Comment by xerox13ster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xerox13ster | Hacker News Reader

>"Working" is not the natural state in a complex world! It's a testament to the combined energy and skill of many people that systems are built and kept working well enough for long enough so as to become invisible.

I just have to take issue with this as someone who grew up in a very rural, natural area and was enamored with biology, biological, and ecological systems as a kid (8-12).

The statement that "working" is not the natural state in a complex world? You're showing your ignorance of complex systems.

What of the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground cave and sediment system that stores and filters water over hundreds or thousands of years? It's massively complex and in its natural state it's working but we're draining it.

What about the weather systems in the atmosphere? Could you argue that one of the most complex systems (maybe only second to the ocean current system) on the planet is not "working" in it's natural state? Don't take an anthropomorphic perspective of it working for you. It is a complex system whose natural state is "working". If it breaks down for our purposes at this point, it is due to our combined energy pulling it from it's natural state.

Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.

It's a testament to our combined lack of regard for the true complexity of systems that we consistently build systems that fail in opaque ways, and through our actions destroy long-running complex natural systems that we don't fully understand.

He speaks as if becoming invisible is a matter of transparency, but it functions more like a veil.

Hi! Author here. You're right — but two things to consider here.

First, that quote is referring to human-made systems, not natural ones (as is the rest of the essay!) and I think our views align on whether human systems regularly work.

Second, natural systems (and all complex-enough systems) are always running in some degraded fashion. So what "working" means is ambiguous: they are broken, yet accomplishing the goal. The quote from the essay refers to "working" in the "free of faults" sense, in which I again think our views align.

"they are broken, yet accomplishing the goal."

Are they really either of those two things? Natural systems have no "goal", they just are. If they change, they change. If they stay the same, they stay the same. Because there is no goal, there is no "broken". It is only we who assign some sort of meaning to them and characterize them as "working", either because they meet our needs, or just because we are inherently impressed by complex systems.

I’ve read recently about natural systems in the book Antifragile. It’s interesting how those systems can become better.

If you follow through on there being no goal, there is no working or not-working state, in which case it bears no relevancy on the question of whether "Working" is not the natural state in a complex world!

Or rather, you could say TFA is made more correct, by virtue of “working” not being a natural state in the first place.

But if we allow room to anthropomorphize, we can basically state that the natural goal of a natural system is to keep doing what it do, at least in regards to the larger outcomes. And for some strange reason, these systems are shockingly difficult to influence at meaningful scale in ways that are rarely true for the systems we design. In one sense, they continue to operate despite continuous minor and possibly major (but not catastrophically so, by definition) perturbations to their state

You need to burn ridiculous quantities of dino juice to influence the weather system. You need to look at windows a little funny to bring it to a complete halt. You need to bully only few substations to bring down the electrical grid.

holy unrelated discussion, batman! it sure yaps

> Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.

It has evolved over millions of years. The evolution included billions of variants that didn't work and died before being able to reproduce.

And even then, are you saying everyone's brain is perfect and never needs any external intervention?

On top of that, we have to continually tend to our bodies, feed them fuel (sometimes at risk of life and limb), exercise them, clean them, tend to them, visit the doctor, take medicine/drugs, etc., just to keep them in good shape. And they eventually have a 100% failure rate.

"Working" here means "operating according to specification or intent", not just "operating". Natural systems have no specification or intent.

Nature as we experience it now took millions of years to get to this point. The "working" state we have now is a result of a great many things coming together into a - for us humans - local minima that just happens to support life as it exists. And yet for humans in particular, things still don't work that well per se. There are generic diseases, mutations, etc that we have found varying ways to offset artificially. We - and all other animals - also get old, which is just short for all systems breaking down over time. Maybe all that can be considered "working" at a macro level, but it sucks at the micro.

I guess this is the distinction between a complex system and a complicated system.

Simple made easy would agree with you

I didn't read the article, but I read your response and it feels a bit heavy handed.

> What about the weather systems in the atmosphere? Could you argue that one of the most complex systems (maybe only second to the ocean current system) on the planet is not "working" in it's natural state?

Over geologic timespans, this is all just temporary thermodynamics. We will not always receive the same amount of energy over the sun. It will vary dramatically as the sun moves through its solar lifecycle.

Everything evolved around these dynamics in their current metastable states. Lots of optimization flux ebbing and flowing around the larger gradients and salients. All subject to perturbation such as asteroids and atmospheric carbon and solar death.

Life on earth has existed a third the age of the universe. That's a long time. Complex life has less than 600 million years left, and that's an upper bound estimate.

> Your limbic system is very very complex and is naturally in a state of working. No human intervention.

If you move around enough. If you vegetate on the couch all day, it's not.

We evolved biology that works under the conditions we evolved under. Through us into new conditions and you stretch the behaviors of these systems.

We evolved under the gas energy exchange of our gravity well. Put us into a different environment and everything breaks. Give us little pocket dopamine rectangles and suddenly we stop reproducing.

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