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Musings Report 2021-27 7-3-21 What Gives Me Hope
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What Gives Me Hope
What gives you hope? There are as many answers as there are individuals and moments in time. Hope is a spectrum, from the simple pleasures (puppies, kittens, a good laugh, a hearty meal, a solitary revelation of beauty) to more complicated sources of hope (I've taken control of my own life, we reached a new understanding, my business is picking up, etc.).
At the systemic end of the spectrum are new approaches which we hope might be solutions to some of humanity's knottiest problems.
The focus of this "what gives me hope" is not something new in the sense of a novel technology, or an individual insight; it's a feature of problem-solving that has to do with the scale and approach to problem-solving.
Let's start by considering something we've all experienced, a traffic jam. Here is Eric Bonabeau's commentary on this phenomenon:
"Traffic jams are actually very complicated and mysterious. On an individual level, each driver is trying to get somewhere and is following (or breaking) certain rules, some legal (the speed limit) and others societal or personal (slow down to let another driver change into your lane).
But a traffic jam is a separate and distinct entity that emerges from those individual behaviors. Gridlock on a highway, for example, can travel backward for no apparent reason, even as the cars are moving forward."
This is an example of self-organization, what's known as emergent systems, which share these characteristics:
1. Radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems)
2. Coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time)
3. A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness")
4. it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves)
5. it is "ostensive" (it can be perceived)
Eric Bonabeau's term for how this works in nature is "swarm intelligence:" ants, bees and other insects self-organize complex, adaptive colonies from a handful of cues and behaviors that operate within individual insects..
These "rules" governing the actions of individual insects generate a remarkable "swarm intelligence" in the colonies.
A deep dive into self-organization and emergent systems would be deep indeed, so let's focus on how these principles manifest in human economies, political systems and societies.
Let's take a simple example: an individual wants to dispose of a broken refrigerator or car.
The governance system the individual inhabits has rules for disposing of bulk items and vehicles.
The rules are pretty simple: drop-off sites for appliances are here, the cost is X, and so on.
Landfills are filling up and disposal costs are rising, so local governments are raising the disposal fees to cover these higher costs.
The impact of the higher disposal fee on individuals and the environment is significant. Some percentage of individuals who want/need to dispose of bulky items cannot afford the fees or considers them an unreasonable burden, so they dump the refrigerator or car along some rural byway in the dead of night.
Soon, rural byways are littered with junked appliances and vehicles, which then signal "it's OK to dump stuff here" to others seeking to avoid the disposal fees.
This one simple rule change--higher disposal fees--and the social cue of implicit permission to dump along various byways "because others have already done so" transform a previously pristine rural environment into an ugly, sprawling dump.
Anecdotally, both Japan and the U.K. are suffering from a proliferation of abandoned vehicles and illegally dumped junk in rural areas.
Analyst Samo Burja summarized the problem here, which he argues plagues every institution: the institution's leadership make a single decision based on whatever factors seem most pressing at the moment without considering the consequences in the self-organizing system the institution influences via rules but does not actually control.
"The main bottleneck here is planning, defined as considering your actions in advance and improving the entire sequence, rather than just thinking one step at a time."
In a related way, Burja reckons that "it is in the nature of institutions to conceal decay."
In other words, the institutional bias is to conceal or forsake (i.e., "not our job") the consequences of changing rules and cues.
What gives me hope is a growing number of people are understanding that decisions made as single (i.e. expedient, not thought out) decisions have potentially enormous negative consequences on the self-organizing systems of the economy and society.
Some of these people are politicians seeking to correct obviously failing policies, others are active in civic organizations, and some are gadflies.
What I find hopeful is these people are calling attention to the potential for more effective solutions not on a grandiose scale of printing and distributing trillions of dollars or attempting to control self-organizing systems with hundreds of pages of top-down legislation/regulations, but by examining and understanding the impact of a small set of rules and cues, and changing them to effect the desired result.
In systems-speak, Donella Meadows described this as changing the parameters of the system by changing leverage points.
In self-organizing, emergent systems, every rule and cue is a leverage point.
Our economy and society are self-organizing systems of heavily siloed institutions and corporations, none of which are incentivized to consider the consequences within the entire sequence/network of their expedient decisions.
Corporations are incentivized to maximize profits by whatever means are available, politicians are incentivized to make whatever political pressure/pain they feel go away as expediently as possible, and institutions are incentivized to maintain their budgets, payroll and power by whatever means are available.
It's difficult to break through all these silos, each of which operates in a limited sphere of self-interest.
The local agency tasked with operating the disposal of vehicles and bulky items raised the disposal fees out of necessity, and no other agency or institution cared because "it's not our job."
The net result--a fast-decaying, uglified rural environment--becomes a political problem as residents complain.
Those who propose a common-sense solution--raise some other tax almost everyone pays a tiny bit to cover the costs of free disposal of bulky junk and vehicles--are enabling solutions that aren't possible in a self-organizing system of self-absorbed silos making expedient decisions without regard for their consequences in much larger sequences and systems.
Even if they fail to persuade the silos to work together, they are introducing a new pathway to small-scale solutions that don't require grandiose efforts that are the wrong scale to actually solve the problems on the local level.
That's extremely hopeful in my view.
Highlights of the Blog
Posts:
Virus Z: A Thought Experiment 7/1/21
The Systemic Risk No One Sees 6/30/21
When Expedient "Saves" Become Permanent, Ruin Is Assured 6/28/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
I almost feel like apologizing for another meal, but as noted above, a good meal is meaningful on multiple levels.
Enchiladas with homemade chili sauce and homemade corn tortillas: 1) the corn dough is rolled into balls 2) a glass pie plate is used to flatten them into tortillas 3) the tortillas are cooked on a skillet 4) tortillas are dipped in the chili sauce, filled, rolled and arranged in a glass baking pan and baked.
Then served with homemade frijoles and salad with homegrown cherry tomatoes.
From Left Field
The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could be--long read, fascinating...
The looming Arctic collapse: More than 40% of north Russian buildings are starting to crumble--yikes...
Haunting Photos Reveal a Massive Abandoned Town of Disneyesque Castles--a metaphor for the global economy?
Confronting Our Next National Health Disaster — Long-Haul Covid
The Collapse of Concrete Buildings: Dust thou art, and unto Dust shalt thou return.-- reinforced concrete a mixed blessing, as rebar rusts.... Roman bridges are still functional because they had no reinforcing steel in the concrete...
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram - Thrill Is Gone (via GFB)
The obesity wars and the education of a researcher: A personal account--don't run afoul of received scientific wisdom...
111-Year-Old’s Secret Foie Gras Diet--and as much butter as you want...
The great American divorce: We aren't acting like people who want to remain part of the same polity
Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet
‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Is the Future: Fracking techniques could be used to generate energy with no carbon emissions.--geothermal...
Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity (via GFB)
"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company." Seneca
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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