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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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."
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...
Recently, a well-spoken mackerel was nominated for a Pulitzer!
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.
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.
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 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?
The Easter Islanders didn't have the Lorax speaking for the trees? I guess we're lucky.
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
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.
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
--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.
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.
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
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.
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.