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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.
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.
Individuals do.
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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
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.
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.
It's a good thing that modern loggin companies plant new trees when after they cut them down. Too bad a lot of enviro-wackos forget that part.
They plant commercially viable species, and harvest them at the optimum ROI age (15-30 years). A healthy forest has a variety of species at various stages of maturity. A commercial plantation is no more a forest than a swimming pool is a wetland.
Remain calm! All is well!
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". Bah. The guy probably hadn't eaten in 3 days and was thinking "If I don't cut down this tree for a fishing boat, I'll surely die."
Many logging companies do, although mostly they do it because it makes business sense to do so (i.e. "Our property size is limited, and we need to still have trees to cut down 5 years from now"). But there is a definite problem when a resource is perceived as being "essentially unlimited", and/or when people are too poor or greedy to care that a resource is being depleted. A perfect example is the rainforests, which will, at the current rates of destruction, be gone within our lifetimes. Yet the people who are cutting them down probably tell themselves, "well there is so much rainforest left that there will still be plenty left by the time I retire, and by then it will be someone else's problem". Additionally they may be saying, "I need to feed my family", and the logging companies will be saying "there is so much rainforest there to still be chopped down that if we try do it responsibly, other companies will be able to log cheaper and faster" (tragedy of the commons).
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 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...
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?
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.
If you actually study attractors in nonlinear dynamic systems, what's popularly called "chaos theory," you'll see that what you actually have are quasi-stable attractors surrounded by regions of long-term unpredictability.
If you're near an attractor, it will take a lot to dislodge you from near that attractor. A butterfly flapping its wings won't cause a hurricane, but a volcano erupting on the other side of the plant might.
But what people usually forget is that there can be multiple attractors, and if you're not that close to one attractor it may not take much to push you over the edge to another attractor.
That's what happened at Easter Island. Cutting down the first tree caused no harm. Saving the last tree wouldn't have prevented the massive population crash. The details would have been changed in each case, but in a century you would still have ended up with a heavily forested island or a stripped one.
But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead. What's the consequences of cutting down a single tree? What if it's used to shore up the ground in the forest it came from?
What does that mean to us today? That we need to be careful since we're clearly in a chaotic realm and we can't predict the long term consequences of our actions. Some of this is due to natural variability (e.g., did you realize that it's been an unusually long time since a massive volcanic eruption, and that alone has driven global warming to a large extent?), some of it is due to human neglect (overfishing, agricultural monoculturism). Some of our problems are due to prior solutions - our artificial fertilizers prevented global starvation in the late 19th century but has now spread throughout the entire biosphere, resulting in plant growth and algae blooms even far from human activities.
N.B., that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change policies that will push us back to a desirable attractor. It means that there's no "final answer"... and that the consequences if we fail can be disasterous. It's not like we haven't had clear warnings (Easter Island, the Irish potato famine, smallpox ripping through the new world or syphillis (IIRC) through the old one.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Sure it can.
1) Butterfly flaps wings leads to a very bad rainstorm three years later where there would have been nicer weather.
2) Rainstorm keeps scientist indoors. (His office is on a marshy area which floods easily.)
3) Scientist, frustrated with not being able to get to his lab, decides to try and work on a form of controlling his lab remotely.
4) After he decides to stick with it, the idea, once implemented, becomes a key idea and is used heavily in gravity technology.
5) The gravity technology is used to create a form of "gravitational tidal wave bomb" which is used to destroy the solar system by a fanatic nut who was born when his newlywed parents decided to make the best of the afforementioned rainstorm.
The odds are absurd, of course, but it is possible. QED.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
"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.
I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?
Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future. Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.
The world is overpopulated.
And your solution to this problem, mein fuhrer?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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
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".
Weather does not appear to be chaotic.
Every spring I can tell you that the Contiental United States will warm up. Snow will melt and storms will develop in the Atlantic.
Climate is the overall weather of an area. When we record climate data, we record average temperatures, temperature ranges and high and low temperatures.
Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given time that includes temperature, precipitation, humidity, pressure, winds.
In the general theme of Guns, Germs and Steel Diamond likes to cut down the role of free thinking societies in the success of Europeans and America and actually says that Europeans have geneticly inferior mental capacity. He tries too hard to reduce history to biology and geography.
Simply stating that assigning artificial costs to compensate for market externalities is not sufficient to solving the problems associated with long-term ecological and environmental change. Diamond is pointing out that recognizing the costs and properly assessing and the potential costs, are hampered by the psychological and sociological structures embedded within society. He's pointing out that economics alone cannot solve the problem. Because the root systemic causes of the problems don't lie only in the economic realm, but also in the psychological and sociological realm.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
If we can attempt to stop or control SARS with quarantines and such, we are stronger than it! Bahahah!
Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is more about why Europe could colonize and crush the rest of world, instead of say Paraguay colonizing England.
Sure, once a society has advanced technology and economy, it can do all kinds of things. The question is, how did those civilizations get to that point?
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
What galls me is that there's a certain type of person who laments the fact that six billion people walk the planet, then suggest that everything would be just peachy keen if only 90% of them didn't exist.
But they do. So overpopulation, while it may be a problem, is just not something you can 'solve'. Not unless you're willing to wipe out a great many of those people. And if that's so, I nominate *you* to be one of the one's to be exterminated.
To a person not invested in murdering billions, overpopulation isn't a 'problem', it's a simple fact of life that one has to deal with. You might decide to try to do something about the growth rate (the most effective method being to raise the standard of living for every country on the planet), but the current numbers will not decline unless some rabid greenie with a supervirus is let loose upon the world.
The world has a certain population of human beings. Deal with it. Problem or not it's a fact of life and the gnashing of teeth and the wringing of hands does nothing other than to suggest that certain nations with high birth rates are to 'blame'.
No doubt these same folks will scream for the banning of immortality since it would exacerbate the 'problem' - well, ban it for everyone else *but themselves*, of course.....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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
Nah, it's over harvested, undermaintained, ill-managed, and ill-distributed food production and supply.
:
And a work incentive-reward system that is bronze age, at best. 5000 years outdated, at least.
Technically, food production in the world could feed everyone today. Except for generalized selfishness and idiocy. They also call it "humanity". Starving, miserable, futureless non-beings are much easier to break and govern. And to make support the system that breaks and barely feeds them.
Europe and the US are considerably more densely populated than most of the rest of the world.
Giving people decent living conditions and education almost immediately brings birthrates down to nearly 2 per. Also technically feasible.
Back to fish
Most overfishing is done by 1st world factory-ships off other peoples shores, or over-technified fleets near their own.
6 billion people do not eat all those fish (and Dolphins, by the way).
Less than a billion mostly de-melanized 1st worlders, and their land herds, do. Oh, and their fishmeal protein fed "fish-farms", too, now.
And a vast percentage of it ends up in trash landfills. Or compacted into blocks and thrown in "ocean-fills".
Cutting down the first tree caused no harm. Saving the last tree wouldn't have prevented the massive population crash. The details would have been changed in each case, but in a century you would still have ended up with a heavily forested island or a stripped one.
But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead.
I disagree that this is chaotic. I suspect that there was some number of trees that, if cut down, would have been OK, and that number + 1 would have not been OK. Now, it would be _extremely_ different to calculate this (as a lot of other factors influence it), but that doesn't make it chaotic.
Chaotic would be if there was a region in the middle where based on knowing the outcome of chopping down 'n' trees you couldn't really say anything sensible about the outcome of either 'n-1' or 'n+1' trees.
It is an inordinately complex system that we lack any suitable knowledge to model, but I don't think it was chaotic.
With the correct knowledge specified to a reasonable degree of accuracy, I think it could have been predicted.