Odd Lots Podcast: Signs That a Civilization Is About to Collapse [audio]
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Tainter -- "The Collapse of Complex Societies"
Diamond -- "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"
Meadows et al -- "Limits to Growth"
edit: after listening to the podcast there is much in common with Tainter's general argument. I'll paraphrase poorly: as civilisations become more complex and interconnected, this makes them more efficient (e.g. economic specialisation and trade). But the increased complexity also increases the fragility of the system, and also adds ongoing maintenance costs. At some point there is no marginal return for adding complexity, or the return on maintaining the complexity becomes negative, so the complexity is no longer worth maintaining. Collapse.
I did like the observation/claim that as civilisations encounter trouble, and things start to go badly, they respond by continuing to do whatever they are familiar with doing, but with increasing intensity.
Society collapses because of technical debt?
Going overboard shouldn't mean collapse but readjustment by simplification. Unless the entire system instantly rely on any newly introduced complexity at a structural level?
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...
Switching to even a simpler insurance would still require rewriting all of that.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked" (1935)
See climate change. It's bee long and drawn out and the major hallmark of this issue is a huge amount of resistance from anyone who would benefit more from the status quo.
I what we see in the climate change debate projects onto all sorts of other issues. People are short sighted and stubborn.
I'm starting to believe that maybe a sufficiently advanced AI should overthrow humanity.
I suppose in many cases if you overshoot it's not possible to go back to slightly below the equilibrium, but rather the overshoot causes some non-linear/exponential/whatever effect that causes a substantial drop (e.g. a collapse). See Lotka-Volterra model for a simple example.
If you look at the last ~10,000 years of history, arguably you can see that. The cycles are longer than you might think, though.
I think technology really throws the cycles for a loop, though. I'm a big fan of looking at history, and an even bigger fan of not thinking that we're just so special that we're specially immune to history or the forces that it shows exist, which history shows is a popular delusion and is very alive and well today. On the other hand, I think the last 200 years of technology is a fundamental shift, too, and while history never truly repeats itself, I think there's good reason to think that we now more than ever can't just take past collapses and expect them to match what is currently happening.
People have not necessarily fundamentally changed from historical people, but the relationships between people definitely have, and that's probably going to have some sort of effect. I don't mean anything like "Facebook is a big change", either. I think the most important change is massive speed change in both communication and travel. I think we're well past the point where quantitative change becomes qualitative change there.
I also want to say I'm not necessarily making utopian predictions; I'm just not sure the old disasters are inevitable. In particular I think that in the 21st century there's a not unreasonably chance that, say, the United States Federal government could completely collapse (for the sake of argument, imagine a nuke taking out the whole of Washington DC), but the modern speed of communication could result in effective, functioning emergency governments arising in just a year or two instead of decades. (Probably based on existing state governments, but I'm not sure the US as a whole would reform necessarily. Pieces of it, probably, but I'm not sure the whole would.) If swift collapse is matched by swift reassembly of other governments, will we necessarily see decades or centuries of a "dark age"? If the reassembly can occur before all the technical knowledge dies off?
On the other hand, new nightmare scenarios are on the table too; for instance, "one world government" will always be tempting (because the Powers that Be who think they will be in charge will always push for it), but the possibility that it could create total correlated economic failure across the entire world would be the biggest catastrophe in human history, and the benefits of it basically can't possibly outweigh this possibility. I suppose that'll be a Black Swan relative to the people pushing for this, though for me I consider it so obviously inevitable based on history that it probably isn't one for me.
Anyways, the upshot is that while history has things to teach us and we are well-advised to learn as much as we can from it, I also believe that in certain fundamental ways we are breaking new ground, with all that implies.
That's what for-profit science, marketing, and fads do for you...
Somewhat tangentially related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14027705
Abstraction is one possible mitigation to this problem.
This also seems to happen to software, which is why we keep rewriting the ecosystem every 10-20 years.
It's not a light read but a solid look from one guy who believed in the cyclical nature of order and society.
Using expensive precious metals in what are essentially symbolic tokens seems like a waste, but that's just me.
The march toward a globalized world is still in its infancy. The US just began the operation; and I don't think a Trump presidency is going to change that direction. In this case, the US is not collapsing but rather its era is just beginning. Though the end result will be a US without an A.
Also, Islam went through various phases during its expansion. In its most lenient (and progressive) Abbasid era it was highly tolerant of other religions coexisting in areas it controlled. You pay the tax, you can be a Christian or whatever you want.
This article might have more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Musl...
Catholicism is just as expansion-oriented as the expansionist Muslim variants. Fundamentalist-Christianity, in the modern form, is a bit late to the game, but coming on strong.
If you think about it, this is just basic memetics. All mental contagions exploit various strategies to propagate. The very long-lived ones get good at it. There are long-term cognitive-parasitic strategies that don't involve expansionism, but they have costs and risks.
It's arguments are ones that could be applied to any time past the industrial revolution. The whole thing is click bait.
I guess I shouldn't feel disappointed that the podcast doesn't make a good argument for the imminent collapse of civilization, but I did feel kinda let down for the lack of insight.
It would be more impressive to find a source that did not predict doom during the other years, and then did before '08, and then ceased to do so after '08.
Here are some hastily taken notes for anybody who wants a better gauge if the time is worth it to them:
- The strengths of a civilization are often the cause of the downfall
- Western economies focus on over production of a small number of things, then exchange for other goods
- Counter movements aren't necessarily indicative of impending collapse
- In the face of counter movements, leaders don't usually adjust strategy, rather they intensify their existing strategies
- This intensifications are usually always counterproductive
- The terms of Presidents or CEO's (4-8 years) are not long enough to meaningfully restructure things; this re-enforces the intensification approach, leading to bubbles, leading to collapses
- Common patterns of this intensification include shorter and shorter term thinking
- Hypercoherent societies are closely interconnected, working as a unit for shared prosperity
- A challenge of hypercoherent societies is that if there's a problem in one area, it creates a huge impact on the whole (ie. computer network outages)
- Competition/profits drive hypercohesion and the associated fragility of the system
- Observations of 'this is the greatest period in <<something>>' are warning signs of status wars that could be construed as ominous
- Dependence on unsustainable systems (ie. transportation infrastructure) creates an entanglement theory that prevents leaders from taking corrective action (ie. closing an sink hole of a subway line)
- This entanglement theory compounds and can lead to speedy collapses
Like a lot of transposed cultural anthropology, this seems like a moral "just so" story. I don't question the archaeology, but I do question how generally applicable it is. Every successful society is the same, each dysfunctional one is dysfunctional in its own way.
I wouldn't. My grandparents lived through two or three shooting wars and a hard reconstruction. My parents lived through the Cold War, when the prospect of nuclear war was very real. By comparison, we are living in a very benign era. The 21st century is playing the game of life in easy mode.
even though, right now, we live in one of the most peaceful periods ever. world hunger has been drastically reduced. most people live safer lives than ever before (crime, health).
Interesting. When was it sufficient, then? Intuitively you'd really expect a better pace of things now with much increased communication/transportation speeds and (in many places) reduced bureaucratic latency.
From the point of view of the country, I think the terms being insufficient to meaningfully restructure things is good and intentional. There's a lot of negative in our government, but there's a lot of positive as well. We wouldn't ever want a single, charismatic sociopath in place long enough to single handedly destroy our country.
A huge portion of our tax money goes towards helping our fellow citizens, through Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I view this as a positive thing, as I recognize that I am one accident away from needing any to all of those.
That's on a first intuition though. Because another intuition is that things that needed adjusting/restructuring back in the day were simpler, less inter-connected, and with fewer implications if they didn't move as fast.
When you have "increased communication/transportation speeds" then you also have faster impact of any breakage / bad decision (in the way e.g. that a software glitch can cost billions in a few hours, whereas an error in some accountant's book in 1960, not so much), but also that they are much more tangled together and complex.
In other words: while you can communicate your intents of restructuring faster now, things are also much more complicated and difficult to understand even (much less restructure).
In fact the summary above already points out to some of this: " A challenge of hypercoherent societies is that if there's a problem in one area, it creates a huge impact on the whole (ie. computer network outages)"
If we take any of the past achievements today, would you intuitively expect it to take longer nowadays? Take the 747 again: do increased friction, bugs in logistic software and Slack downtimes really offset productivity boost from model-based structural engineering CAD packages?
So I see how this idea might come up at a lunch discussion, but kindof sceptical to taking it at face value.
That's an engineering work though, on a constrained end product which is a known quantity. I'm pretty sure they'll be able to make it in the same time, or faster than in the 70s.
Whereas what we were discussing was whether presidential terms were big enough to affect change -- some of which involve millions of people, special interests, thousands of systems, deeply interconnected (and non expected) side-effects and reactions, etc.
Some 1880s or 19930s politician ruled in a much simpler country.
Is it? I've thought that the big advantage of democracies is that when people get fed up with their leaders, they can change them without a bloody revolution or civil war (which, as you say, is incredibly damaging).
I mean, our dear democratically(?) elected politicians say or do dumb things just like any inbred royalty, but at least we can switch them peacefully.
Of course, democracies aren't immune and can fail too. E.g. Germany in the 1930's, or for that matter Turkey 2017.
PS: The US scores relatively low on several measures of democracy. Relatively few house seats are competitive with many candidates unposed. D.C. has zero power in congress yet can't even run it's own budget. The president frequently loses the popular vote by huge margins. Is so something of a nominal democracy where without massive backlash the people have little say.
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As a summary:
– The things that make a civilization collapse are often the same as its strength.
— The collapse happens very fast because of the fragility created by pushing the strengths to the maximum.
— Civilizations tends to accelerate when they reach a crisis, accelerate decision making, accelerate building things, that creates their apogee, followed by the immediate collapse.
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(30s advertising and introduction)
Interviewer – How (Joe Washington) do you feel about the future of our civilization?
Joe — Tracy, it just all looks so bleek, everything is so depressing, it seems like all of the things that we took for granted - political norms - down the drain
Tracy — I know you have an interest in Guatamala - your mum. The Maya civilization is famous for its collapse. Let's connect it to today. An Indiana Jones-kind researcher described Westerans as guys in a tent drinking Scotch and reading philosophy books. And here he is:
Jones (the Indiana Jones - couldn't get his name) – When you live in the jungle under a tent, you need some Scotch. You can't access with riverboat.
Tracy – What makes civilizations collapse?
Jones – The patterns are often the same. Often the strength are the same things that bring it down. Things fall apart little by little, but the apogee is often the collapse: The collapse looks really good from monuments and stuff. From the way they collapse, you can often see what went wrong and how it was structured.
Joe — Examples of an aspect that made it ?
Jones — Both Maya and Angkor in Cambodia: Those civilizations aren't supposed to survive in rainforest because of soils and stuff; Their successful secrets were to adapt their cities to the tropical forests, mimic the diversity, various field systems, be spread out, so it had to be decentralized. And it was great but when it got too successful, built up, population grew, put a strain on the environment, switched to our kind of economy: Long distance exchanges, overproduction in each area followed by exchanges on a market just like capitalism, and once it took hold, the Maya area weren't competitive, they moved to the coast. In the Maya the religion/kings/ceremonies is the head, and anything that goes wrong is their fault. The rainforest made them vulnerable.
Tracy – When nearing collapse, what patterns emerged? Trump? Judgements on the elites?
Jones — Yeah but those are usually reactions to an ongoing collapse. But the problem is leaders do more of what they do. They double or triple down on the existing order and it's almost always counterproductive. In the Maya things weren't going well so you had to build more temples, make the gods more happy, so you take more from the environment and things go down. You see that in business, technology and the politics.
Sponsor break.
Joe — So you see that in business. Give us some examples from business schools.
Jones — Short-term thinking. You really see that from CEOs. The shorter cycle on which they're judged, fast reactions, fast solutions, like politicians: We've got to slow down, it takes more than 4 or 8 years to build back up. The accelerating pattern looks like an apogee, but it's a bubble like in the hi tech, the e-bubble, real estate, it's a good example of intensifying something that has been successful but actually begins to undermining the system. Once you start studying that you look back at things like the Renaissance: It was a collapse! It ended in disaster as in the Golden Age of Greece. When people look at that they don't see that. That's because of leadership/problems: you start to think of shorter and shorter solutions.
Tracy — Euphoria, market bubbles: Is there a particular thing, a tipping point towards the collapse?
Jones — Not really, not all of the collapse have the kind of pattern of apogee pattern. But you do see the pattern of intensification, the pattern of shorter-time thinking, faster and faster decisions. You also study non-collapses: Sometimes there's a near-collapse, they change something, they have a big recession then they go on. So you also get to study why there was a collapse in one situation and not the other. For our civ, I would take the hypercoherence–
Joe — What does that mean, "hypercoherence"?
Jones — Well it's one of our great strengths: It's the integration of the society, leading to better decision-making, leading to great wealth. We're probably the most hypercoherent: the satellites, Amazon, etc. BUT if there's a problem with one part of the system, it brings down the full system. It becomes a vulnerability and the response to that, because of business competition, is even more hypercoherence, and more fragility.
Tracy — So the best would be to build some kind of walls/buffers in this system, the opposite of globalization?
Jones — Lots of reasons for not doing that: As societies become more complex, investments become less profitable, system goes from diminishing marginal returns to diminishing returns. The other problem is it costs money to back up the system, cutting down on a degree of hypercoherence, the rules of the Maya state or Renaissance can't get away with those costs, the public wants more wealth, not more backups.
Joe — Some question
Jones — Status war / status rivalery / competitive art in Renaissance: It does generate the magnificence, as Bill Gates says "It's the best times to be alive" – That's more and more expenditure, leaders competing with other leaders, CEOs but also countries, and that keeps making everyone more and more fragile.
Tracy — So when Trump says we should increase defense spendings...
Jones — People treat it more as a symptom than a cause. People begin to get more and more dissatisfied. But the problem (with renewing our infrastructure) is that can't be done quickly. It's an entanglement: You depend on a huge system (e.g. the interstate system, the subway, the rail), but you can't maintain it, and people want to extend it.
Joe — How quickly can it all collapse?
Jones — Very quickly. With more time I could make your listeners weep. The Maya civilization was most spectacular at around 790 and by 810 it was just in pieces. It ramps up just slowly then that reaches a critical point and –.
+ conclusion about Scotch.
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