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