[HN Gopher] Complex systems collapse faster
___________________________________________________________________
Complex systems collapse faster
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-06-05 04:08 UTC (18 hours ago)
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| eternalban wrote:
| The human body is a very complex system. It's an incredibly
| complex system with 30 trillion moving parts (cells). And it
| doesn't stop there. Layer upon layer of abstraction culminating
| in organs, sub-systems (cardio, nervous, GI, ..), and finally a
| thinking hairy biped. It operates in a hostile environment
| subject to ceaseless assault by germs, viruses, and other
| organisms. Complexity clearly can not be the issue, otherwise
| evolution would favor simpler organism, but we're the ones
| lording it over simpler systems.
|
| I think our design thinking is lagging. We need to work on that
| front.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Simple systems are also easier to dismantle, which seems to hint
| that they are more fragile.
|
| If a tertiary goal is to have job security, designing a more
| complex system could be in your favor.
| TedShiller wrote:
| The headline implies a conclusion which is not necessarily true.
| There are many complex systems that don't collapse faster than
| many simple systems.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Complex systems can form feedback loops under just the right set
| of conditions.
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Seems like any highly complex system can have elements that are
| chaotic- in the sense that they are very subject to small changes
| that can lead to a threshold. You may be moving a number of
| levers and all is going well. Then you make a change or fail to
| adapt to a change that in the past was not of consequence - but
| now it is. Only in this case you quickly find yourself at a
| threshold you did not expect and no amount of effort can keep you
| from it. If you had full understood the situation you could have
| easily prevented the unraveling but you did not have compete
| knowledge due to the complexity.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| Mildly related, I am currently reading "Thinking in Systems" and
| came upon the idea of positive reinforcing feedback loop.
|
| I immediately have 2 questions:
|
| - how to make a positive feedback loop for self - can positive
| feedback loop be sustained indefinitely
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| The observations about complex systems declining faster than they
| grow was interesting. The rest of the post kind of boils down to
| "complex systems fail because they're complex".
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Collapse is a matter of time scales. We know pretty well when our
| star stops functioning and everyone on earth dies.
|
| Are we not then therefore in a very slightly downward slope
| towards absolute annihilation and collapse?
| blesimetar wrote:
| "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone
| drops to zero."
| civilized wrote:
| > Perhaps the first person who reasoned in scientific terms about
| how to avoid collapses was the American scientist Jay Forrester
| (1918-2016). He was one of the main developers of the field known
| today as "system science." To him we owe the idea that when
| people try to avoid collapse, they usually take actions that
| worsen the situation. Forrester described this tendency as
| "pulling the levers in the wrong direction."
|
| This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an
| observational artifact. A complex social system that has
| developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has
| the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior
| resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So
| whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system,
| you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and
| attribute its decline to not doing those things.
|
| Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so
| this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.
| kens wrote:
| Jay Forrester may be better known here as an inventor of
| magnetic core memory and creator of the groundbreaking MIT
| Whirlwind computer (1951).
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| That appears to be the point of the comparison, no? If you are
| operating a machine so complex and unpredictable you don't
| truly know how it works (a Roman Empire, in this case), you'll
| never know which way to pull the lever until you have already
| done so.
| civilized wrote:
| Just speculation, but I think complexity provides decisive
| advantages, at least initially, and that's why we see complex
| societies dominate. Human groups that can avert catastrophe
| by adding complexity will do so, and those who do not may be
| unknown to history.
|
| If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably
| wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic
| complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Also short term beneficial choices may be long term bad
| choices.
|
| The industrial revolution was great for humanity for well
| over a century. The standard of living in industrial
| countries advanced farther and quicker than ever before.
| But that same industrial activity had long term effects
| that we (as a society) are only just starting to accept and
| are still in disagreement about how to handle.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think it's even simpler:
|
| We have a cognitive bias that undervalues "negative design"
| -- removing things from a design -- and so our social
| structures ratchet towards more complexity until they
| break.
|
| We encounter that in software or mechanical design as well.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Can you suggest any reading about this?
|
| This is a fascinating concept and I'd like to learn more.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This. But I'd also suggest couching it in different
| psychological terms.
|
| We have a "cognitive bias" (fear) against relinquishing
| control. Therefore our social structures ratchet towards
| more bureaucracy and rigidity until they snap. A skidding
| car, careening this way and that, needs the driver to
| stop over-steering. Alternately pulling the wheel the
| wrong way in a desperate frenzy to take control is the
| problem.
|
| Many things just work out when you take your hands off
| the levers. But we also have a political and commercial
| class who are way too proud to do so. That would seem to
| invalidate their "scientific management" ideology [1].
| The Wizard of Oz would be exposed as a fraud.
|
| I think what's going on in the digital realm shows we've
| already entered that phase of overcompensation, because
| so many technologies simply go against common-sense
| survival instinct, and we seem stuck in cycles of
| solutionism, adding ever more layers of sticking plasters
| to fix the stuff we broke last week. We know we are
| building dangerously brittle and irresilient systems such
| as a "cashless society". It is this fetish for control
| that contains the seeds of breakdown.
|
| [1] pretty much the thesis of Adam Curtis's "All Watched
| Over...", "The Trap" and "Hypernormalisation"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
| m0llusk wrote:
| Geoffrey West has some really good work on this. What happens
| most of the time is that new alternative technologies and ways
| come in and change the whole context around. That is, the old
| civilization really does collapse in a sense but a new and
| different one takes its place. A good recent example of this is
| the "green revolution" which for better or worse created a burst
| of productivity in agriculture that has so far sustained ongoing
| population growth that previous agricultural traditions could not
| have supported.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The Santa Fe Institute (of which Geoffrey is a member) is
| explicitly dedicated to complex systems research. They tend to
| take some theoretical stances certain fields might consider
| controversial, but there's a lot of smart people there
| nonetheless. I'd also recommend Marten Scheffer's work on the
| stability of complex systems as particularly relevant to this
| thread.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Netflix became popular around 2004-2005, but it took another 5
| years after that for blockbuster to fail, and it was sudden.
|
| A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace
| was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the
| creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular,
| but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless.
|
| A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the
| sudden decline of Research and Motion.
|
| In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.
| fnord77 wrote:
| it doesn't have to be that long .... VisiCalc, the first
| "killer app" collapsed about a year after Lotus 1-2-3 was
| released.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| At least in the case of Blockbuster, I'd say the lag can be
| accounted for by the fact Netflix got into streaming in 2007.
| Prior to that Netflix started eating Blockbuster's lunch, but
| the service really took off once they managed to mainstream
| streaming. This was helped, in no small part, by the rapid rise
| in broadband penetration of that same time period.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...
| animalgonzales wrote:
| > A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook
|
| It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The key thing is the same as in the coronavirus pandemic, it's
| exponential growth - think of Facebook as the virus, Myspace as
| the immune system and word-of-mouth being the infection way.
|
| The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current
| fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established
| entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to
| adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take
| over.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| a lot of times the trigger is usually some kind of massive
| payment that needs to be made, but then all of a sudden
| whatever was enabling these payments to happen before is no
| longer happening and the company goes into default.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Everyone seems to be focusing on the crazy assertion that the
| Roman Empire collapsed quickly. But what stood out to me was
| citing Blockbuster as a complex system. They didn't die because
| an interconnected web of dependencies started to rot, they died
| because their entire reason for existing disappeared.
|
| It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really
| weak.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| > they died because their entire reason for existing
| disappeared.
|
| That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to
| exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores"
| rather than just "distributing media".
|
| Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to
| pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote
| business model.
|
| Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a
| behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old
| business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped
| along for years past it being needed until it disappeared
| practically overnight.
|
| You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just
| means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex
| enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a
| dime given a massive change in conditions.
| k__ wrote:
| Would you argue that social systems of the past failed mostly
| because of technological advancement?
| metadat wrote:
| What does this mean for our highly-available distributed systems
| like Kubernetes, Airplanes, and Global Economics?
|
| Does it always reduce to resource optimization versus resiliency
| tradeoffs?
| m0llusk wrote:
| Scale is another big part of it. Over longer time periods
| resilience comes to mean something different. How many web
| sites from the 1990s are still up, accessible, and relevant?
| O__________O wrote:
| Attempted to find critical counter points to the "seneca curve"
| -- but was unable to find any via Google, Wikipedia, etc.
|
| As is, worth noting that human's analysis of complex systems is
| very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly
| significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal
| proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speak our
| cognitive capacity, observations of universe both large, small,
| over time, etc -- are extremely finite.
|
| While it's possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the
| seneca curve, core issues I take are that:
|
| -- man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve,
| though in my opinion so do all man made systems, not just complex
| ones.
|
| -- many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For
| example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full
| development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays
| and is very resilient to failures within its system.
|
| Guess not having read the original research, to me this feels
| like both literal & semantic cherry picking.
|
| As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the
| article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various
| civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would
| they really see any meaningful use to these labels in
| understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should
| humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of
| humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
| jostmey wrote:
| Perhaps the solution to preventing complex systems from
| collapsing is to built in a reset button to rest and restart.
| Most of us became used to regularly restating our early PCs,
| which is how we delt with these complex systems collapsing. I
| speculate the human body does something similar when we sleep,
| which is an example of a highly complex system
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| A lot of the relevant researchers basically define complex
| systems as the systems that you don't or _can 't_ understand
| well enough to simply reset and restart, nor would that be an
| appropriate intervention strategy most of the time. Should we
| drain lakes and put in new soil and water every time there's an
| algal bloom? Similarly, you can't truly reset an economy, or a
| polity with anything we'd call "reasonable methods".
| sys_64738 wrote:
| It's harder to keep a complex machine running which is why you
| want a simple system. Keep It Simple Stupid.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You definitely do not want a simple system if your singular
| goal is resiliency. The most resilient systems we know about
| are all complex, from ecosystems to organisms to cities to the
| internet itself. The main problem is that our current toolkit
| is so primitive that understanding anything about them, from
| how to intelligently intervene to how resilient any particular
| system is at any particular point in time is damn near
| impossible. There's a lot of research trying to change that,
| but it's obviously a difficult problem.
| throw457 wrote:
| Complex systems are always in a failed state.
| analog31 wrote:
| But "failed state" simply means that some of the controls
| have been disabled, at least according to John Gall. That
| just translates into working without quite knowing how they
| work.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Complex systems are always in a state of maintenance. Some
| part is always failing, but we can repair it. Systemic
| failure happens when we can't keep up with the necessary
| maintenance. It's very easy to look a a _big_ complex system,
| see lots of failure, and conclude the whole ship is going
| down, but that may not be the case.
| lamontcg wrote:
| What about the British Empire?
| taylorius wrote:
| I don't think this article is very convincing, as far as the
| complexity of a system having anything to do with its potential
| speed of collapse. The article's first example (the Romans)
| collapsed due to resource shortage (mining becoming harder).
| Their society WAS complex, but that isn't why it collapsed.
|
| Human grown societies tend to under-invest in redundancy, for the
| sake of more growth, so our societies end up rather brittle. But
| their complexity is not itself to blame, in my view.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Complexity is what makes under-investment viable, profitable
| and inevitable. In that order.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| The Roman Empire example that the article goes into is more
| interesting than it makes out, and can be an example of the
| wrong sort of redundancy being applied to a problem.
|
| The reforms in the 3rd century were not just an increase in
| taxes, but a restructuring of society to keep the army strong.
| Price controls were placed on goods to make sure that people
| and the state would always have reliable access to goods. Tax
| collection on private property was formalized and made much
| higher. Peasants were bound to the land to make sure they
| always were able to produce. This makes sense based on the view
| the Emperor had of the empire: an empire is like an army, so
| this strict control should boost resilience and redundancy.
|
| The tax collection was incredibly onerous and led to a lot of
| small estates going under. The price controls didn't work at
| all, in part because it didn't understand that price
| differences can be caused by things other than greed. The
| remaining landowners increasingly pulled out of the money
| economy and the cities and instead focused more on their own
| estates and the newly bound peasants. It is often stated as the
| starting point of feudalism, and ultimately did more to weaken
| the empire's structure than sustain it.
|
| When you ask for redundancy, it's important to think about what
| kind of redundancy you want, and who it serves.
| taylorius wrote:
| "When you ask for redundancy, it's important to think about
| what kind of redundancy you want, and who it serves."
|
| Well, of course that's the case. Though I must say, none of
| the things you listed sound like redundancy to me. They sound
| like an illustration of the fact that a complex system has a
| lot of ways to fail, and the result of a certain action can
| be hard to predict.
|
| The article doesn't really drive at this though - it seems
| focused on irresponsible use of resources. TBH the article's
| whole thesis strikes me as a bit weird.
| civilized wrote:
| This is what N. N. Taleb would say.
|
| Also, I bet any serial entrepreneur can explain why we tend to
| invest in growth over redundancy: we don't even know the names
| of those who didn't, because they died in the cradle.
| taylorius wrote:
| Exactly this. In any sort of survival-of-the-fittest
| environment, a redundant system can always be outcompeted by
| a highly optimised, brittle one, that dodges a few bullets.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Until you hit a point were _every_ system receives at least
| one bullet hit.
| civilized wrote:
| I imagine this can even be made mathematically precise. You
| need some minimal amount of robustness depending on the
| number of bullets you need to dodge, but conditional on
| that, someone who is _just robust enough to be lucky_ will
| win, and if the population is large and diverse enough, a
| lucky, minimally robust, growth optimized individual will
| survive and win.
| pharrington wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's just called "cancer" when it
| happens in animals.
| civilized wrote:
| Life is the ultimate cancer.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Biology is one of the most ancient and cutthroat examples
| of "survival of the fittest" imaginable. Yet it's filled
| with highly redundant systems outcompeting better optimized
| and brittle systems. Cells spend huge amounts of resources
| on redundant DNA, transcription error checking, and
| redundant organelles. Animals have redundant organs,
| complicated immune systems, hugely expensive neural
| systems, and so on.
|
| Human designed systems tend to be less redundant and
| comparatively fragile by contrast.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| In the end, isn't all a function of the energy needed to keep a
| system going?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Also : how complex systems fail. https://how.complexsystems.fail/
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I think it's less a matter of complexity and more a matter of
| dependencies. In the case of our society, we have enormous
| dependency on centralized systems for energy, heat, water,
| medical, and more. That is where the real risks exist.
| luis_cho wrote:
| I agree with you, the other problem is to rely on only one
| system. Our global economy is fragile in this sense.
| luis_cho wrote:
| For those who don't know Jay Forester is one of the persons
| responsible for world3, and the limits to growth report 50 years
| ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Ugo Bardi (the author) is also a member of the Club of Rome,
| which goes a long way towards explaining why the article is
| written the way it is.
| luis_cho wrote:
| I confess I haven't read the article yet but it gave me the
| feeling of being related to limits to growth.
|
| It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of
| sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of
| brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the
| 1970s.
|
| At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the
| work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new
| engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'll be honest, I find most of the stuff from that group to
| be a bit vapid and typically doesn't reflect deep
| familiarity with the background literature. As an example,
| the author offhandedly proposes a just-so story about why
| Rome collapsed. If we go to our trusty _210 reasons for the
| decline of the Roman Empire_ [1] (compiled by a historian
| frustrated that everyone and their pet had different, often
| contradictory explanations), we see that "depletion of
| mineral resources" is #53. So _why_ #53 as opposed to #191,
| or #67, or #3? Similarly, there are entire fields of
| studies about how complex systems evolve created since
| Forrester 's work, yet the headline here is all about how
| complex systems aren't resilient (which flies in the face
| of most observation and literature).
|
| [1] https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%202
| 50/21...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Complexity can stabilize an unstable system, allowing it to stick
| around long enough for us to notice how unstable it really was
| all along when the stabilization eventually fails.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| My understanding of the article is that complex systems don't
| collapse faster, they simply need a lot more time to be built and
| collapse faster _than that_
|
| But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept
| existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an
| additional thousand years and did not fail after all.
|
| Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to
| engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from
| political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily
| influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the
| process is still going on.
|
| So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster,
| but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without
| disappearing from history.
|
| They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive
| even if their original form does not.
|
| A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would
| be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate
| it.
| skohan wrote:
| Intuitively it makes sense to me that more complex systems
| collapse faster because potentially they have more points and
| modes of failure.
|
| For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of
| our current modern global society depend on the availability of
| Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively
| rare element, with concentrated extraction.
|
| Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap,
| powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems
| which have that dependency. This creates a single point of
| failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the
| whole system.
|
| I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the
| more likely it is that you have many of these weak points
| floating around.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You can have a complicated system that spends its complexity
| "budget" on redundancy and/or protection mechanisms. This
| means that when A fails, B keeps things working, and when B
| fails, C does. And so the system just keeps going, with B
| failed, and F, and K, and Q and X and Z. And maybe nobody (or
| very few people) notice that there's all these failing
| subsystems adding up.
|
| And then A fails, but hey, it's still running great!
|
| And then C fails. And the system collapses, because A, B, and
| C all failed. And everybody thinks that it collapsed quickly,
| because nobody thinks of the collapse as starting when B
| failed.
|
| TL;DR: A complex redundant system can run for a long time in
| a partially-failed state. If you measure only from the start
| of full failure, you can miss how long the collapse took.
| yakak wrote:
| It seems to me like this relates to how much emphasis there
| is on competition monopolizing the entire market and
| eliminating less efficient solutions. In the 1980s it seemed
| like every quirky solution would kind of survive, maybe being
| too bulky and too expensive (to fabricate) but not licensing
| X, Y or Z for an exorbitant price.. That greatly added
| complexity but meant redundancies.
|
| In the current form, I feel like the highest efficiency
| solution maker (or maybe the one in second place) is usually
| trying to do extremely low licensing with the idea of winning
| the whole market. That's great in terms of efficiency and
| actually lowers complexity but means monoculture with exactly
| identical dependencies.
| mirceal wrote:
| yes and no. complex systems are not designed to be complex
| from the start. they are in fact successful simple systems
| that have evolved. Any complex system that is around for a
| while will have build in redundancy and, as a matter of fact,
| will run in degraded mode.
|
| So I don't buy into the complex system collapse faster idea.
| I would say that if you were to look at a simple system and
| and a [working] complex system the simple system is going to
| collapse faster in case of a failure, while you may not
| notice failures as a complex system works around them). What
| the author here observes is the catastrophic collapse in the
| late stage of the system where something leads to the almost
| simultaneous collapse of multiple subsystems.
|
| Here is one of my favourite writings that ties complex
| systems with failure: https://how.complexsystems.fail/
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yeah, the author sort-of deforms actual historical data to his
| own needs.
|
| The Roman empire in the West was rather slow to collapse, even
| the fact that it survived the crisis of the third century [0]
| speaks more to its resilience than fragility. As late as 460,
| Western Roman commanders were able to subdue hostile barbarians
| and reattach their territories to the Empire proper [1].
|
| The Roman empire in the East, as you notice, survived for
| another thousand years.
|
| If the author wanted an example of an empire that collapsed
| really fast, it would be the USSR. _That_ was indeed rather
| fast. In 1985, Moscow controlled not just the USSR itself, but
| several important European satellite states east of the Elbe,
| plus it held a lot of sway in the developing world. Six years
| later, the empire was gone. Not even Western Kremlinologists
| expected such a fast unraveling of the Soviet system.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorian
| jdkee wrote:
| You are spot on with the collapse of the USSR.
|
| See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178
| /ev...
| chejazi wrote:
| I am not a history expert but it is interesting to hear that
| re: Rome, given the author's background
|
| > Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the
| University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the
| Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to
| promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and
| the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017),
| Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
| trakl wrote:
| What about the Late Bronze Age Collapse?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| That's a very interesting topic.
|
| We still don't know what actually happened, but the scholars
| studying it are discovering piece by piece that it was a
| "perfect storm" and no single event can be assumed as the
| root cause of the collapse.
|
| The most interesting part of it, for me, is that it was a
| cascade failure caused by "globalization" of the times.
|
| Maybe if we really understand what happened it can help us
| prevent a collapse of our current society (assuming it's not
| already too late)
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| The best example of a complex system is the human body. It's
| useful to juxtapose such a complex system to a "complicated
| machine" such as a car as far as you they breakdown (i.e.
| collapse).
|
| A single part failure can easily cause a car to become
| completely undrivable, whereas a surprisingly amount can go
| wrong with human body and it works more or less the same.
|
| Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either
| you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an
| incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel.
| Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty'
| of food.
|
| However once that human body _does_ fail, it 's over.
| Additionally all parts of it collapse together.
|
| A car is more or less the sum of it's parts. You can take each
| individual part and take it off and reuse it, like wise each
| failing impacts primarily it self. The engine can go find with
| a flat tire, you can use the headlights on car with no gas and
| no wheels until the batteries fall out. When an essential
| component for driving the car fails, all of the other
| components are still useful. This also means that any piece
| that is necessarily for the car to drive causes complete
| failure for the system when it fails. But it also means you can
| restore the system trivially by repairing a single part.
|
| The human body is more than the sum of it's parts. You can't
| trivially remove or replace parts. The upside is it is wildly
| resistant to failure. You can lose an eye and still see, you
| can lose huge parts of the brain and still function, you can
| damage a leg running a marathon and still find a way to finish
| rather quickly, the entire system can be under attack by an
| invader and automatically defend it self.
|
| But there are limit and when they are cross the entire system
| fails completely and irreversibly. And in this sense they do
| collapse faster because once that limit is crossed the system
| rapidly starts to fail and can never be restored.
| 323 wrote:
| > _Not enough fuel and a car stops. It 's completely binary,
| either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human
| there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having
| enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when
| they are 'empty' of food._
|
| You're highly selective. Let's switch things around a bit:
|
| Not enough oxygen and a human stops. It's completely binary.
| But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly
| long time.
|
| More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a
| car and it still functions as the original one
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you
| can't do that with a human (even if cells do that in a way).
| This means you can have a car last 1000 years, but not a
| biological human.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I agree on some of the points.
|
| My point was that complexity is not a single face phenomenon
| and can't account alone for risk of failure.
|
| I believe we should look at why complexity is there and what
| purpose it serves.
|
| Human body is a complex machine, but the fact that failure
| can bring it down to the extreme is because human body is
| fragile and once single organs start failing things cascades
| to the point of no return very quickly.
|
| We are in fact not build for extreme resiliency, but for
| extreme adaptability (not even the most extreme nature
| created)
|
| A simple system most of the times is built with simplicity in
| mind (sorry for the tautology) and sometimes because of
| simplicity is more efficient.
|
| It can also happen to more complex systems, like for example
| our body which is very energy efficient at the expenses of
| resiliency. Klingons OTOH have _two livers, an eight-
| chambered heart, and two stomachs_. They are bigger, consume
| more energy and need to eat (and drink) a lot more.
| Redundancy adds complexity, but have its purpose.
|
| Klingons do not exists obviously, but nuclear factories are
| another example of complexity serving safety, not more
| efficient operations.
|
| Simpler systems usually exhibit single point of failures,
| like for example now with the war our very complex supply
| chain can shield us better from the consequences than
| countries that don't have them or can't afford them.
|
| Historically they died sooner and we haven't records of their
| sudden fall, because they never reached the point were it
| mattered enough.
|
| So complexity - I would call it complex redundancy -, which
| is very costly, depends a lot on the ability of gathering the
| resources.
|
| Going back to the Romans, at one point they stopped making
| new steel and warships because the huge amount of wood
| necessary was not sustainable and Europe witnessed the first
| massive deforestation of its history.
|
| So, before collapsing, they had to add another layer:
| recycling. Which can be simpler as a process but also
| requires a longer chain of supply.
|
| Add to that the will of their enemies to conquer them, the
| lost knowledge on how to reboot failing systems because they
| were so old that people took them for granted and things can
| go south pretty rapidly, but that's not an inherent property
| of complexity, but of fragility.
|
| The Universe is immensely complex, but I believe it's still
| going strong after 13 billions years from its birth.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why complex _social_ systems collapse faster - the article
| doesn't talk about general complexity but the kind found in
| social structures.
|
| It also suggests a kind of simplistic mathematical analysis which
| doesn't sound super insightful or accurate. Otherwise, Asimov's
| psychohistory could already be a thing, if it was possible to
| mathematically model with accuracy the behaviour of societies.
| DennisP wrote:
| Asimov did say in the books that it depended on having a much
| larger population on lots of planets, so random events averaged
| out.
| trasz wrote:
| We wouldn't know if it was a thing.
| [deleted]
| tarkin2 wrote:
| More things to go wrong?
| [deleted]
| joebob42 wrote:
| The roman empire seems like an especially terrible example of
| complex systems failing quickly given it existed in a partially
| collapsed state for longer than most major empires existed
| period.
| baybal2 wrote:
| [deleted]
| cedilla wrote:
| I have yet to see one comparison to the fall of Rome that
| wasn't complete horse shit - and this is no exception. It's
| just madness from the beginning - "Rome" began to fall as soon
| as it was relevant, it lasted for more than a millenium, and if
| you just pick the right point in time, you can make an argument
| for almost anything.
|
| Except in this case the author didn't even bother to pick the
| right time, instead opting for some quote "A few centuries"
| before the "rapid" descent. Most empires last only a few
| decades.
| joebob42 wrote:
| Even the fall of the republic to "tyranny" / dictatorship
| took a pretty long time. You could pick a number of different
| starting points I guess but I think it'd be hard to argue it
| wasn't in progress post Sulla, which is like 30 or 40 years
| before Caesars whole thing. I guess on the scale of history
| that's pretty short but that's still multiple lifetimes for
| most people back then.
| mirceal wrote:
| the Roman Empire being brought up over and over again makes
| sense in the current context where people like to compare the
| USA with the Roman Empire. Apart from certain small
| similarities IMO the comparison is nonsense and does not make
| sense.
| t_mann wrote:
| Exactly. Even considered on its own it's a really bad example
| of rapid collapse. Roman civilization lasted for about 1000
| years until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD
| (250 more if you include the pre-republican period). One could
| argue at length when its decline started, but a reasonable
| starting point would be ~250 years prior to that, with the
| great crisis of the third century. That's a quarter (fifth) of
| its entire existence, and a lot of human generations, who would
| mainly have noticed significant up- or down-swings during their
| own lifetimes (with somewhat equal probability). Only the most
| historically literate would maybe have perceived a general
| downward tendency over the centuries.
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