Slashdot Mirror
On The Collapse of Complex Societies
One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
One butterfly flapping its wings cannot lead to the destruction of the sun. Nature has built in redundancy. So do human societies. Diamond's book (Guns Germ and Steel) is a hodgepodge of deterministic gibberish.
Slashdot: On The Collapse of Complex Web Servers
Dewd just dl CivII off kazaa and learn all u need 2 know about society!!
Okay I admit it, I'm an idiot.
Who are y oo ?
I go to UCLA and had the unique opportunity to study Guns, Germs, and Steel among other books with Jeffery Miller, pre-eminent microbiologist. A highlight was a guest discussion with Jared. The depth and breadth of his knowledge is amazing, and he is, in my professors words "a national treasure."
The adage popular then was that students who got A's did the technical work, while people who managed only C's wound up running things.
That this adage may no longer hold true seems like progress.
After all those years of hard work, getting ready to rule the world, they switch the rules of the game just as I leave!
Like guarding the Oil Ministry while letting the National Museum, Library, and more fall to looters? If that isn't dumbass, not to mention tragic in its disregard for the whole world's cultural heritage, I don't know what is.
sulli
RTFJ.
First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives.
-- My girlfriend and I will be together forever.
Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem.
-- She is not interested in other guys, we are simply growing closer.
Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
-- Her dating other guys is simply a cry for more attention.
Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so.
-- I will win her back with chocolates and poetry.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Individuals do.
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This is obviously some strange usage of the word "science" that I wasn't previously aware of.
was telling one girl that another had sex with her football star boyfriend...
WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?: JARED DIAMOND
Education is supposed to be about teachers imparting knowledge to students. As every teacher knows, though, if you have a good group of students, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their supposed teachers and challenging their assumptions. That's an experience that I've been through in the last couple of months, when for the first time in my academic career I gave a course to undergraduates, highly motivated UCLA undergraduates, on collapses of societies. Why is it that some societies in the past have collapsed while others have not? I was discussing famous collapses such as those of the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatan, Easter Island society in the Pacific, Angkor Wat in southeast Asia, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Fertile Crescent societies, and Harappan Indus Valley societies. These are all societies that we've realized, from archaeological discoveries in the last 20 years, hammered away at their own environments and destroyed themselves in part by undermining the environmental resources on which they depended.
For example, the Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether -- if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now -- people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.
This question, why societies make disastrous decisions and destroy themselves, is one that not only surprised my UCLA undergraduates, but also astonishes professional historians studying collapses of past societies. The most cited book on the subject of the collapse of societies is by the historian, Joseph Tainter. It's entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter, in discussing ancient collapses, rejected the possibility that those collapses might be due to environmental management because it seemed so unlikely to him. Here's what Joseph Tainter said: "As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken towards a resolution. With their administrative structure and their capacity to allocate labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best. It is curious that they would collapse when faced with precisely those conditions that they are equipped to circumvent." Joseph Tainter concluded that the collapses of all these ancient societies couldn't possibly be due to environmental mismanagement, because they would never make these bad mistakes. Yet it's now clear that they did make these bad mistakes.
My UCLA undergraduates, and Joseph Tainter as well, ha
People are basically selfish assholes. As time goes on, they think more and more about themselves and less about how their actions impact others. As society gets more complex and has more technology, this is amplified - now instead of being an asshole in my own little area, I can be a much bigger asshole and affect more people. ("Gee...I don't see a problem with speakers that'll rattle a whole city block.")
:)
Raises stress, causes more tension and then boom.
At least that's my take...think I may be a bit too cynical
The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead.
But for the 10% of slacker, cannibalistic, sun worshipping Easter Islanders this was a golden age.
Fisheries are being depleted around the planet. In each case that the problem is identified ahead of time, the local fishing industry mobilizes to prevent restrictions on their own fishing. They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.
I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.
Blame Nature, that vengeful bastard is always out to get us!
Jared Diamond was the speaker at my graduation & I've heard a few of his talks at UCLA. He pointed out that the factor that caused the collapse of both the Easter Island civilization and (probably) the Mayan civilization is now thought to be the same: Logging. Both civilizations overlogged the surrounding forest ecosystems which sustained them, resulting ultimately in a collapse of agriculture. Diamond wondered what might have been going through the mind of the Easter Islander who felled the last tree on the island. He guessed that it might just have been thoughts that would resonate today: "Hey, keeping my job is more important than preserving the environment".
Jews aren't black, dumbass.
Neither the Israelites, the Egyptians, nor the Arabs were "black" in biblical times. If they had been, then large numbers of them would stll be "black" today.
The essay presents one example of the civilization that wiped out all of the trees it depended on. If that civilization allowed for the ownership of pieces of land, the individuals with a little more foresight could conserve the trees on their plots of land. On the other hand, if every tree belongs to the person who cut it down, then even if the majority of the society is conscious of the problem, the nearsighted minority is still able to cut down the last tree.
The problem with any kind of "public" resource is that it doesn't belong to everyone -- it belongs to noone. Noone cares enough about it to protect or conserve it. Everyone just wants to grab as big a piece as possible.
...that the goatse hole is a sign of impending dume for this sivilization. What do you think?
NAKED PR10ST!!!!!!!!
Man, I'm so sick of Jared. You know, I can't get a sandwhich at Subway or watch TV without his smug kisser staring back at me. Yeah, Jared, congrats on losing the weight. That was an accomplishment, I admit. But that's not enough to qualify you as a permanent celebrity in my book. Now he's using his newfound fame to write about the collapse of society? Jimminy Fuckin' Cricket! When are we going to stop getting Jared thrown at us?
An intriguing essay and one that most of us ought to ponder as we sit in the here and now, as groups, making decisions, watching things happen, recogizing or ignoring problems.
One thing is that many members of a group don't like to confront problems or issues. Frankly, it's too damn uncomfortable for many people to come face problems whose evident solution may well demand of them that they endure change or discomfort. We're creatures of habit and we don't like change (shoot, some people won't make a change for the better even if you lead them to water), even if events suggest that change might be in our better long-term interest.
Second, groups are composed of individuals with greater and lesser abilities to influence group decision making. For example, decisions by one typical homeless person are less likely to impact the group's overall decisions than are decisions by a large stockholder of Exxon-Mobil, just to take an illustrative example. It turns out that decision makers at EXOM may well perceive threats and benefits differently than the average homeless person, and even differently than an average cross-section of individuals in the group we call society.
From an environmental perspective, beneficiaries of extractive industries don't necessarily feel a balanced level of pain for their actions: some of the consequences won't be felt for a lifetime. (Same deferred consequence problems applies to political decisions in general).
Easter Island's environmental demise probably wasn't accelerated due a few powerful individuals benefitting out of proportion to the changes made to their environment.
But it's certain in our modern industrialized society that some points of view are going to be affected because some individuals will perceive current benefits to outweigh possible long-term adverse consequences. Those individuals have more influence than an average person. They may even be right sometimes in their views. But it's important to know the frame of mind where those views are born.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And how do you determine if it was my pollution on my property that harmed your air?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
The U.S. has biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. All others have WMD.
Cheers,
W00t
Get Your War On 23
I believe the opposite. If societies acted as a group, probably very few stupid decisions would be made. But societies don't act as groups. The members of societies act as individuals.
It comes down to greed and human nature. Most people are extremely selfish and hypocritical, and this is be basis of most "stupid" decisions.
We, as a species, are polluting our planet. Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one. A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
The depletion of fish stock is an excellent example. 6 billion people catching and eating fish every day without regard to the existing fish supplies would deplete the oceans of fish. Even as we speak, several varieties of fish are on the verge of distinction.
The world is overpopulated.
The goals of a limited liability corporation are expressly to make profit for a group of shielded remote elite executives.
Hmmm. What effects of this do we now see?
And these are the most powerful organizations in the world today...
It's "no one" not "noone".
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
We're talking about societies.
How do you explain that the society of Israeli Jews is failing due to "Under-Population".
In fact, they will be a significan minorty in 50 years. Palestinians have significantly positive birth rates, while Jews just are procreating enough.
This guy doesn't realize something. We can't see the Forest from the Trees. But things change. We grow forests overnight practically these days. In Minnesota, far more trees are planted each year, than harvested.
Modern societies don't fail due to Natural Resources. They fail because we can't seem to get along with each other. Or, we can't get along with our neighbors. Or, our neighbors hate us, and conquer us.
Modern societies fail because they don't value life. For instance, Genocide, and dare I say Abortion?
but if I came across the last tree on an island which is quickly converting to cannabalism, my thought would be closer to "building a boat and getting my ass off this island is more important than preserving the environment."
The author complains that history isn't treated as a science, but offers nothing more than anecdotes. What he's groping for is a theory of economic externalities. But he doesn't have one.
Externalities involve unloading some of your costs onto someone else. Pollution is the classic example, as is spam. Windows bugs are another; the costs are borne by users, not Microsoft. A major social question is the extent to which externalities should be accounted for and billed back to the source. Most of the political arguments over "litigation reform" and "deregulation" involve this issue.
Classically, the problem with externalities was that accounting for them was technically difficult and expensive, more expensive than the value of tracking them. In the computer era, this is less of an issue than it used to be. Measuring and tracking things is now a cheap operation. We're seeing some of this, in the form of "road-usage fees". It's still possible for tracking to cost more than the value of the thing being tracked; long-distance phone billing costs more than long-distance call transmission, for example. There's a legitimate economic tradeoff argument.
But mostly, externality issues are resolved by power, not accounting. Understanding this gives one insight into how societies function.
This is what makes being human so frickin' cool. We have these traits that have been given to us by way of evolution. We're self-centered, because nature has taught us that no one else is going to look out for #1 quite like ourselves. But paradoxically, we expect everyone around us to yield. E.g. driving in traffic. That latter trait really glows in a modern civilization. It's fascinating this friction of realization and expectation.
Those that were wise and saved their trees would have been the first to have been eaten. Individual property rights mean diddly when the mob says so.
"These are my trees go away 100's of people you can't have them."
mob - "Oh, we didn't realize, they're not yours if you're dead right?"
"No I guess not...."
(awkward silence)
-- taking over the world, we are.
We can study the U.S. society for clues to why societies become self-destructive:
History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories
In the case of the U.S. government, the self-destruction seems to be due to government secrecy and to the availability of easy money by fostering corruption.
Question: Shouldn't U.S. vice president Dick Cheney be investigated for using his government influence to make money? Pre-arranged no-bid contracts were given to his former company, Halliburton. In the past such conflict of interest would have resulted in a prison term.
Is this short essey? If my teacher ever asked me to write short essey, I made sure I wouldn't use more than ten minutes writing it, max 200 words.. Looks like this guy just want's to be the teachers pet.
Societies (sp) collapse when the seperation between the haves and the have-nots grows to large.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
I don't recall butterflies being mentioned in "Guns, Germs, & Steel." Perhaps I missed it.
The point of the book, in case you missed it, is that the classic argument (they're savages, we're civilized) is not a scientific approach to the question of why certain achievements occurred in Eurasia rather than Africa, the Americas, or Oceania.
In fact, the arguments are not deterministic. The advantages that peoples had on a particular continent did not a priori determine their success, but does provide an explanation for why some societies could "advance" more rapidly than others.
"Those examples illustrate situations in which a society fails to solve perceived problems because the maintenance of the problem is good for some people. In contrast to that so-called rational behavior, there are also failures to attempt to solve perceived problems that economists consider "irrational behavior": that is, the behavior is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when all of us are torn by clashes of values within each person. We may be strongly attached to a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value that we admire. "
Finally, I understand why we continue the drug war...
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
It was a good read, but I noticed his examples did not touch on many of the more taboo subjects the US faces. For instance I think society should start to think about population control. But that would upset a lot of religious groups, and it will be a huge hurdle to coax society to turn around a system that is currently very skewed towards pro-creation (tax cuts, free schooling, most corporate health plans are by law forced to charge the same for 1 child vs 10 children, etc).
I can think of a bunch of stuff our society currently seems to be heading for trouble in the next 100 years, but I'm fearful to publically express those views, since I would be lynched by political correctness and corporate america(and I'm not even talking about race relations).
But I'm not very worried, since when the going gets bad, society tends to do a hard 180 without many complaints. Look to the history of China and India relating to population control. When the US has 1 billion people, we'll do a sudden 180 as well. Of course, we could soften the blow on many of these issues if we started to tackle them now-- but I do not consider humans as a whole to be that far above the apes on the intelligence chain to claim rational and logical tought.
The Easter Islanders didn't have the Lorax speaking for the trees? I guess we're lucky.
I don't have any moderation points or I'd mark this one was funny -- cause it is.
Basically, all they said was that there are a class of problems that indivualhumans are not good at solving, and that governements are nor perfect.
It would be more interesting if he at least discusssed possible ways to fix the problem.
Take the simple case of lawsuits. The class action lawsuit was designed to solve the specific kinds of problems mentioned by the author. The author should have discussed the value/flaws.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Its only paranoia until the sky really is falling....
"While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions."
My morale: Now when we know that we have a future, we can party as if there was no tomorrow.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a useful device for understanding how rational decisions for the individual can lead to irrational decisions for the group. In addition to being used by game theorists and in AI (where readers of Slashdot may have seen it), it is a very basic illustrative tool used in political science to explain behavior.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
EOM
If I have a piece of land that contains a river and I put a dam on it, I'm happy but my downstream neighbours are out of luck. Both of us "own" the river but I'm the only one that can control it or enjoy it. Similarly, If I dump toxic waste in the downstream portion of my river, I can still enjoy the upstream portion while my downstream neighbours are out of luck.
In this case, the river must be viewed as community property which is managed by the community (much the same way as a condominium -- with community bylaws). Any attempt to make it individual property will only lead to disaster.
The museums were responsible for the renaissance happening. Were it not for the "dusty scrolls that society no longer cared for", europe and consequently the US might never have gotten out of the dark ages and we'd still be dealing with plague after plague.
There's a different mindset that develops in individualistic societies compared to collectivist societies, and private property ownership is one factor.
Individual property ownership is important, because no one is a better steward of a resource than when they have a direct personal stake... companies and governments tend to look at ledgers and law books, and can be some of the worst transgressors when it comes to mismanagement.
For instance, the collectivist societies that made up the former communist bloc of eastern Europe (where everything was government owned, and they had no environmental movement) did absolutely terrible things to their environment, far out of proportion to similarly-populated western countries.
There are certainly people who would be dumb enough (or greedy enough) to destroy/pillage/pollute/clear-cut land that they actually owned... but I'd have to think that number would be small... nobody wants to own a wasteland. When your property is ruined, you have lost property value, resale potential, and any long-term benefit you might derive from that investment.
Seriously, who here has ever ridden with a buddy in a rental car? Many of my acquaintances are quite hard on such vehicles... when I ask them why, the response is always the same: "Hey, it's a rental!"
that one statement speaks volumes.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
He was probably thinking "I'm sure there are a few more trees on the other side of the island."
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The article is interesting, but perhaps would be better titled if it mentioned the fact that the causes of these collapses were going to focus on environmental reasons. The author seems to note that some societies have collapsed for other reasons, but never really mentions that his only focus is on those who seem to have collapsed for environmental reasons. I guess my primary problem with this article is it is very simplistic. Because of this one cause, "A", "B" happened. Now, he covers four "causes" but his writing reflects an interesting lack of depth in connecting the causes to the outcome. Rarely is one action the only cause of a reaction. Interesting veiwpoint, however. Of course, it is hardly unique. Wish I had time to throw some links together on the hundreds of articles written on this exact subject. I'd suggest doing a google search on global warming...
No.
It was because their religion predicated their rulers repeatedly stabbing their foreskins with stingray spines.
That, and obviously, not enough drugs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Are you people still talking about the earth? ;)
:wq
Don't say I didn't tell you so!
We in the United States need not fear the collapse of our society; I have it on good authority that Congress will shortly pass a bill outlawing such a collapse.
--the one I read was that advanced civilization came about from beer. Guys accidentaly had some wild grain ferment in some gourd, they drink/eat it, get drunk, liked it. Being hunter gatherer's, they stripped the local grain supply, moved on until they found abundance. Then your scenario takes over, controlled agriculture comes about, they settle in one area, villages arise, trade starts, division of labor, etc, etc.
Probably fire and metal working in there, too, someplace, but I think beer and then therefore an abundance of drunk babes did most of it. Occams razor.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Birth rates fall precipitously as societies become richer. Most "developed" societies have birth rates well below the replacement rate. The trend is so dramatic that the latest population projections from the U.N., IIRC, show worldwide population peaking in something like 2050 and declining from there.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
please moderate accordingly
My point being: "what caliber of leaders are you going to get when part of the job description involves regularly jabbing unsanitary parts of dead animals into your wee-wee to provide blood to nourish your weirdo gods?"
When Bush was elected, or when Bush attacked Iraq, or when the health care plan was shot down, or when more money got allocated to prisons than crime prevention, those were "decisions that society made".
By your reasoning, we should say that "people don't make decisions, neurons do". But that's an unnecessarily narrow definition of the term "decision".
For example, I recently saw Diamond on CSPAN talking about his ideas. As an example of societies that failed/didn't fail to develop, he compared Paraguay to Switzerland. The irony is, Paraguay, under the 19th century dictator Francisco Lopez, was on its way to developing when it lost the devastating War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Behind this war was the manipulation of British diplomacy, horrified by Paraguay's opposition to free trade and use of tarrifs against British good to stimulate local economic development; Paraguay was crushed by war, the same way Egypt's efforts to develop under Mohammed Ali were crushed by war with England three decades earlier.
Historians like Diamond will always find cultural or geographical explanations for development and underdevelopment, but they will never examine too closely the role of colonialism, war and politics. That might be hitting too close to home.
-- you're cool word -anosognosia- explains political parties and why fanatical party member A can clearly see the faults in party B, but not in his own party.
Thanks, I always knew they were nuts, just didn't know there was an exact word for it!
hmm, I guess that applies to operating systems and editors, too....
IMHO Guns, Germs and Steel is a work of such importance - the offering of a sound anthropoligical explanation for differing successes of ethnic groups on the basis of something other than race (namely, environment, researched and explained in painstaking detail) - that ignorance of its content amounts to being uneducated. It would be like not knowing what the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is.
Thanks to Diamond we have a concise explanation for why the societies on the Eurasian continent were so much more conventionally successful than those in Africa, the Americas, or Oceania: a massive contiguous landmass with a predominant latitudinal axis.
This simple factor had the (in retrospect) obvious consequence of allowing flora and fauna (including germs) to traverse the entire landmass easily. In other words, because environmental resources were so easily and rapidly able to proliferate and become distributed, everything from farming, settlement and accompanying task specialization, and idea proliferation (literacy and technology) spread easily, including fast-evolving bugs and human immunity to them.
Jump to the Americas/Africa/Australia and you have pathetically limited resources in comparison - far fewer indigenous domesticable crops, virtually no large indigenous domesticable animals, massive climatic barriers (jungle, desert) preventing the spread of such resources and therefore of societies utilizing them, far lower population as a result of these factors, and therefore far less rapid development of civilization. One major difference was lack of immunity to lots of germs that evolved over millennia with the help of nearby domesticable animals, and, voila, now we know why 20 million people in the Americas died of germs introduced by a few boatloads of Spaniards and not the other way around.
If this explanation for why people with dark skin just seem throughout 99% of human history to have done less well than people with light skin is not an important accomplishment - as an alternative to a genetically-based explanation which is, make no mistake, lurking in the back of most people's minds - then by God I don't know what is.
...that attempted to present itself as historically accurate. As a trained historian I found it difficult to finish his book because the whole things was built on shoddy premise after shoddy premise. Sort of a less retarded Chariots of the Gods... It was written in an attractive style, but for accuracy it is basically a fraud.
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SARS is one of those great biological opportunities that doesn't happen everyday. I'm surprised that there's not a "Hug a SARS Victim" campaign underway. It certainly shows a complete ignorance of the species which is really what underscores the fact that humanity may make nice toys, but it's still a collection of dumbfounded dipshits.
Humanity has no appreciation for a biological arms-race that will thin the herd and leave those who survive in a position of being able to cope with the new virus. Instead, the process is thwarted completely, leaving tens of billions of weak individuals where hundreds of millions of stronger individuals would be better off for having survived.
Sure this sounds silly or maybe even cruel, but in a hundred years at the current rate of population growth, if nature isn't producing a SARS-level outbreak of some kind you can bet your ass the governments of the world will. And then what will be the excuse?...profit shortfalls in some MEGA-PHARMA corp result in a 2 to 5 year moratorium on vaccine research...hand wringing, piles of dead bodies everywhere. It will be a wonderful time to ride a pale horse. Humanity is all about deferred suffering.
When it comes down to it, the evolution of everything on this planet is red in tooth and claw. Just because you can't see the critters, doesn't mean you're not prey.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
one thing that has become apparent in recent years is the increasing corrosion of scientific thinking with political ideology.
Here's the condensed version of the 6,800 word manifesto, with regard to humanity and its environmental problems. Presented to you in 23 words:
Don't procrastinate.
Don't assume.
Admit to knowing that you don't know.
Better late than never is a lie. There is a Too Late.
The rest is filler.
This article seems a bit anthropomormpic. Example: his example of a false analogy is that Viking settlers in Iceland assumed that they could clear-cut land in Iceland and not worry about soil erosion because Norwegian soil is heavier and not subject to wind erosion. I seriously doubt that the Vikings had a working knowledge of soil erosion at all, let alone that any conscious analogy figured into their land use plans in Iceland. More likely they didn't think about it at all, any more than leopards consciously think about maintaining an ideal prey population while they hunt.
The finger of blame falls squarely on Chinese society. Read "China and SARS" by "The Economist". The majority of Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China support Beijing, and the Chinese in Beijing deliberately hid the extent of the epidemic and directly caused it to spread to the rest of the world.
The point is that there is nothing inevitable about human disasters: overpopulation, SARS epidemic, etc. We can all choose to act like Westerners and prevent a disaster. The alternative is to act like the Chinese and to rush headlong into disaster.
The choice is ours. Let's choose to be Westerners.
There are those of us in the archaeology profession who dedicate their entire careers to studying the processes behind the collapse of civilizations. The critical thing that Diamond fails to recognize is his own hidebound ethnocentric assumption about what collapse actually is. The examples he uses in his discussions (the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, the Maya) have one major thing in common: the fact that commonplace Euro-American historical accounts treat these societies as if they "disappeared."
Diamond seems to accept such a premise in spite of strong archaeological evidence that it is nonsense. The descendants of the Classic Period Maya, the Anasazi, and all his other examples are all very much alive today and most still live on or near the ancestral lands from which they supposedly "vanished" centuries ago.
Folks who have thought about this issue for a little longer than Diamond recognize continuity between groups that may have undergone major socio-economic changes resulting from systemic conflicts between they way people made their living and the stresses that the natural or cultural environment could handle. So, instead of collapse, what we are really talking about is *reorganization.* Seen in this light, the Civil War could be viewed as a major period of such reorganization...in which the Federalist system "collapsed" and was replaced by the National system. This example points out another omission of Diamond's, namely that some societies, such as the Mississippian Chiefdoms of the southeastern US, shifted organization in the presence of abundant natural resources and collapsed sheerly as the result of conflicting social forces.
In sum, I would take any of Diamond's work with an entire shaker of salt grains, recognizing his tendency toward ethnocentrism and environmental determinism.
Instead, here are a few sometimes thick, but much more cogent resources on collapse and reorganization.
Culbert, T. Patrick (editor)
1972 The Classic Maya Collapse. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Yoffee, Norman and George L. Cowgill
1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by N. Yoffee and G. L. Cowgill, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Weiss, H., M. -A. Courty, W. Wetterstrom, F. Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow and A. Curnow
1993 The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millenium North Mesopotamian Civilization. Science 261:995-1004.
Blanton, Richard E., Stephen A. Kowalewski, Gary M. Feinman and Laura M. Finsten
1993 Ancient Mesoamerica. Second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
If economics was any good at analysing this sort of thing, then we'd have a series of principles in force acting against the short-term exploitation of fragile resources.
But Diamond addresses economics only once in the article, where he refers to 'discounting' of resources - if the percieved benefit of harvesting all the resources now, and investing the profits elsewhere, outwieghs the calculated benefits of harvesting the resource over a number of years (read: sustainability), then the 'rational' economic argument is to harvest now, and fuck the future.
Economics, outside of strict financial / manufacturing / internal human activities, is pure voodoo, and should never be taken too seriously.
Now there's a flame for ya!
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Mod this parent UP!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Evidently, you missed the point entirely. The main reason a free society allows gun ownership is so that a law-abiding citizen is able to protect herself from an assault by a criminal. (Even the possibility of a potential victim being armed is a deterrent.)
Historians like Diamond will always find cultural or geographical explanations for development and underdevelopment, but they will never examine too closely the role of colonialism, war and politics. That might be hitting too close to home.
Huh? This is a gross misreading of Diamond. He was talking in 'GGS' about why Europe in particular was able to conquer and colonize. Blaut would have agreed and did agree in 'The Colonizer's Model of the World' with much of this assertion.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Most "developed" societies have birth rates well below the replacement rate.
Agreed.
For example, my parents have four children and three grandchildren.
It's unlikely that they will have any more grandchildren, and two of the grandchildren (both adults) do not want or plan to have any children of their own.
So, unless the youngest wants kids, the line will die out, and the delta population from my parents' time will be -2 after we all die.
This is probably an extreme example, but it is in no way unique.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
ahhh shit, I already posted in this thread or I'd mod you.
+1 Funny
+1 Obviously Read Article Modifier
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
I call bullshit on this one. Show some links and back up your statements.
The "BC dept. of forestry" is actually called the BC Ministry of Forests. For some information from them about wood density, you could start with this paper on hemlock density. From the summary (Page 39):
Hmm, one coastal species down. You could look here next.Here is some info on biodiversity Disturbance is a natural part of succession, and any removal of trees interferes with the forest ecosystem. Many forest systems depend on a major disturbance such as fire for regeneration, which is why properly managed clear cuts can actually be beneficial for some species (hint - look at the age distribution of trees within old growth stands - they are often within a few years of age for species such as fir). Biodiversity is greatly impacted by succession, and while poor forest management (guided by short-term economic goals such as unemployment rates) will screw things up, it is only a question of degree.
As I understand it, the critical factors in managing the forest are how much impact a given management practice will have:
It is a gross simplification to say that clearcuts are bad, let alone to say that clearcuts are bad for all tree species in every biogeoclimatic zone.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
This book written by Carroll Quigley (a late professor of history at Georgetown and Bill Clinton's former Rhodes' Scholar mentor) and Harry Hogan is another good book which delineates examples from world history about how complex societies rise and fall.
Another Quigley book, Weapon Systems and Stability makes the connection between the rise and fall of civilizations and the style of weapons they forged and used, since usually war precipitates the destruction of cultures. It's out of print, but should be available at a university library or via ILL.
Sometimes, dissappointly, a statement is made which rightly or wrongly causes me to immediately dismiss anything else the author may have had to say.
The two leading statements of the linked article are a case in point.
quote:
"Education is supposed to be about teachers imparting knowledge to students."
No it isn't.
quote:
"As every teacher knows, though, if you have a good group of students, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their supposed teachers and challenging their assumptions."
No it's not.
Why bother reading the rest?
The CBS show, "60 Minutes" told the story last Sunday. Cheney arranged to change the law, so that when he used the government to make money, it was no longer illegal.
That is such a thoughtfull comment. (If I had mod points right now, I'd give you all of them if I could.)
When I was reading his paper, it reminded me of the tendencies of government. Like how governments insist on imposing a tax "give people a safety net", but that tax causes economic harm, so that causes the government to want to pass more laws and taxes to "help the people in need", which causes things to get worse and so on.... eventually the system collapese on its own weight like the former USSR.
I think the same is true with his observations. The real solution to his issues are a heavy dose of individual liberty and upholding of individual property rights. But contrary to the trends he mentioned. I do believe individuals can make a difference. People who stand up and assert their own rights, make it less costly and safer for every one else arround them to do it too.
In that sense, the biggest threat is not enviromental, but political to our freedoms.
Nope. Doesn't work.
I live in one of the "deforestation frontiers" mentioned.
All the farmers, and "businessmen", and "interested public officials" I know and hear about just want to find more and better ways to harvest that wood without interference from government or irs or greens.
They usually do.
They consider themselves "stupid", or "disadvantaged", or "defrauded" if they don't. Their wives, family, neighbours, friends and strangers goad them to it. Not to mention the "businessmen" and "officials". Which, if the poor sap continues to hold out, is when bullets start to fly in the night.
Not surprisingly, public "ecological awareness" campaigns get a lot of lip service, but not much compliance.
The only instance I've seen eco-laws actually used, here in the backwoods, was when one political clan decided to settle some score with another one, that had more chips riding on "discreet" farm-clearing.
So, nope.
Cretinous malicious ignorance has massive blinding inertia. Or... which philosopher was it that bought all the olive presses on the island ?
Only the beaver could really stand the test
My God I must be the only person on the planet that's ever heard that song.... here's hoping you have too.
And thus, Canada is a sucker for helping the United States.
Societies collapse partly because they have poor leaders:
President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been arrested a total of 5 times. Here are some records:
President of the U.S. George W. Bush DUI Arrest record #1. (President Bush's date of birth is 07/6/46. The date on the record is an error.)
President of the U.S. George W. Bush DUI Arrest record #2.
Vice President of the U.S. Dick Cheney DUI Arrest record #1.
Vice President of the U.S. Dick Cheney DUI Arrest record #2.
Does that imply any differences between Mayan religious practices and the modern market system ? :>
first p0rn!
Conservatives bitch about how the ayr-ahbs don't have any mechanism for building wealth except oil. Here's this fantabulous museum, gets blown to shit, proof that ayr-ahbs have more going on than oil, and poof back to square one. Genius. You are a moral monster.
People in Africa, Asia and other "non-civilized" (high emphasis on the double quotes, please!) are of different mentality, that's all. They are connected to nature more than the white man. As a result, they have continued to practice the same way of living for thousands of years, unaltered. Don't forget that nature forces them to solve different problems than us. Also don't forget the over-exploitation of their natural resources by the white man the last centuries.
In my opinion, they are civilized as much as we do. Just because they are different, does not make them uncivilized. They do have social rules, albeit different than ours. They have culture. They just lack the motivation to expand their technology, maybe due to climatic conditions forcing them to a particular way of living.
What I envy about them is that they are calm and more warm than the white man. Under normal circumstances (not war, extreme famine etc), they are friendlier than us. Maybe it is the technological race and the too much technology that has alienated us from our more humane instincts.
All these are my thoughts of course, accompanied by a big 'maybe'. Don't judge'em too hard!!!
Complex societies to be succesful require a sense of identity.
Museums like this contribute to that.
And in case you did not realize it, one of the most important money earners today is tourism.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... male masturbation.
Think about all those spermatozoids!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As a matter of a fact, society is the aggregation of individual decisions. The key issue here is how the aggregation works.
This kind of decision making (based on complete knowledge) can be modelled using game theory, and the results are often counterintuitive.
For one thing society as a whole cannot be said to "want" anything, because it is easy to construct a situation in which a society "wants" A more than B, B more than C and C more than A, which is clearly irrational.
So there is no such thing as democracy in the sense of public institutions that determine and carry out "the will of the people". Democracy is always sort of an approximation. The majority of Americans didn't want George W Bush, and the majority of the French didn't want Chirac, but the countries are still considered democracies. The relations of the two countries suffered afterwards. Was that the will of the people?
I believe its real contribution of democracy is that the election process tends to keep politicians on their toes, and term limits are a natural cleansing process. the free press is also very important.
Another counterintuitive idea is the "Nash Equilibrium". It is a situation in which none of the players in the game can improve their situations by unilaterally changing their behavior. Since no one has any incentive to change his behavior, the situation is stable. The counterintuitive part is that there can be more than one such equilibrium in a given "game", and that they don't necessarily maximize the benefits of the players.
So you could think of Saddam's regime as a Nash equilibrium. It'S bad news, but there's no way out (without an external push).
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Most people are greedy, selfish and stupid. And in other news.....
The pipeline through Afghanistan has already been started:
http://www.paknews.com/flash.php?id=8&date1=2003-
Last Sunday the CBS show "60 Minutes" discussed the conflict of interest. I'm not the only one who thinks there is conflict of interest. 50 years ago, President Eisenhower warned about the "Military-Industrial Complex".
See Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War
(Brown and Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton)
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2003_39/news/10427-1
"The Bush-Cheney team has turned the United States into a family business", says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War.
Computers, ants don't make descisions, they react to stimuli. If your definition of making a decision is reacting to a stimulus (and it seems to be) then you are correct, neurons make decisions.
Making a decision requires that you consider choices. It requires concious thought. Neither ants nor computers are capable of conscious thought and therefore cannot and do not make decisions.
Bush is not a society, he is an individual.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Actually, according to the statistics, it doesn't: if you have a gun, you are more likely to be shot/injured/killed.
check it out at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm
Intersting reading (and I hope the link is still current).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Daniel Quinn, in "The Story of B" suggests it is our surplusses of food that cause the population problems. Shipping surplusses to unsustainable societies guarantees starvation.
I thought you were talking about the book: http://books.cambridge.org/052138673X.htm
I had a Plants and Man class at the UW-Madison where we used that as the textbook - a long with LOTS of extra handouts.
8-PP
Something moving from a low energy state to an even lower energy state without passing through the invervening states is quantom tunneling. All the air going from the bottom of Earth's gravity well (low PE) to the bottom of the Sun's (lower PE) without going through space (high PE) would be a classic example of tunneling, if it ever happened.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
An acquaintance of mine says she traveled in the same social circles as Cheney, and he was known as a heavy drinker. This was much less than 30 years ago.
Find a recovered alcoholic. He or she will tell you, "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic", even if the person doesn't drink.
that mean I don't have to pay back that money I owe you?
Funny? Troll? Flamebait? No! This guy deserves a Nobel prize!
We are afforded guns to keep a militia which was meant to prevent the federal gov't from becoming too powerful.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Nothing in there about having the guns to protect yourself from criminals. Honestly, unless you fear the neighborhood that you live in so much that you sleep with a loaded gun next to you (perfectly legal) there is no reason to have your guns not locked up in a safe. And somehow I don't think that will help you when a person breaks into your house.
-- taking over the world, we are.
My father owns over a hundred acres in Maine. Most of that land has been logged at least four times over the past 170 years. The only area that is not forest right now is about four acres of wetland marsh and about one acre of lawn around his house.
One of the poplar groves had been getting fairly dense so he had one of his neighbors, who happens to be a logger, selectively cut about five acres. This man specializes in low impact forestry. He's the only logger I know who still uses draft horses to drag out logs. He cuts the trees very lot to the ground to minimize stumps. Once the trees are down he hitches a few at a time to the horses and just says "Landing." To the horse, "Landing" just means go to where we left the water trough at this job site.
He did the logging in the fall. The next spring you couldn't tell the area had been logged unless you knew the area very well. He got two tractor trailer loads of lumber and pulpwood out of those five acres.
Selective cutting takes a lot more care, training, and labor. But it is most definitely sustainable forestry when it is done right.