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Comment by luis_cho

4 years ago

For those who don't know Jay Forester is one of the persons responsible for world3, and the limits to growth report 50 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

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luis_cho

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smcameron  4 years ago

Wow, this takes me back to 8th grade science fair in probably 1982 or 1983. I was casting about for a science project, and came across an article in Creative Computing magazine about this model, and the Limits of Growth and the Club of Rome, and I was like, "yeah, I'll make a population simulation on my Ti/994a in Extended BASIC and that'll be my science project." And so I did. I remember my model predicted population to fluctuate in a kind of sine wave pattern with some major crash in the early 2000's. I remember explaining the concept of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to the judges, and suspecting that my program was suffering a bit from GIGO. And I won in my category and went on to the state level science fair in Jackson, Mississippi, where I did win some scholarship from the Army (well, I'm not built for the army) but got beat out (justifiably) by this kid who had built a TRS-80 controlled robot. I remember being very impressed by his robot, of course, but maybe even moreso by the fact that all the silver finish was worn off his keyboard from where he'd been typing so much. It was also on that trip, during a visit to the university that I saw WordStar for the first time, and I was impressed by the automatic line breaking moving words to the next line, and I also saw some implementation of Lunar Lander on a vector graphics display for the first time.

AlotOfReading  4 years ago

Ugo Bardi (the author) is also a member of the Club of Rome, which goes a long way towards explaining why the article is written the way it is.

  • luis_cho  4 years ago

    I confess I haven't read the article yet but it gave me the feeling of being related to limits to growth.

    It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.

    At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.

    • AlotOfReading  4 years ago

      I'll be honest, I find most of the stuff from that group to be a bit vapid and typically doesn't reflect deep familiarity with the background literature. As an example, the author offhandedly proposes a just-so story about why Rome collapsed. If we go to our trusty 210 reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire [1] (compiled by a historian frustrated that everyone and their pet had different, often contradictory explanations), we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3? Similarly, there are entire fields of studies about how complex systems evolve created since Forrester's work, yet the headline here is all about how complex systems aren't resilient (which flies in the face of most observation and literature).

      [1] https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...

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