Free-will as a necessity II

Holding people responsible is not a fact-finding process, its a normative process. -- Peter McKnight

what you are told

Morality is doing what is right, regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told,  regardless of what is right. -- Anon.

Free-will as a necessity

Behavior is always going to be more important to the law than neuroscience. -- Peter McKnight

Scaling

Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better. -- S. T. Rev

Stubborness

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John Adams

what you do, not what you say

The purpose of the system is what it does.  After all, there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. -- Anthony Stafford Beer

X

The Buddha rejected all questions of the type ‘Does X exist?’ He rephrased it: ‘Can we experience X?' -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Redistribution

The tax debate is 99% about distribution, 1% about growth. Don’t let economists fool you with their models that they don’t even pretend capture real phenomena. When they say lower corporate taxes increase growth they are modelling a world without assets where all profits are devoted to new investments in capital equipment. [...] Redistribution of global wealth is clearly the most obvious policy for a utilitarian. -- Cameron K. Murray

Replacing three horsemen

There are exactly four ways of limiting the numbers of the human population: War, famine, plague, and birth control. As long as birth control is discouraged, we are left with some combination of the other three. -- Charles St. Pierre

Incentives

I am usually pro private business except when it does not work. An important category are treatment, prevention, and elimination of negatives: Private prison industry does not work. Private law enforcement does not work. Private military industry does not work. Private drug research does not work. If you want to eliminate or prevent something, then do not privatize it. Private business wants to grow. Missions to shrink or end something must be publicly controlled. If we insist on privatization, then the financial incentives must be aligned with the desired results. For example, only give private drug companies the money that would be otherwise lost to the disease via whatever arrangements - probably some insurance scheme or similar - and make them lose money immediately when the disease appears again. -- Sakari Maaranen

Science

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience. -- Niels Bohr

Transcendence

Transcendence, mother had said, is another word for escape. But escape to where? This life is all we have. To desire escape from life is to desire death. -- Karl Schroeder

Chesterton's Fence

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. -- Aldo Leopold

Normal(s)

one of the signs of an abusive relationship is the creeping normalization of the abnormal: that one takes the most disturbing or painful circumstances as a meter stick for everyday life, and assumes that what one is experiencing is in fact the way everyone else lives, and not an aberration -- Charles Stross

as dumb as a mushroom

Think, for a moment, about lignin itself.

It's this complex structural biopolymer made by trees. It's what makes trees woody. And it's totally, transcendently worthless to everything else on earth. There's a tremendous amount of stored energy there -- this being why wood burns -- and nothing can get at it. Millennium after millennium, the accumulation of woody debris starves the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and poisons all of the earth's fresh water. Insofar as anything living has the capacity to suffer, everything is.

Eventually, bracket fungus figures out a way to break down lignin. In a matter of a few hundred thousand years, the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide triples, and the amount of atmospheric oxygen plummets. The giant insects that dominate the Earth begin to die. Temperatures rise. The oceans acidify. Almost everything dies. [Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction, 65.5 My ago]

Go back further, and disruptive species become increasingly catastrophic. For instance, when cyanobacteria discovered photosynthesis and produced oxygen as a byproduct, nothing respirated. These huge mats of bacteria were producing a waste product more toxic than chlorine gas. And it destroyed almost all life on earth, down to the microbiome, not that there was anything other than a microbiome. The ground corroded, crumbled, washed into the sea. [Great Oxygenation Event, 2.5Gy ago]

And then life, by chance, stumbled on a way to use this horrifyingly toxic gas to ride a more efficient biochemical gradient. And that's all there is to it.

In expending all of the Earth's stored carbon, we're acting just like bracket fungus, or cyanobacteria, or the first cycads. We've found a clever chemical trick and are riding the entropic gradient as long as we can, because, at worst, it temporarily relieves suffering, and at best, it gives us more degrees of freedom to someday not act just like bracket fungus.

This is a low bar -- to not be literally as dumb as a mushroom. But the biological incentives of disruptive species, us included, make environmental catastrophe difficult to avert. The dimensions in which disruptive biology is unsustainable will eventually place a burden on biodiversity system-wide. -- Andreas Schou

Profiteers must Profit II

The human ability to disconnect from and deny geopolitical reality lies at the heart of the “green” net-zero project.  Most obviously, those who claim victories along the road to the Nirvana of net-zero must maintain blindness to the way in which the UK economy is integrated into a global industrial civilisation.  As a result, such measures as closing British coal mines and coal-fired power stations can be translated into lower national carbon emissions figures, even though all that is achieved is the outsourcing of UK emissions to other, less developed states elsewhere on the planet.  Aiding this sleight of hand is the international convention that we do not include emissions from shipping in anyone’s national data, giving the appearance that there is no difference between goods moved tens of miles by truck or train, and goods transported by ship from the other side of the Earth. -- Tim Watkins ref

Profiteers must Profit

Scratch the surface of the current plans to decarbonise the economy and replace it with renewable energies and beneath it lays the same logic that has made the UK the 6th richest country in the world. Britain is planning to go green through a new phase of resource and wealth extraction of countries in the global south. At the heart of our economic system fueled by the City of London is a belief that the UK and other rich countries are entitled to a greater share of the world’s finite resources irrespective of who we impoverish in doing so, or the destruction we cause.

This green colonialism will be delivered by the very same entrenched economic interests, who have willingly sacrificed both people and the climate in the pursuit of profit. But this time, the mining giants and dirty energy companies will be waving the flag of climate emergency to justify the same deathly business model. In this new energy revolution, it is cobalt, lithium, silver and copper that will replace oil, gas and coal as the new frontline of our corporate destruction. The metals and minerals needed to build our wind turbines, our solar panels and electric batteries will be ripped out of the earth so that the UK continues to enjoy “lifeboat ethics”: temporary sustainability to save us, but at the cost of the poor. -- Asad Rehman

Simulation as Filter

If you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense -- Scott Aaronson

Hidden Law

A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call "hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition.

Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No one could pretend assisted suicide wasn't happening. Activists framed state right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings. Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos and darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will march on like Sherman's army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as they encounter.

The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced. --  Jonathan Rauch ref

Adequate, not True

... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. -- Henri Poincaré

Alternatives and Models

A further problem that arises in the use of any test that simply rejects a hypothesis without at the same time considering possible alternatives[...] Is it of the slightest use to reject a hypothesis until we have some idea of what to put in its place? If there is no clearly stated alternative, and the null hypothesis is rejected, we are simply left without any rule at all, whereas the null hypothesis, though not satisfactory, may at any rate show some sort of correspondence with the facts. It may, for instance, represent 90% of the variation and to that extent may be of considerable use in prediction, even though the remaining 10% may be larger than we should expect if it was strictly true. 

Consider, for instance, the history of the law of gravitation. Newton first derived it from Kepler’s laws and a comparison of the accelerations of the moon and of a body falling freely at the earth’s surface. Extending it to take account of the mutual attractions of the planets and of the perturbations of the moon by the sun, he got the periods and orders of magnitude of the principal perturbations. But he did not explain the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn, with a period of 880 years, which gives displacements in longitude of 1196″ and 2908″ of arc for the two planets, and was only explained by Laplace a century later. 

The theory of the moon has been taken only in the present century, by E. W. Brown, to a stage where most of the outstanding errors of calculation can be said to be within the errors of observation; there are discrepancies between observation and calculation that are attributed to changes of the rotation of the earth; but these discrepancies are our principal ground for believing in the existence of these changes. In fact agreement with Newton’s law was not given by the data used to establish it, because these data included the main inequalities of the moon; it was not given during his lifetime, because the data included the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn; and when Einstein’s modification was adopted the agreement of observation with Newton’s law was 300 times as good as Newton ever knew. 

Even the latter appears at present as powerless as Newton’s to explain the long empirical term in the moon’s longitude and the secular motion of the node of Venus. There has not been a single date in the history of the law of gravitation when a modern significance test would not have rejected all laws and left us with no law. -- Theory of Probability, Harold Jeffreys 1939.

Position(s)

Science deals with measurable events. Anything non-measurable is non-testable and outside the scope of Science. Scientists might favor some of these non-measurable claims, like believing in ghosts or gods, because they are people, and people are complicated. However Science should be neutral towards these claims. Some accept Naturalism, the philosophical position that states anything non-measurable does not exist -- leading, for example, to Atheism and to several skeptical philosophies --, but that in itself is not a scientific position.

Religion is not necessarily opposite to Science. Sometimes a religion claims something that is testable and there is evidence for and against it (including moral claims), but other religious claims are outside measurement and, thus, outside scientific analysis. What's opposite are the processes of Faith and the Scientific Method, which approaches to evidence are completely in contrast.

On the other hand, pseudo-sciences, like Homeopathy or Flat-Earth theories, make fact-based claims that are subject to scientific analysis (and were tested, and refuted repeatedly). Every social relevant position relating to facts can, and must, be validated by Science. People should have the liberty to select their personal beliefs, but facts are socially shared and are only up to debate under the scrutiny of the Scientific Method.

Hidden Reasons

Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. -- Mark Dominus

Ecological Thinking

Recently I've been thinking about the world in ecological terms. It’s an interesting change in perspective. [...] Instead of focusing on the players, who are waving their hands, making noise, and generally being conspicuous, ecology asks us to focus on the game -- the incentive structures and ground rules under which the players act.

Central to ecology is the concept of a niche. A niche is an abstract space in the environment which some actors may be able to exploit successfully for an extended period. [ref] A niche involves not just location but also behavior. "It is the behavioral space in which an organism moves and competes for resources" [ref].

Here are some examples of ecological thinking:

• There will always be cheaters because there is always a niche for cheating. No sooner does a species develop behavior X than other members of that species develop the ability to exploit X, or another species develops X-mimicry, allowing them to get benefits that they don't 'deserve.' [...] You will never be able to eliminate cheating; the best you can hope for is mitigation.
• In a democracy you get the government you deserve and you deserve the government you get. If a candidate for office makes a promise and breaks it once she's in office, blaming her misses the point. She's just playing a role in a system that allows people to make promises they can't keep. If she didn't make too many promises, someone else would, and we'd elect that guy instead.

So here is the core insight, in two parts:

1. In complex systems, niches exist. They are a property of the system, independent of the particular actors within the system.
2. Niches exert a constant pull on behavior. If there's a niche for a particular type of behavior, and if the space is crowded enough (competition), the niche will be filled.

When you put these two facts together, you start to see behavior as a property of the system rather than the individual. Of course the individual is still proximately responsible for the behavior — and morally responsible, if that's the axe you're trying to grind. But sometimes it's more productive to look at the system rather than the individual. Ecological thinking doesn't give the complete picture by any means. It just provides a different perspective. Sometimes the problem you're facing is one that requires story-thought (attention to the details of individuals), but sometimes it requires systems-thought. You need both weapons in your arsenal.

In biology, ecological thinking doesn't concern itself with individual organisms, but rather with entire species. This is because individual organisms aren't adaptive enough to change their behavior in meaningful ways. A tree, a shrub, a weed, a bacterium, even a snail or a bat — these individual organisms have behavior that is mostly determined by what their genes have programmed for them. If its environment changes, a single tree is going to keep doing what it’s always done; it can’t adapt (much). Species, in contrast, can significantly change their behavior, at least over evolutionary time scales.

What does this tell us about the kinds of systems that are 'ecological'? Let me propose this criterion:

A system can be analyzed as an ecosystem if it has independent, competing agents who can change and adapt to their environment.

So, besides the biosphere, what other systems fit this definition? Lots, it turns out. Communities of all sorts: corporations, agencies, committees, the student body at a high school, nations, online communities (think Reddit). Markets, where firms compete against each other to win resources (employees, customers, investment dollars). Financial markets, where traders try to outwit each other. The dating market. Academia. The media. A corporation is both an ecosystem unto itself (where employees are the agents who inhabit the ecosystem), and an agent within a larger ecosystem (the market, where it competes against other firms).

But in all these cases, remember, it's not actually about the agents. It's about the system and its niches. In ecological thinking, agent behavior is a property of the system, rather than the other way around.

What's powerful about this way of thinking is that it abstracts away from individuals, and allows us focus on the properties of the system that are causing different types of behavior. In the process, it suggests completely different types of solutions to a lot of big, thorny problems. It asks us to stop thinking about the players, and get to work reforming the game.

Let's see some applications of this new mindset.

Office Politics. To reduce the amount of politics in your workplace, it's not enough just to say, "We'll fire people who play politics." Instead you'll want to think about how, where, and why politics occurs. What gains do people feel they can achieve by playing politics, and how can you change the system to make politics less rewarding? If politics thrives where there is restricted information flow (secrets, back-room deals, information brokerage), work on increasing feedback and transparency. Use open floor plans, encourage CC habits, and force people who are avoiding each other to talk. Maybe your office ecosystem has room for politics because there's a leadership vacuum, in which case you should fill the void. Of course the threat of punishment (firing) is one way to narrow the niche, by increasing the costs associated with politicking. It's just not the only way.

Drug violence. Ultimately, drug-related violence isn't caused by drugs or even by drug users or dealers, but by drug policy.Because there will always be buyers, there will always be a niche for selling drugs. Putting pressure on that niche, by criminalizing it, isn't making it go away (this is an empirical fact I hope we can agree on). Instead, it's only making the niche riskier. Since the stakes are so high — jail time or death on the one hand, big big money on the other — the 'drug dealer' niche can support only people who are desperate and/or ruthless. Inevitably the result is violence. And like all niches, the drug-dealing niche exists independent of any actors who might be filling it. Take out the kingpin and the niche is unfazed; someone else will soon step in to replace him. The only way to win is to change the game — treat drug abuse as a medical issue rather than a criminal one, for instance.

How to reform elementary school bullies? On Quora, Yishan proposes an ecological solution to this problem: punish the bully's peers.

One major determining factor about whether bullying is repeated is the reaction of the bully's peers. Often bullies are validated by friends or peers for identifying a victim and leading the bullying. Therefore, authority figures would be well-advised to set up a countervailing social dynamic that discourages bullying through social pressure.

In ecological terms: the niche for bullying exists because the bully gets recognition and reward from his peer group. Turn the peers against the bully and the niche will dry up, along with its corresponding behavior.

Why is there so little originality in Hollywood? Sean Hood gives us an ecological answer: "Hollywood makes more of what audiences pay to see. When more people start showing up for original movies, more originality will come out of Hollywood." In other words, the audiences define the niche, and behavior (of the studios) is determined by the niche. This inversion of blame — from producers to consumers — can be seen in politics (why do politicians lie?), internet culture (why is content so inane?), and all forms of pop culture. The producers are only giving the people what they want.

In complex systems, niches exist. A niche is a property of the system, independent of any agents who happen to be filling the niche. Agent behavior is explained by the niche, rather than by properties of the agents themselves (at least when using the ecological mindset). And finally, when looking at problems that arise in a system, it's often more productive to think about solutions at the niche level rather than the agent level. -- Kevin Simler

Life

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference… -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Propaganda

We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth. -- Terence McKenna

Costs as Guides

A heuristic shouldn't be the "least wrong" among all possible rules; it should be the least harmful if wrong.

-- Nassim N. Taleb

Context

There's no such thing as a bad gene, only bad gene-environment interactions. -- Robert Sapolsky

As Night Closes by

Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best of the lot, but it was pretty much guaranteed to land even deeper in the memory hole than the others. The difficulty was that [William R.] Catton’s book didn’t pander to the standard mythologies that still beset any attempt to make sense of the predicament we’ve made for ourselves; [...] he explained how industrial civilization was cutting its own throat, how far past the point of no return we’d already gone, and what had to be done in order to salvage anything from the approaching wreck.

The core of Overshoot, which is also the core of the entire world of appropriate technology and green alternatives that got shot through the head and shoved into an unmarked grave in the Reagan years, is the recognition that the principles of ecology apply to industrial society just as much as they do to other communities of living things. It’s odd, all things considered, that this is such a controversial proposal. [...] human societies are as subject to the laws of ecology as they are to every other dimension of natural law.

Let’s start with the basics. Every ecosystem, in thermodynamic terms, is a process by which relatively concentrated energy is dispersed into diffuse background heat. Here on Earth, at least, the concentrated energy mostly comes from the Sun, in the form of solar radiation—there are a few ecosystems, in deep oceans and underground, that get their energy from chemical reactions driven by the Earth’s internal heat instead. Ilya Prigogine showed some decades back that the flow of energy through a system of this sort tends to increase the complexity of the system; Jeremy England, a MIT physicist, has recently shown that the same process accounts neatly for the origin of life itself. The steady flow of energy from source to sink is the foundation on which everything else rests. The complexity of the system, in turn, is limited by the rate at which energy flows through the system, and this in turn depends on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters the system, on the one hand, and the background into which waste heat diffuses when it leaves the system, on the other. 

 

Simple as it is, it’s a point that an astonishing number of people—including some who are scientifically literate—routinely miss. [...] one of the core reasons you can’t power a modern industrial civilization on solar energy is that sunlight is relatively diffuse as an energy source, compared to the extremely concentrated energy we get from fossil fuels. [...] Nature has done astonishing things with that very modest difference in concentration. People who insist that photosynthesis is horribly inefficient, and of course we can improve its efficiency, are missing a crucial point: something like half the energy that reaches the leaves of a green plant from the Sun is put to work lifting water up from the roots by an ingenious form of evaporative pumping [...] all told, a green plant is probably about as efficient in its total use of solar energy as the laws of thermodynamics will permit.

That said, there are hard upper limits to the complexity of the ecosystem that these intricate processes can support. You can see that clearly enough by comparing a tropical rain forest to a polar tundra. The two environments may have approximately equal amounts of precipitation over the course of a year; they may have an equally rich or poor supply of nutrients in the soil; even so, the tropical rain forest can easily support fifteen or twenty thousand species of plants and animals, and the tundra will be lucky to support a few hundred. Why? The same reason Mercury is warmer than Neptune: the rate at which photons from the sun arrive in each place per square meter of surface.

Near the equator, the sun’s rays fall almost vertically.  Close to the poles, since the Earth is round, the Sun’s rays come in at a sharp angle, and thus are spread out over more surface area. The ambient temperature’s quite a bit warmer in the rain forest than it is on the tundra, but because the vast heat engine we call the atmosphere pumps heat from the equator to the poles, the difference in ambient temperature is not as great as the difference in solar input per cubic meter. Thus ecosystems near the equator have a greater difference in energy concentration between input and output than those near the poles, and the complexity of the two systems varies accordingly.

All this should be common knowledge. Of course it isn’t, because the industrial world’s notions of education consistently ignore what William Catton called “the processes that matter”—that is, the fundamental laws of ecology that frame our existence on this planet—and approach a great many of those subjects that do make it into the curriculum in ways that encourage the most embarrassing sort of ignorance about the natural processes that keep us all alive.

A human society is an ecosystem.  Like any other ecosystem, it depends for its existence on flows of energy, and as with any other ecosystem, the upper limit on its complexity depends ultimately on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters it and the background into which its waste heat disperses. (This last point is a corollary of White’s Law, one of the fundamental principles of human ecology, which holds that a society’s economic development is directly proportional to its consumption of energy per capita.)  Until the beginning of the industrial revolution, that upper limit was not much higher than the upper limit of complexity in other ecosystems, since human ecosystems drew most of their energy from the same source as nonhuman ones: sunlight falling on green plants.

The discoveries that made it possible to turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy transformed that equation completely. The geological processes that stockpiled half a billion years of sunlight into coal, oil, and natural gas boosted the concentration of the energy inputs available to industrial societies by an almost unimaginable factor, without warming the ambient temperature of the planet more than a few degrees, and the huge differentials in energy concentration that resulted drove an equally unimaginable increase in complexity. Choose any measure of complexity you wish—number of discrete occupational categories, average number of human beings involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of any given good or service, or what have you—and in the wake of the industrial revolution, it soared right off the charts. Thermodynamically, that’s exactly what you’d expect.

The difference in energy concentration between input and output, it bears repeating, defines the upper limit of complexity. Other variables determine whether or not the system in question will achieve that upper limit. In the ecosystems we call human societies, knowledge is one of those other variables. If you have a highly concentrated energy source and don’t yet know how to use it efficiently, your society isn’t going to become as complex as it otherwise could. Over the three centuries of industrialization, as a result, the production of useful knowledge was a winning strategy, since it allowed industrial societies to rise steadily toward the upper limit of complexity defined by the concentration differential. The limit was never reached—the law of diminishing returns saw to that—and so, inevitably, industrial societies ended up believing that knowledge all by itself was capable of increasing the complexity of the human ecosystem. Since there’s no upper limit to knowledge, in turn, that belief system drove what Catton called the cornucopian myth, the delusion that there would always be enough resources if only the stock of knowledge increased quickly enough.

That belief only seemed to work, though, as long as the concentration differential between energy inputs and the background remained very high. Once easily accessible fossil fuels started to become scarce, and more and more energy and other resources had to be invested in the extraction of what remained, problems started to crop up. Tar sands and oil shales in their natural form are not as concentrated an energy source as light sweet crude—once they’re refined, sure, the differences are minimal, but a whole system analysis of energy concentration has to start at the moment each energy source enters the system. Take a cubic yard of tar sand fresh from the pit mine, with the sand still in it, or a cubic yard of oil shale with the oil still trapped in the rock, and you’ve simply got less energy per unit volume than you do if you’ve got a cubic yard of light sweet crude fresh from the well, or even a cubic yard of good permeable sandstone with light sweet crude oozing out of every pore.

It’s an article of faith in contemporary culture that such differences don’t matter, but that’s just another aspect of our cornucopian myth. The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not available for other uses. The result, however you slice it conceptually, is that the upper limit of complexity begins moving down. That sounds abstract, but it adds up to a great deal of very concrete misery, because as already noted, the complexity of a society determines such things as the number of different occupational specialties it can support, the number of employees who are involved in the production and distribution of a given good or service, and so on. There’s a useful phrase for a sustained contraction in the usual measures of complexity in a human ecosystem: “economic depression.”

The economic troubles that are shaking the industrial world more and more often these days, in other words, are symptoms of a disastrous mismatch between the level of complexity that our remaining concentration differential can support, and the level of complexity that our preferred ideologies insist we ought to have. As those two things collide, there’s no question which of them is going to win. Adding to our total stock of knowledge won’t change that result, since knowledge is a necessary condition for economic expansion but not a sufficient one: if the upper limit of complexity set by the laws of thermodynamics drops below the level that your knowledge base would otherwise support, further additions to the knowledge base simply mean that there will be a growing number of things that people know how to do in theory, but that nobody has the resources to do in practice.

Knowledge, in other words, is not a magic wand, a surrogate messiah, or a source of miracles. It can open the way to exploiting energy more efficiently than otherwise, and it can figure out how to use energy resources that were not previously being used at all, but it can’t conjure energy out of thin air. Even if the energy resources are there, for that matter, if other factors prevent them from being used, the knowledge of how they might be used offers no consolation—quite the contrary.

That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall, and what could be done to salvage something from its wreck. That knowledge, however, was not enough to make things happen; only a few people ever listened, most of them promptly plugged their ears and started chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” once Reagan made that fashionable, and the actions that might have spared all of us a vast amount of misery never happened. -- John Michael Greerref

Models

Because models do not aspire to ontological accuracy, it is possible simultaneously to employ a variety of mutually incompatible models in order to gain some purchase on different aspects of the behavior of the same physical entity. -- John Polkinghorne