Comment by 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...
we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3?
Most causes in the list are just idiotic, so it doesn't matter. There are a few that are more convincing than "sexuality" TBH.
Anyway, yes, the article and everything around it is just weak, malthusianism all over again. The first wtf for me was the "every civilization has fallen, why not ours". Exactly, why not? Don't they see any difference? And did all previous civilization fall for the same reasons?
Maybe they fell because "complexity"... come on.
> we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3?
I think the list is on alphabetic order.
Regardless of the reasons above the real problem is that we are putting all the eggs on one basket. When we listen to Elon Musk saying we need to be an interplanetary society we think "the guy is right", but we have difficulties on accepting that having a single global economy is dangerous.
Resilience is the new buzz word but anti-fragility is what we should strive for. Nassin Tabel give Switzerland as an example. Again you see the pattern, instead of one big and fragile system you have 26 cantons with some degree of independence.