Comment by taylorius
4 years ago
I don't think this article is very convincing, as far as the complexity of a system having anything to do with its potential speed of collapse. The article's first example (the Romans) collapsed due to resource shortage (mining becoming harder). Their society WAS complex, but that isn't why it collapsed.
Human grown societies tend to under-invest in redundancy, for the sake of more growth, so our societies end up rather brittle. But their complexity is not itself to blame, in my view.
The Roman Empire example that the article goes into is more interesting than it makes out, and can be an example of the wrong sort of redundancy being applied to a problem.
The reforms in the 3rd century were not just an increase in taxes, but a restructuring of society to keep the army strong. Price controls were placed on goods to make sure that people and the state would always have reliable access to goods. Tax collection on private property was formalized and made much higher. Peasants were bound to the land to make sure they always were able to produce. This makes sense based on the view the Emperor had of the empire: an empire is like an army, so this strict control should boost resilience and redundancy.
The tax collection was incredibly onerous and led to a lot of small estates going under. The price controls didn't work at all, in part because it didn't understand that price differences can be caused by things other than greed. The remaining landowners increasingly pulled out of the money economy and the cities and instead focused more on their own estates and the newly bound peasants. It is often stated as the starting point of feudalism, and ultimately did more to weaken the empire's structure than sustain it.
When you ask for redundancy, it's important to think about what kind of redundancy you want, and who it serves.
"When you ask for redundancy, it's important to think about what kind of redundancy you want, and who it serves."
Well, of course that's the case. Though I must say, none of the things you listed sound like redundancy to me. They sound like an illustration of the fact that a complex system has a lot of ways to fail, and the result of a certain action can be hard to predict.
The article doesn't really drive at this though - it seems focused on irresponsible use of resources. TBH the article's whole thesis strikes me as a bit weird.
This is what N. N. Taleb would say.
Also, I bet any serial entrepreneur can explain why we tend to invest in growth over redundancy: we don't even know the names of those who didn't, because they died in the cradle.
Exactly this. In any sort of survival-of-the-fittest environment, a redundant system can always be outcompeted by a highly optimised, brittle one, that dodges a few bullets.
Biology is one of the most ancient and cutthroat examples of "survival of the fittest" imaginable. Yet it's filled with highly redundant systems outcompeting better optimized and brittle systems. Cells spend huge amounts of resources on redundant DNA, transcription error checking, and redundant organelles. Animals have redundant organs, complicated immune systems, hugely expensive neural systems, and so on.
Human designed systems tend to be less redundant and comparatively fragile by contrast.
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I imagine this can even be made mathematically precise. You need some minimal amount of robustness depending on the number of bullets you need to dodge, but conditional on that, someone who is just robust enough to be lucky will win, and if the population is large and diverse enough, a lucky, minimally robust, growth optimized individual will survive and win.
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Until you hit a point were every system receives at least one bullet hit.
Complexity is what makes under-investment viable, profitable and inevitable. In that order.