Modeling societal demise and reversal

So, an article citing the US response to Covid as evidence that society has entered a "death spiral". With no mention of climate change? Written by epidemiologists?

Ah, the second author is John Ioannidis, who during Covid was put forward an anti-lockdown position forcefully and published a series of studies which scientists considered bad. I kept an eye on the debate and think he wound-up producing dubious claims of covid having a much lower fatality than was the case.

That's not to say I think the US responded well to Covid, that's big debate. But the "death spiral" argument can't help sounding a bit aggrieved here, even if many things threaten to make things worse in this society today; climate, pollution generally, rising inequality (that rose before-and-after covid), the thread of nuclear war (MAD has worked so but doesn't seem like a good long term plan) etc.

The term "modeling" probably means different things in different research domains. I would expect on the one hand an effort to describe the conjectured dynamics with some detail and on the other hand a quantification and validation of the model/hypothesis with empirical (historical) data.

Admittedly both are extremely challenging tasks: human society is maybe the most complex system we know and we seem very far from adequate modeling in the above sense.

This is not to imply that the phenomena identified and discussed are not relevant factors towards a societal "crisis" but they feel more like a partial collection of hunches and analogies which may or may not be capturing the relevant societal dynamics to a meaningful degree.

There are reasons to be concerned though. Underlying the theatricality and subjectivity and collective mind games that drive political and economic behaviors there is the physical reality of the anthropocene and its no longer negligible environmental impacts.

Its not unreasonable to conjecture that as ad-hoc and capricious social arrangements hit hard external constraints there will be some unavoidable "adjustments". Whether these will unfold as an out-of-control societal collapse or just another chapter of human history remains to be seen.

We should not discount the extreme sophistication and resources available to modern societies. Eventually we may even develop a model of society, though its not clear if it will include the impact of there being a model :-)

The growing distrust of authority and institutions is something that really worries me. That is what keeps the fabric of society together and I am not sure what comes after the collapse of previously trusted institutions.

> ... [the crisis] seemed to be characterized by groupthink and escalation of commitment to one course of action, at the expense of other possible solutions ...

This is my favourite sentence in the whole article. I'm not sure what the solution really is, but spending 12 months in school just teaching people "how to respond to a crisis without panicking and behaving like a herd of sheep" would be of huge societal value.

We don't all have to do exactly the same thing. Different people can do different things. I've only seen crises where compromises on individual liberty were a grave mistake; but I've seen a lot of crises where by gum the authorities tried that approach anyway with the populace egging them on.

Hard disagree. Society is clearly getting better; and we fight over bad moves faster.

Authors don't take into account multiple other viewpoints. Climate change for example, no mention at all in the article? My political opponents clearly believe climate change is a doomsday scenario for humanity.

Here in Canada we have a regressive carbon tax which is causing huge problems. It has come to the point that the premiers who ideologically should be in favour or on the same side as our Prime Minister are calling him out and demanding to stop that asap.

This is not the kind of society who is headed toward demise.

Some of the references are interesting. "PREDICTING AND PREEMPTING THE CORPORATE HEART ATTACK" (all caps in original, paywalled) looks promising. That's the management consultant view. It's a good question, though. How can you tell in advance when an organization is in trouble? Consider Boeing and General Electric. Accounting does not capture what's broken. It's possible to capture that info in stable production environments, which is what the Toyota Production System and Deming are all about. It's not clear what to measure in a more dynamic situation or over longer time scales.

A less apocalyptic question is, how do you tell if a system is stuck in a state well below optimum? What are the risks associated with getting out of that state and into a higher state?

Why was this article flagged? Did it hurt the feelings of the 'Elite', aka the parasites whose greed caused this death spiral?

THE major difference between nations is their concept and practice of "justice". Capitalism is a side-effect. Feudalism seems to be every society's first pass at justice, and then capitalism arises by erasing hard class distinctions and deregulating economic exchange. This becomes clear when you ask yourself the question, "If my nation was invaded and occupied, how would things change?"

Justice in America is badly broken, and most, if not all of our ills (including distrust in the legitimacy of institutions) is a direct result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to sue an individual or institution for harm and to get a fair result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to get arrested for something criminal and be found either guilty or innocent in a fair trial, judged by a jury of peers. Instead, all but the 1% are priced out of the justice system, and the justice system itself is slow, expensive, and fundamentally unjust. The complexity of law and its practice shelters entire ecosystems of "professionals" who's job is to game the system to obtain the desired result. The price of justice, in both time and money, is itself used as leverage. And leverage is Power. Any society that lets its justice system go, lets it rot under layers and layers of complexity, makes it inaccessible to the average person, has undermined its Purpose. Only momentum, particularly the ignorance of the masses who imagine the system to be "mostly functional", keeps it legitimate. But that ignorant goodwill is finite, and decays as more and more smart, self-interested actors take advantage of the moribund system.

What I find most astonishing is the profound lack of attention given to the justice system itself. Not just its performance in high-profile cases, but its performance in every day cases. This goes part-and-parcel with police brutality and abuse, the "Marshal Law Bubble" that surrounds every LEO in America, because the justice system has their back in an almost unbelievably complete way. The same holds true for state attorney generals and prosecutors: for every story of a person wrongfully convicted, spending 20+ years in prison, how many times have you ever heard of a prosecutor being prosecuted for their malfeasance? How many horror stories of lawsuits getting bogged down in years of pre-trial motions before the poorer of the two litigants has to give up? How many fathers have been separated from their young children for months or years at the whim of an uncaring family court?

In practice, we almost all rely on the fact that its rare to go to court. Everyone knows that to be arrested is to have your life changed, whether or not you're convicted. Everyone knows that to be sued is to lose 10's or 100's of thousands, even if you win. Is this justice? No. It's statistics. It's most people not knowing and not caring because they see the justice system as being only for those who "deserve it". But that's not what justice is supposed to be about. You should be able to sue Roku for changing their terms of service and preventing you from using your TV until you agree. It should be cheap and easy and quick. You should be able to sue Harvard for publishing false data that misled you into doing the wrong thing for your patients, or leading you to wrong conclusions in your own papers. You should be able to sue a LEO for false arrest, violation of your rights, and assault. The fact that you cannot (and in the current system, should not) do any of these things means that bad actors get away with it, constantly, and with no real prospect of correction.

Now, whether this problem is isomorphic to ants following in a circle, I don't know. Maybe. It certainly seems like no-one is thinking about it or talking about it. I know that state law boards are a very powerful (perhaps THE most powerful) lobby in America, and serious justice system reforms would undermine their business model. But the simple fact is that our justice system has already failed. The core function of government has failed. And the public is barely aware of it.