New community

Yes, I'm going to start posting again, I've just had some things to take care of.

I want to announce the creation of a new community, socorro_carpool to help people driving in/to/around the Socorro area organize carpooling, both for regular commutes and one time trips. Join in and start using less gas.

Complexity Ideas

No, this isn't meant to be a nice, formal, coherent essay, I'm just trying to get some things I have been thinking about down and hopefully stimulate some discussion.

We live in a complex society. Every part of it, transportation, government, economic processes, communication and so forth, is dependent upon a large network of systems, sources and delivery methods that form an increasingly large, complex and interdependent web. In order to read this you are using software that was written by thousands of people from all over the world running on hardware that was assembled from parts made in the US, China and elsewhere and transported by plane, train, cargo ship and truck. The individual components of the dinner I ate tonight came from all over the US and likely South America.

This is not to say that complexity is always bad, in fact quite the opposite is often true. Complex systems have their advantages: more resources, more variety, more possibilities and better options. However, at some point that added complexity starts to take more to maintain than it returns. Once that point is passed adding complexity harms the system.

There is an adage in engineering, "Good enough often beats better". Due to the shortness of software generations there are many good examples there, such as Navigator/Mozilla vs. Firefox, but you can see this principle in any designed system.

Human societies act this way as well. In general, as a society becomes more complex there is a benefit that more than makes up for the cost of that complexity. For every unit (time, money, food, whatever) you spend on increasing complexity you get back many more in return. At some point these returns start to diminish and at some later point these gains become negative and you actually start losing ground as the cost to maintain these bureaucracies/supply chains/whatever eat up more resources than they provide. In addition, once you hit the point of diminishing returns the system becomes more and more fragile as crisis in various places ripple through the system faster and can cause cascading failures.

Take, for example, the military of the Roman Empire after it split into the Western and Eastern Empires. The Western empire continued to maintain a large, complex professional military. This worked well for conquering new lands but was poor at defending the home front. It took too long to move the troops around and cost too much to supply them. The Eastern empire disbanded most of the professional military, leaving only a small elite core. Local defense was provided by the locals, organized as militias and trained by the small professional core military. This meant that troops were available for defense everywhere, but that there was little cost in taxation to maintain them. Granted, these troops would be outclassed by similar numbers of well supplied professional troops, but their low cost and constant presence more than made up for their lesser training.

Quick Side note #1
The points at which diminishing returns kick in and negative returns occur vary on several factors, including natural resources, technology levels, education levels and culture.

Quick side note #2
Once a society has its basic needs taken care of (food, water, shelter, security) it can take one of two broadly defined paths and become either a having society or a being society. In being socities indiviuals use their surplus resources to become better at what they are, whether that is better artists, farmers, soldiers, renaissance man type generalists or more spiritual. In having societies individuals use there surplus resources to try and gain more resources. Having societies are quicker to build up and often more powerful than being societies but when big complexity driven crisis occur they are less able to cope as individuals don't have many of the skills or community networks necessary, they only have physical things that the crisis takes away.

Back to the main topic. I believe it is quite obvious that modern Western society has gone past the diminishing returns complexity level and is now steaming full speed down the negative returns path. For example, after 9/11 it was obvious that the intelligence gathering and crisis response systems of the US had major problems, yet instead of simplifying them we added another layer of complexity on top. In New Orleans the government was unable to properly respond for most of a week to a major crisis that we knew was going to happen, that was predicted and described in detail years before it happened, that we knew the timing of days if not week in advance, simply because the mechanisms of response were too complicated, the manpower was too tied up and it took too long to be able to provide resources that were needed.

We are on the downward slide and there are going to be crisis after crisis that our society is not going to be able to deal well with until a major breakdown occurs. When that happens most people will be unable to cope in a civilized manner as the basic societal support they require will not be available.

If you have been reading my journal for a while you know that I am expecting the final crisis to be a complete economic collapse initiated primarily by an energy crisis. I keep hoping I am wrong, but I find that not a month goes by without some sort of event pointing towards it happening and faster than I was expecting.

At this point the question becomes, "How do we avoid the worst of the fallout from the coming crisis?" If by 'we' you mean society at large I don't think it is possible at this point. Our society is too complex, fragile and focused on having to be able to cope. If, however, by 'we' you mean a relatively small number of close individuals then I think there are ways, but I don't claim to know exactly what they are. It seems to be that the big step is to work on creating a small, relatively non complex being society that is not overly dependant on the larger overly complex having society. The devil, of course, is in the details. Thoughts?