Critical Mass and Tipping Points | Hacker News Reader

Critical Mass and Tipping Points

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85 pointsrzk39 comments

Made me think of these, and then I remembered to spread the meme:

Systems Thinking, Jamshid Gharajedaghi

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/592861.Systems_Thinking

When I read it like a decade ago it was The Tome on complex systems. There might be more up to date stuff but I guarantee the ideas are still solid.

Black Swan, Nasim Taleb

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan

Mentioned in the article. Despite the celebrity power behind the title has some solid ideas backed by fairly cold analysis.

>The concept of a sociological critical mass was first used in the 1960s by Morton Grodzins, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Grodzins studied racial segregation — in particular, examining why people seemed to separate themselves by race even when that separation was not enforced by law.

Curious where this researcher found examples of white flight in the 60s completely divorced from the reality of explicitly incentivized depopulation and segregation[1]. Very weird that it is used as an example of "spontaneous" sociological critical mass here, because it very much was catalyzed by real economic policy.

1. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/redlining

Flight and segregation emerge spontaneously in any population where people don't want to be a significant minority, even when they prefer some amount of diversity:

https://ncase.me/polygons/

well it appears spontaneously in this game that has a hard set of deterministic rules, but there is no proof that actually this is the cause of demographic flight - just an argument. Probably a correct argument, but I am cursed with the tendency to see the opposition to my beliefs as perhaps true.

Correct, it is not a proof that things like explicit legislation or rampant levels of racism are not the actual cause in some specific instance -- they may be. But it does mean you cannot logically conclude, as many do, that neighborhood segregation is smoking gun proof of continuing rampant racism, or anything else.

For such an interesting topic, the many of the leading examples seemed weak. The racial segregation one seemed a bit strange to me too (is racism really the only reason people can think of? If an area is undergoing radical demographic shifts then there is going to be a lot going on), the business one seemed vague and the Independence one is underexplored.

It is an important topic but I wouldn't recommend reading this article on it. It seems to be a just-so story situation without much meat on the bone.

(I could be wrong) I think there is an argument for a critical mass of where explicit policy gave way to more of a doom loop - as people then flee due to declining services and amenities caused by policy driven white flight.

Feel free to disagree.

Interesting read. It puts into context the importance of luck in life. There is a group of people who become oppressed to the point that it becomes unbearable and they have a choice either to die by revolting too early without critical mass, or by letting themselves starve from the increasing weight of the oppression. In the case of the opioid epidemic, people have been/are driven to insanity and commit suicide by drug overdose.

You really don't want to be in that early oppressed group.

IMO, it's because human systems are over-systematized and over-regulated. It always causes oppression. Some group of people has to pay dearly for all the structures that are imposed on them. Laws and social structures essentially never work for everyone equally; at scale, many laws systematically steal wealth, power and opportunities from one group and give it to another.

Even the most well-meaning laws basically end up stealing from certain groups of people for the benefit of others. Especially on a complex global playing field. Just look at Africa. It's not their fault that they're stuck in poverty... Western powers keep installing corrupt dictators by sponsoring coups. The dictators then saddle their citizens with debt. The people have little say. Then basically they become so poor that they are forced to immigrate to the rich countries which are causing the problems... And for the most part, join the lower class of that society where the oppression continues under a different form.

They get to be oppressed in this slightly different way while also contributing to the continued oppression of their people back in their home countries through the gift their cheap labor to their oppressors in their new country, which enriches them. This is made possible by a combination of ignorance and intergenerational low self-esteem inflicted upon them by their oppressors as a result of manipulation of the political systems of their previous countries.

IMO, US leftwing politics are extremely short sighted with their approach to immigration because they are building a critical mass of oppressed people in the US. Some people will be grateful initially but the gratefulness will soon turn to disdain once the new reality sinks in.

Better never means better for everyone. And it always means worse for some.

Life is not a 'zero sum game'. Just because someone benefits from something does not mean someone else is exploited or oppressed.

Many in the anti-capitalist crowd have the mindset that wealth is not created, but just spread around. If someone gets rich, it must mean others got poorer. If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).

On human lifetime timescales much of life is very much so a zero sum game.

Only the exceedingly privileged cannot grasp this fact of life. Academic bubble theories don’t help a generation of rust belt manufacturing workers, but it sure as hell made a whole lot of other folks rich at their direct expense.

The same academics are happy to talk about income inequality while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Ignoring this fact is exactly how we’ve gotten to where we are today. Politicians have only just begun to exploit this blind spot so many seem to have.

I have directly benefited from this fact and have done quite well for myself. But it’s so obvious I can’t believe it’s even an argument. Comparative advantage may help their grandchildren, but it doesn’t help the 49 year old machinist with no realistic job opportunities and bills to pay after the executives ship the plant off to Mexico or China. I personally watched it happen.

You're not describing a zero sum interaction because the gain in China has almost certainly outstripped the loss in the US. That's pretty much the story of globalization so far.

Of course, it's a net loss for the rust belt.

This is precisely the academic theory bubble talk I was referring to.

On balance no one cares that some Chinese peasants had a huge increase in quality of life. Their lives, and the lives of their children were significantly degraded so some executives and owners could get obscenely rich. If you zoom out far enough literally nothing is zero sum given the conservation of energy. But that’s a silly argument.

That it may someday be a net win for humanity (and this is entirely uncertain) is very much immaterial to anyone other than folks so disconnected from reality that they are insulated from the impact these theoretical games have on real people in their own country and communities.

Agreed. It is a zero sum game once you consider the extreme asymmetry in opportunities. In the age of social media, it's a myth that you can 'create opportunities for yourself'. It doesn't work like that. You need the right social network; else you will create value but that value will be ignored and not integrated into the system; you will not be paid/rewarded for it.

Either you exist in a social environment where opportunities fall on your lap by the hundreds and you have to pass on 99% of them and only pursue the top 1%... or you exist in an environment where you have to work like crazy for 10 years straight to get a single mediocre opportunity and such opportunities are so rare for you that you recognize it instantly and you know you cannot pass it up.

The economy is a zero sum game at best and a negative-sum game at worst. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have such significant asymmetries in opportunities.

Just look at anyone who is earning a lot of money in our system... They're not adding value. They have shares in companies; they could sit at home all day and they'd get paid the same. How is that not proof that they're being paid for not adding value?

Ignore past stories of what these people supposedly did once-upon-a-time to get to their current positions. What do you call a system where, at any given time, most of the money flows to people who do the least amount of work and consume the most?

Probably 5% of the population could do a better job than most CEOs. Still, these people will never get the opportunity to become a CEO. There's just not enough room at the top... So people make up all sorts of nonsense stories about track records and connections.

Buy up my existing cryptocurrency shitcoin for hundreds of millions of dollars and my track record and business connections will magically appear out of nowhere. I don't need to do anything. Just a Tweet from a celebrity will do.

It does mean something was manipulated though. In most cases attention and or resources. Both finite at some scale. When either is gained it does take from something else.

> If that were true then everyone would be getting poorer as the population grows (finite resources spread ever thinner within a growing society).

Well then what is inflation?

Not everything is infinite like software. The largest sources of inflation are caused by things that have a human limitation. ie. things that need to have a human in the loop.

And lets not forget the many sources of suppressed inflation. That iPhone is its current price because we rely on low paid Chinese workers and factories destroying their local environment to produce that phone. Once that goes away (some are saying this is China's last decade of free trade) then we will see the real cost of these things.

> always means worse for some.

Can't agree. Say, when a new treatment emerges for a disease that was affecting some part of the population, it's better for the cured, and not any worse for all others.

Even simpler, at the very foundation of daily life: when two people willingly exchange something, they are both better off, by their subjective measures, else they would have done that. This applies not only to exchanging goods for money, but even to exchanging friendly smiles.

If all life were a zero-sum game, the world would never progress to its current state.

> it's better for the cured, and not any worse for all others.

Won't anyone think of the business owners who lost their steady stream of income from treatable but incurable illnesses?

Get lost, government regulations made them supply the palliative medicine at the cost of production. They can now reallocate the production capacity.

All changes being worse for some does not imply zero-sum. It only implies that every individual change will always make the status quo worse for at least 1 person, not that the collective good did not outweigh the bad. Plus, this is frequently off-set by some future change being a net-improvement for the previously impacted person.

That makes a lot of sense, well thought! The only thing I would like to add is regarding the critical mass of oppressed people in the US, at least when it comes to immigrants. I think the first generation struggles the most, but their children, who are raised - if not born - in the country face less issues, and things then improve from one generation to the other.

Granted, for generations there will be a difference between their standard of living and the one from their non-immigrant counterparts on average, but that gradual reduction might be enough to avoid reaching the tipping point.

>I think the first generation struggles the most, but their children, who are raised - if not born - in the country face less issues, and things then improve from one generation to the other.

>Granted, for generations there will be a difference between their standard of living and the one from their non-immigrant counterparts on average, but that gradual reduction might be enough to avoid reaching the tipping point.

This is the conventional wisdom about immigration in the US, because that's what the historical record says, but you shouldn't accept this as a given. The historical record shows that immigrant groups assimilated well into America ~150-~50 years ago, but those were also times when the American economy was expanding at a huge rate. So of course there was lots of room for newcomers to fit into that economy and help build it, at a time when everyone's standard of living was constantly rising. This is no longer true: America is being vastly outcompeted by other economies, namely China's, and American society seems to be going downhill in general, a process that seems to me to have started (at least most visibly) in the early 2000s.

>but their children, who are raised - if not born - in the country face less issues, and things then improve from one generation to the other.

Not if you are the group currently in the hot seat. First it was Irish and then Italians and then Jewish and then Japanese and then Black and then so on and so on.

Right now its probably Muslims and maybe in the future Chinese (I hope not).

They are on average more successful than their parents but all of that can be taken away in the blink of an eye and many would lose out in that scenario. Just ask the Japanese or Koreans (some of which never recovered from the concentration camps or the LA riots).

Thank you for this comment. It really expresses how I have been feeling in such a clear and eloquent way. The question is how do you overcome this? I am wasting my life away with this low self-esteem and also guilt because I see how the US has continued to damage my ancestral country (Pakistan) and it seems like there is no positive future for people there. I read about the utter despair of people there and it leads to guilt because despite my attempts to change the US political system (I have volunteered in multiple progressive campaigns and vote in every election) nothing changes.

I was lucky to have such good parents that drilled studying and hard work into my head and I lucked into a career that pays extremely well so im in the upper tier of the income strata but despite this, I feel like a second class citizen sometimes. The day to day is not bad because you can distract yourself but when you look back at the big picture its a problem. I dont feel like my fellow countrymen have my back if s*it hits the fan.

I have traveled enough throughout Europe and the other western nations to know that in all of these countries, people like me have it even worse than I do in the US but the US still feels fake like Mcdonalds.

It's great that you can see both extremes and have such a clear-eyed, honest view about the situation. There's only so much you can do.

The way I deal with it is I post comments online. It's the best I can do and the least I can do. Also, I believe that pointing out system flaws will lead to better outcomes and a better life for every honest person, rich or poor.

I was hoping it would talk about the most important tipping points, the climate ones, but unfortunately it does not.

If you're comparing critical mass in physics with critical mass in sociology, I already know you're full of it without needing to read any further.

Is there not a value in drawing interdisciplinary ties between fields? Physics underpins reality, would it not be feasible that it's laws scale to higher order complexities?

See Pepsi rebrand for answer.

Curious what conclusion you draw from this. Care to elaborate?

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My guess is it's a reference to this document [0], arguing that interdisciplinary research is indistinguishable from it. Not sure I agree, honestly.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...

That seems like a shallow dismissal

> The concept can explain everything from viral cat videos to why changing habits is so hard.

Somehow this line persuades me of exactly the opposite.

Why?

Because claims that one singular concept or idea can explain pretty much everything in life have, historically, been quite false. Worse, such claims tend to attract people who like to have one simple solution for everything, or like to have one single thing that's root of all evil, or like to have one simple explanation for everything, etc. The damage such people can incur, especially when equipped with a grandiose enough concept, have (again, historically) been quite incredible.

Thanks for explaining!

Upon reflection I believe polarization helps to draw attention.

We love black and white as species. Nuances get lost way to often.

Indeed! Reaching the critical mass in a nuclear reaction pushes things apart, while reaching the critical mass in a social movement helps pull even.more participants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com