improve efficiency, workflow, best practices, processes,
etc. Part of the quality
>>>         movement is about gains made in eliminating waste and
eliminating reviews, and
>>>         instead having quality as an up-front and intrinsic effort.
>>>         [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in
itself
>>>         in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return
>>>         endeavor, like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and
>>>         then successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>>>
>>     Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality.
>>     In some ways it sounds like  the complaints about Total Quality
Management from the Six Sigma
>>     crowd - that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized
area
>>     (technical only, say), while ignoring the organizational needs as
a whole. So you might
>>     have a spruced up assembly line that runs really well but the
organization needs
>>     a better sales force. Combine this with an approach that gets IT
focused on business
>>     processes with enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better
mobile access to
>     sales support in
>>     the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
>>     [PH] Well our scenarios are different.   You seem to be
describing
>>     a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
>>     by creating emergent levels of reorganization.   I was assuming
>>     that the difference between growth (positive exponent increase)
>>     and refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you
seem
>>     to be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which
>>     we're talking about.   My description was meant for the later.
>>
>I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many
>processes. China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or
refine, target
>new markets, find new uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and
factories onto something else?
>I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but

>both types are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one
flies off the
>shelf and one stays.  I can't be sure that refinement means negative
exponent increase
>unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are
>negative exponent increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead
to exponential
>growth with little to no extra effort.
[PH] yes, essentially defining it differently.  My use of the term is to
refer to processes leading to the perfection on one emergent form rather
than to the creative leap-froging from one emergent form to another.
The latter is what I gather your sense to be.   My usage is tied to a
scientific method.   I'm using the terms to help refer to the general
phase sequence of rapid evolution that any natural system displays,
positive exponent increase (growth), negative exponent increase
(refinement), positive exponent decrease (collapse), negative exponent
decrease (decay).   Mostly my attaching a special scientific meaning to
these common English terms helps, but with your usage my use sounds
confused.    
 
Traditional business development used to proceed from start-up to
cash-cow by growth and then refinement.   More modern practice is to use
the cash-cow phase as a seed bed for new start-up's, like you're
suggesting.   When you look at almost any consistent measure for any
business over time you see the organizational development phases and can
recognize the dynamics associated with the structural progressions
throughout its history.   The same is true for constituent and
encompassing systems.  
 
Growth gives birth to things.   That's its job.   Whatever it gives
birth to, growth always gives up its own structure in doing so.   That's
an absolute (assuming a relatively agreeable understanding of the terms
of course...).
 
Regards,
 
Phil
 
 
 
 


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