10 ms·

Complex systems collapse faster

265 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
What does this mean for our highly-available distributed systems like Kubernetes, Airplanes, and Global Economics? Does it always reduce to resource optimization versus resiliency tradeoffs?
- m0llusk 4y ago
  Scale is another big part of it. Over longer time periods resilience comes to mean something different. How many web sites from the 1990s are still up, accessible, and relevant?
spaniard89277 4y ago
In the end, isn't all a function of the energy needed to keep a system going?
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Also : how complex systems fail. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/
sharpener 4y ago
I agree with the comments that the article is misdirecting fluff. Cutting through... All organised systems (anything that we would describe as a system as opposed to random or chaos) require additional energy inputs to maintain organisation over and above those energy inputs required for performing input-output function. Maintenance requires work. All life on Earth depends on the thermodynamic gradient supplied by the Sun being appropriately steep enough for that additional organisational margin to be provided within tolerances, but not too steep to make everything excessively random, or too shallow to stop stuff moving. Failing to provide that extra margin of energy for organisation for any part of the functionality of a system results in breakdown and halting. E.g. Quite a lot of the extra margin of human organisation energy is provided via being omnivores _at the top_ of the food chain. If all the plankton and birds and bees die -> Humans don't get enough food -> Disorganisation -> Dead humans. It is possible to build forms of organisation that are inherently unstable outside of limited tolerances. Stepping outside of those tolerances exponentially raises the extra costs required to maintain organisation. Needless to say Nature doesn't keep many such systems around, if any, particularly when under significant stress. They get weeded out fast. The extra kicker in human economic organisation is money as a mediator for controlling energy allocation. Organisations retain function if they can afford to support the additional cost of being organised. Within monetary systems, profits have to remain high enough to pay off loan interest and support organisation. But... If people without enough jobs or money starve -> The latent labour pool dies -> No support for growth, no maintenance -> breakdown. So the labour force loses a margin of value-add generated in order to support organisation. The hidden labour force that is Nature loses out once human economies/populations grow too fast or too large. So modern humans do this "supporting organisation" without considering Nature as part of the organisation, and frequently fail to support the labour pool properly. Obsolete monetary/value system designs are a big problem. Globally, monetary systems to support sustainable societies should provide for: equilibration against destructive monopolies - especially at the ForEx level; enough liquidity - supplied through limited liability loan failures under capitalism - to meet aggregate interest on loans and organisational costs AND latent labour pool support; maintenance of key functional inputs, like food, sunlight,...; and zero cumulative pollution; Why shouldn't every viable economic or social unit operate monetarily locally according to Kirchhoff's current law, if money is an adequate proxy for energy? Why do we not price in the extra energy input Nature requires to remain coherent and still balance supply and demand? Humans previously kept building inherently unstable civilisation structures with inherently unstable monetary systems that cannot cope with externally imposed constraints arising. They kept failing to preserve and maintain the inputs sensibly, and they designed monetary systems that are typically destined to create and exarcerbate those failures. They could collectively: stop breeding like rabbits; design better monetary systems; stop shitting on the environment. All of it is technologically feasible already. How much of that is politically feasible right now? People are holding people back by being people. Wicked problem. Difficult to handle kindly.
sys_64738 4y ago
It's harder to keep a complex machine running which is why you want a simple system. Keep It Simple Stupid.
- throw457 4y ago
  Complex systems are always in a failed state.
  - analog31 4y ago
    But "failed state" simply means that some of the controls have been disabled, at least according to John Gall. That just translates into working without quite knowing how they work.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Complex systems are always in a state of maintenance. Some part is always failing, but we can repair it. Systemic failure happens when we can't keep up with the necessary maintenance. It's very easy to look a a big complex system, see lots of failure, and conclude the whole ship is going down, but that may not be the case.
    - slx26 4y ago
      Funny thought: then we may characterize a complex system as a system that's (most of the time) too big to fail all at once, and whose resilience to failure simply arises from continued previous failure. Which sounds like another way of saying "I don't know what I'm doing, but it kinda works"... until it doesn't. Maybe when it has inevitably grown too big to be successfully maintained anymore.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  You definitely do not want a simple system if your singular goal is resiliency. The most resilient systems we know about are all complex, from ecosystems to organisms to cities to the internet itself. The main problem is that our current toolkit is so primitive that understanding anything about them, from how to intelligently intervene to how resilient any particular system is at any particular point in time is damn near impossible. There's a lot of research trying to change that, but it's obviously a difficult problem.
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Why complex social systems collapse faster - the article doesn’t talk about general complexity but the kind found in social structures. It also suggests a kind of simplistic mathematical analysis which doesn’t sound super insightful or accurate. Otherwise, Asimov’s psychohistory could already be a thing, if it was possible to mathematically model with accuracy the behaviour of societies.
- trasz 4y ago
  We wouldn't know if it was a thing.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Asimov did say in the books that it depended on having a much larger population on lots of planets, so random events averaged out.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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SomewhatLikely 4y ago
The observations about complex systems declining faster than they grow was interesting. The rest of the post kind of boils down to "complex systems fail because they're complex".
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Collapse is a matter of time scales. We know pretty well when our star stops functioning and everyone on earth dies. Are we not then therefore in a very slightly downward slope towards absolute annihilation and collapse?
- imtringued 4y ago
  Yes, the problem is not recognizing that decay is everywhere.
- blesimetar 4y ago
  "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
civilized 4y ago
> Perhaps the first person who reasoned in scientific terms about how to avoid collapses was the American scientist Jay Forrester (1918-2016). He was one of the main developers of the field known today as “system science.” To him we owe the idea that when people try to avoid collapse, they usually take actions that worsen the situation. Forrester described this tendency as “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.” This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an observational artifact. A complex social system that has developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system, you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and attribute its decline to not doing those things. Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  That appears to be the point of the comparison, no? If you are operating a machine so complex and unpredictable you don't truly know how it works (a Roman Empire, in this case), you'll never know which way to pull the lever until you have already done so.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Just speculation, but I think complexity provides decisive advantages, at least initially, and that's why we see complex societies dominate. Human groups that can avert catastrophe by adding complexity will do so, and those who do not may be unknown to history. If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Also short term beneficial choices may be long term bad choices. The industrial revolution was great for humanity for well over a century. The standard of living in industrial countries advanced farther and quicker than ever before. But that same industrial activity had long term effects that we (as a society) are only just starting to accept and are still in disagreement about how to handle.
m0llusk 4y ago
Geoffrey West has some really good work on this. What happens most of the time is that new alternative technologies and ways come in and change the whole context around. That is, the old civilization really does collapse in a sense but a new and different one takes its place. A good recent example of this is the "green revolution" which for better or worse created a burst of productivity in agriculture that has so far sustained ongoing population growth that previous agricultural traditions could not have supported.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The Santa Fe Institute (of which Geoffrey is a member) is explicitly dedicated to complex systems research. They tend to take some theoretical stances certain fields might consider controversial, but there's a lot of smart people there nonetheless. I'd also recommend Marten Scheffer's work on the stability of complex systems as particularly relevant to this thread.
k__ 4y ago
Would you argue that social systems of the past failed mostly because of technological advancement?
jostmey 4y ago
Perhaps the solution to preventing complex systems from collapsing is to built in a reset button to rest and restart. Most of us became used to regularly restating our early PCs, which is how we delt with these complex systems collapsing. I speculate the human body does something similar when we sleep, which is an example of a highly complex system
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  A lot of the relevant researchers basically define complex systems as the systems that you don't or can't understand well enough to simply reset and restart, nor would that be an appropriate intervention strategy most of the time. Should we drain lakes and put in new soil and water every time there's an algal bloom? Similarly, you can't truly reset an economy, or a polity with anything we'd call "reasonable methods".
  - blep_ 4y ago
    Eh, just remove all the laws and invalidate all the money every n years. I'm sure this will have no negative consequences.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Invalidating money every n years could work because it forces people to make an arrangement with people in the future. However, it would be simpler to introduce a three month expiry date to cash bills that demands you pay 1% once it expired, resulting in -4% interest per year. People will be glad to lend out money at 0% as they avoid the -4% interest on cash.
taylorius 4y 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.
- civilized 4y ago
  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.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    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.
    - civilized 4y ago
      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.
      - pharrington 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure that's just called "cancer" when it happens in animals.
        civilized 4y ago
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
I think it’s less a matter of complexity and more a matter of dependencies. In the case of our society, we have enormous dependency on centralized systems for energy, heat, water, medical, and more. That is where the real risks exist.
- luis_cho 4y ago
  I agree with you, the other problem is to rely on only one system. Our global economy is fragile in this sense.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  I think you nailed the problem. I once had a car that had a single chip control various subsystems. You couldn’t easily get to the chip because it was buried behind the dash, and you had to remove the entire dash to replace it. Once the chip went bad, the collision detection system stopped working, which is kind of important to the modern driver, since you want to know if you are too close to objects or if something is too close to you. Then, the radio stopped working, which is kind of important if you like to listen to news or get weather updates. Then, the various stereo components stopped working, which is kind of important if you like to listen to music, the CD player, podcasts, or use the phone hands free to talk with people as you are driving. Etc. All because of one bad chip buried in the vehicle dash that nobody could get to in order to replace it.
m3kw9 4y ago
Complex systems can form feedback loops under just the right set of conditions.
asimpleusecase 4y ago
Seems like any highly complex system can have elements that are chaotic- in the sense that they are very subject to small changes that can lead to a threshold. You may be moving a number of levers and all is going well. Then you make a change or fail to adapt to a change that in the past was not of consequence - but now it is. Only in this case you quickly find yourself at a threshold you did not expect and no amount of effort can keep you from it. If you had full understood the situation you could have easily prevented the unraveling but you did not have compete knowledge due to the complexity.
immigrantheart 4y ago
Mildly related, I am currently reading “Thinking in Systems” and came upon the idea of positive reinforcing feedback loop. I immediately have 2 questions: - how to make a positive feedback loop for self - can positive feedback loop be sustained indefinitely
luis_cho 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
- AlotOfReading 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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%20250/210%20Reasons.htm https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...
im3w1l 4y ago
Complexity can stabilize an unstable system, allowing it to stick around long enough for us to notice how unstable it really was all along when the stabilization eventually fails.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
My understanding of the article is that complex systems don't collapse faster, they simply need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all. Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on. So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history. They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not. A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that I think this is a very good judgement. It's a lot easier to deplete resources than to allow them to retain their value, or with even more difficulty achieve growth.. Sometimes things really fly off the shelf (viral) but mostly it takes a lot of work with a focused mindset for growth to be initiated to begin with and continue to take place for any length of time. For a large multi-generational system like that the tremendous strength required to get it flying and keep it going will often have to result in some remarkable upward momentum. The initiative required can sometimes be lost over one or more generations and the average person may not notice as the upward momentum alone prevents things from faltering immediately. Until it's too late because the collective talent's focus needed to be retarding collapse as soon as the elusive initiative was lost, but that event did not register against the macro upward momentum still remaining. So the whole thing comes crashing down while presided over by those who seemed OK at stewarding upward trends, while they were actually not capable of continuing the mindset or making equivalent contributions over one or more generations, and completely out of their element when downward pressure arises that would otherwise be overcome.
- skohan 4y ago
  Intuitively it makes sense to me that more complex systems collapse faster because potentially they have more points and modes of failure. For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of our current modern global society depend on the availability of Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively rare element, with concentrated extraction. Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap, powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems which have that dependency. This creates a single point of failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the whole system. I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more likely it is that you have many of these weak points floating around.
tarkin2 4y ago
More things to go wrong?
olah_1 4y ago
Simple systems are also easier to dismantle, which seems to hint that they are more fragile. If a tertiary goal is to have job security, designing a more complex system could be in your favor.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "simple systems are easier to dismantle". It seems easy to think of counterexamples if I'm understanding what you mean. Even with technology, the bitcoin blockchain (simple) seems way harder to dismantle than layer 2+ web3 DeFi projects running on smart contracts (complex)
TedShiller 4y ago
The headline implies a conclusion which is not necessarily true. There are many complex systems that don’t collapse faster than many simple systems.
paulpauper 4y ago
Netflix became popular around 2004-2005, but it took another 5 years after that for blockbuster to fail, and it was sudden. A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless. A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion. In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  a lot of times the trigger is usually some kind of massive payment that needs to be made, but then all of a sudden whatever was enabling these payments to happen before is no longer happening and the company goes into default.
- animalgonzales 4y ago
  > A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The key thing is the same as in the coronavirus pandemic, it's exponential growth - think of Facebook as the virus, Myspace as the immune system and word-of-mouth being the infection way. The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.
- fnord77 4y ago
  it doesn't have to be that long .... VisiCalc, the first "killer app" collapsed about a year after Lotus 1-2-3 was released.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  At least in the case of Blockbuster, I'd say the lag can be accounted for by the fact Netflix got into streaming in 2007. Prior to that Netflix started eating Blockbuster's lunch, but the service really took off once they managed to mainstream streaming. This was helped, in no small part, by the rapid rise in broadband penetration of that same time period. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall-of-Blockbuster-Chhabria-2017_fig4_332091515 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...
joebob42 4y ago
The roman empire seems like an especially terrible example of complex systems failing quickly given it existed in a partially collapsed state for longer than most major empires existed period.
- baybal2 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- t_mann 4y ago
  Exactly. Even considered on its own it's a really bad example of rapid collapse. Roman civilization lasted for about 1000 years until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD (250 more if you include the pre-republican period). One could argue at length when its decline started, but a reasonable starting point would be ~250 years prior to that, with the great crisis of the third century. That's a quarter (fifth) of its entire existence, and a lot of human generations, who would mainly have noticed significant up- or down-swings during their own lifetimes (with somewhat equal probability). Only the most historically literate would maybe have perceived a general downward tendency over the centuries.
- cedilla 4y ago
  I have yet to see one comparison to the fall of Rome that wasn't complete horse shit - and this is no exception. It's just madness from the beginning - "Rome" began to fall as soon as it was relevant, it lasted for more than a millenium, and if you just pick the right point in time, you can make an argument for almost anything. Except in this case the author didn't even bother to pick the right time, instead opting for some quote "A few centuries" before the "rapid" descent. Most empires last only a few decades.
  - joebob42 4y ago
    Even the fall of the republic to "tyranny" / dictatorship took a pretty long time. You could pick a number of different starting points I guess but I think it'd be hard to argue it wasn't in progress post Sulla, which is like 30 or 40 years before Caesars whole thing. I guess on the scale of history that's pretty short but that's still multiple lifetimes for most people back then.
superb-owl 4y ago
Everyone seems to be focusing on the crazy assertion that the Roman Empire collapsed quickly. But what stood out to me was citing Blockbuster as a complex system. They didn't die because an interconnected web of dependencies started to rot, they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared. It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really weak.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  > they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared. That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores" rather than just "distributing media". Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote business model. Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped along for years past it being needed until it disappeared practically overnight. You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a dime given a massive change in conditions.
  - superb-owl 4y ago
    Very true! I'd be curious to learn why they failed to make the shift to digital. I imagine having to support hundreds of storefronts was a huge distraction.
eternalban 4y ago
The human body is a very complex system. It's an incredibly complex system with 30 trillion moving parts (cells). And it doesn't stop there. Layer upon layer of abstraction culminating in organs, sub-systems (cardio, nervous, GI, ..), and finally a thinking hairy biped. It operates in a hostile environment subject to ceaseless assault by germs, viruses, and other organisms. Complexity clearly can not be the issue, otherwise evolution would favor simpler organism, but we're the ones lording it over simpler systems. I think our design thinking is lagging. We need to work on that front.
lamontcg 4y ago
What about the British Empire?
O__________O 4y ago
Attempted to find critical counter points to the “seneca curve” — but was unable to find any via Google, Wikipedia, etc. As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite. While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that: — most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones. — many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system. Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking. ________ As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
- prepend 4y ago
  Isn’t Rome itself a counter example? It peaked in expansion and size in 117AD but didn’t really collapse until hundreds of years later (or a thousand of you consider Constantinople through Istanbul). My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
- imtringued 4y ago
  You have noticed the problem with humans. They don't like modeling decay. So decay is simply ignored and assumed away. Meanwhile biological systems model decay. There is no obsession with growing forever. People's height is limited by nutrition and genetics, nothing else really. If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.
drewcoo 4y ago
This model of complexity just doesn't make sense to me. So I looked it up on Wikipedia: > Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.[1] Is a star topology wih 50 nodes more complex than a star topology with only 5? To me, there are concerns of size and scaling, but not complexity only given that as a problem. And according to Wikipedia, the difference in leaf nodes wouldn't increase complexity. But that's exactly what the article is calling complexity, more nodes in a star topology! And then it calls other things complexity that make even less sense: > Blockbuster, too, was a network: one formed by the links that the company had with its customers [star topology again, like I pointed out above]. But by the early 2000s, those links started breaking down: The company was losing customers because its business model had become obsolete [and not because the business was too "complex," so let's blame complexity]. Maybe complexity works differently in physical chemistry. Maybe that just doesn't translate well outside of chemistry. I don't know. I just don't get it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  There's no formal theory behind complexity. There's qualitative and scientific studies but I have seen any strict mathematical formalism around it that fully fleshes out that system A is more complex then system B definitively. I remember reading that currently there is a movement take intuition of of complexity and transform it into a formalism. If you squint it looks like it's possible, however this isn't always true. For example the term "life" can't really be formalized because the intuition encompasses a set of things that are over complicated and even blurry at times. It's a loaded word that spawns philosophical debates and nobody realizes they're debating about a poorly defined arbitrary concept. It could be that "complexity" is the same thing... personally it doesn't look that way to me, but I'm not sure.
onos 4y ago
In some models, this picture of slow gain followed by rapid decline is actually the worst possible situation for happiness, with the inverse (rapid gain followed by slow declines giving optimal happiness). See here: https://www.efavdb.com/utility-engines https://www.efavdb.com/utility-engines
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Key word: complex. As complexity increases so do unknowns. As in, if X and Y changes what happens to Z or Q for that matter. Futhermore, as complexity increases, often historically so does hubris. Look no futher than the current state of the world and say The Fed.
Threeve303 4y ago
Speaking of which, hope someone is watching the Feds' Reverse Repo Market Rates
decebalus1 4y ago
As someone who frequently gets great book recommendations from HN, I will try to return the favor and mention https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10258783-drift-into-failure https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10258783-drift-into-fail...
gkanai 4y ago
The author: "Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy." If you want to read about the collapse of complex societies from an actual anthropologist, I recommend Joseph Tainter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collaps...
Konohamaru 4y ago
This guy/gal is writing sensationalist propaganda. Spectacular collapses of systems are rare, which is why it's noteworthy when they happen. Rather, systems transform. Even his/her example of the Roman Empire wasn't a true collapse but rather a transformation: most of medieval Europe's institutions were continuation of Roman institutions.
ftyers 4y ago
A nice book about this subject that I haven't seen references here yet is Joseph Tainter's "The collapse of complex societies".
seventytwo 4y ago
Makes intuitive sense. The corollary to this might be that linearly increasing complexity requires a non-linear amount of input energy. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen from human civilization development and evolutionary development.
larsrc 4y ago
Junk writing with cherrypicked examples. As mentioned by others, the collapse of the Roman empire was not slow. Blockbuster may have fallen quickly, but it wasn't any more complex than other companies of our time that have risen quickly or fallen slowly. Complexity can be fragile or it can be stable. A system with redundancies and ways to adapt can be quite complex and yet stable. And many, many simple systems collapse quickly, for instance most start-ups. It's just not as noticeable as a huge system collapsing quickly.
lkrubner 4y ago
Queue theory suggests the more nodes you add to handle your queue then the longer your queue can survive (facing rising traffic) but the faster it will collapse when it finally runs out of capacity. Zach Tellman went over this in one of his talks and he had a nice graphic to demonstrate what this looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0 I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed. Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies: ”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. ”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.” Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch: ”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” lifted from: https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-law-of-motion-gradually-then-suddenly/ https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-la...
vivasvan 4y ago
> All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness. Uh, what about India?
jollybean 4y ago
"Already in the time of Seneca, the first century CE, the problem of mine depletion may have been felt. By the third century CE, Roman mining production collapsed. At that point, gold started vanishing from the empire; most of the gold that was in circulation went to China to pay for luxury items, like silk. Eventually, no gold meant no money. No money meant the troops couldn’t be paid." ??? 'Gold' is not 'money'. We just use it as such. We can use anything. If there is 'less gold' to go around, we can just value it in higher denominations, i.e. deflation. Of course that can have practical problems, and an expanding economy, you generally want more 'currency' ... ... but you can just as easily say '1 ounce of Gold' is '1 plot of land' ... and then make it worth more. Or use salt. Or silver. Or whatever. And oddly, the Roman Empire took forever to really come undone.
- imtringued 4y ago
  >If there is 'less gold' to go around, we can just value it in higher denominations, i.e. deflation. Imagine borrowing $300k for a house denominated in gold and then the price of gold doubles. Now you owe $600k even though you haven't agreed to this amount in the original contract. You have taken something less valuable and now you are returning something more valuable. In any other business context one would expect to get paid for providing this service. The illogical nature of gold demands compensation instead, as the lender could just do nothing with his gold and get the same benefit despite the fact that doing nothing is actively harmful to the economy. Ancient Egypt simply used grains as money. You deposit the grains at a local grain bank, get a clay tablet in return. They never had a "not enough" money problem. Because borrowing grain and returning it in pristine condition was actually considered the service it is. If the lender does nothing, his grains will spoil in front of his eyes.

265 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

What does this mean for our highly-available distributed systems like Kubernetes, Airplanes, and Global Economics? Does it always reduce to resource optimization versus resiliency tradeoffs?

m0llusk 4y ago
Scale is another big part of it. Over longer time periods resilience comes to mean something different. How many web sites from the 1990s are still up, accessible, and relevant?

spaniard89277 4y ago

In the end, isn't all a function of the energy needed to keep a system going?

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Also : how complex systems fail. https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/

sharpener 4y ago

I agree with the comments that the article is misdirecting fluff. Cutting through... All organised systems (anything that we would describe as a system as opposed to random or chaos) require additional energy inputs to maintain organisation over and above those energy inputs required for performing input-output function. Maintenance requires work. All life on Earth depends on the thermodynamic gradient supplied by the Sun being appropriately steep enough for that additional organisational margin to be provided within tolerances, but not too steep to make everything excessively random, or too shallow to stop stuff moving. Failing to provide that extra margin of energy for organisation for any part of the functionality of a system results in breakdown and halting. E.g. Quite a lot of the extra margin of human organisation energy is provided via being omnivores _at the top_ of the food chain. If all the plankton and birds and bees die -> Humans don't get enough food -> Disorganisation -> Dead humans. It is possible to build forms of organisation that are inherently unstable outside of limited tolerances. Stepping outside of those tolerances exponentially raises the extra costs required to maintain organisation. Needless to say Nature doesn't keep many such systems around, if any, particularly when under significant stress. They get weeded out fast. The extra kicker in human economic organisation is money as a mediator for controlling energy allocation. Organisations retain function if they can afford to support the additional cost of being organised. Within monetary systems, profits have to remain high enough to pay off loan interest and support organisation. But... If people without enough jobs or money starve -> The latent labour pool dies -> No support for growth, no maintenance -> breakdown. So the labour force loses a margin of value-add generated in order to support organisation. The hidden labour force that is Nature loses out once human economies/populations grow too fast or too large. So modern humans do this "supporting organisation" without considering Nature as part of the organisation, and frequently fail to support the labour pool properly. Obsolete monetary/value system designs are a big problem. Globally, monetary systems to support sustainable societies should provide for: equilibration against destructive monopolies - especially at the ForEx level; enough liquidity - supplied through limited liability loan failures under capitalism - to meet aggregate interest on loans and organisational costs AND latent labour pool support; maintenance of key functional inputs, like food, sunlight,...; and zero cumulative pollution; Why shouldn't every viable economic or social unit operate monetarily locally according to Kirchhoff's current law, if money is an adequate proxy for energy? Why do we not price in the extra energy input Nature requires to remain coherent and still balance supply and demand? Humans previously kept building inherently unstable civilisation structures with inherently unstable monetary systems that cannot cope with externally imposed constraints arising. They kept failing to preserve and maintain the inputs sensibly, and they designed monetary systems that are typically destined to create and exarcerbate those failures. They could collectively: stop breeding like rabbits; design better monetary systems; stop shitting on the environment. All of it is technologically feasible already. How much of that is politically feasible right now? People are holding people back by being people. Wicked problem. Difficult to handle kindly.

sys_64738 4y ago

It's harder to keep a complex machine running which is why you want a simple system. Keep It Simple Stupid.

throw457 4y ago
Complex systems are always in a failed state.
- analog31 4y ago
  But "failed state" simply means that some of the controls have been disabled, at least according to John Gall. That just translates into working without quite knowing how they work.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Complex systems are always in a state of maintenance. Some part is always failing, but we can repair it. Systemic failure happens when we can't keep up with the necessary maintenance. It's very easy to look a a big complex system, see lots of failure, and conclude the whole ship is going down, but that may not be the case.
  - slx26 4y ago
    Funny thought: then we may characterize a complex system as a system that's (most of the time) too big to fail all at once, and whose resilience to failure simply arises from continued previous failure. Which sounds like another way of saying "I don't know what I'm doing, but it kinda works"... until it doesn't. Maybe when it has inevitably grown too big to be successfully maintained anymore.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
You definitely do not want a simple system if your singular goal is resiliency. The most resilient systems we know about are all complex, from ecosystems to organisms to cities to the internet itself. The main problem is that our current toolkit is so primitive that understanding anything about them, from how to intelligently intervene to how resilient any particular system is at any particular point in time is damn near impossible. There's a lot of research trying to change that, but it's obviously a difficult problem.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Why complex social systems collapse faster - the article doesn’t talk about general complexity but the kind found in social structures. It also suggests a kind of simplistic mathematical analysis which doesn’t sound super insightful or accurate. Otherwise, Asimov’s psychohistory could already be a thing, if it was possible to mathematically model with accuracy the behaviour of societies.

trasz 4y ago
We wouldn't know if it was a thing.
DennisP 4y ago
Asimov did say in the books that it depended on having a much larger population on lots of planets, so random events averaged out.
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SomewhatLikely 4y ago

The observations about complex systems declining faster than they grow was interesting. The rest of the post kind of boils down to "complex systems fail because they're complex".

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Collapse is a matter of time scales. We know pretty well when our star stops functioning and everyone on earth dies. Are we not then therefore in a very slightly downward slope towards absolute annihilation and collapse?

imtringued 4y ago
Yes, the problem is not recognizing that decay is everywhere.
blesimetar 4y ago
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

civilized 4y ago

> Perhaps the first person who reasoned in scientific terms about how to avoid collapses was the American scientist Jay Forrester (1918-2016). He was one of the main developers of the field known today as “system science.” To him we owe the idea that when people try to avoid collapse, they usually take actions that worsen the situation. Forrester described this tendency as “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.” This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an observational artifact. A complex social system that has developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system, you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and attribute its decline to not doing those things. Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.

shadowofneptune 4y ago
That appears to be the point of the comparison, no? If you are operating a machine so complex and unpredictable you don't truly know how it works (a Roman Empire, in this case), you'll never know which way to pull the lever until you have already done so.
- civilized 4y ago
  Just speculation, but I think complexity provides decisive advantages, at least initially, and that's why we see complex societies dominate. Human groups that can avert catastrophe by adding complexity will do so, and those who do not may be unknown to history. If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Also short term beneficial choices may be long term bad choices. The industrial revolution was great for humanity for well over a century. The standard of living in industrial countries advanced farther and quicker than ever before. But that same industrial activity had long term effects that we (as a society) are only just starting to accept and are still in disagreement about how to handle.

m0llusk 4y ago

Geoffrey West has some really good work on this. What happens most of the time is that new alternative technologies and ways come in and change the whole context around. That is, the old civilization really does collapse in a sense but a new and different one takes its place. A good recent example of this is the "green revolution" which for better or worse created a burst of productivity in agriculture that has so far sustained ongoing population growth that previous agricultural traditions could not have supported.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
The Santa Fe Institute (of which Geoffrey is a member) is explicitly dedicated to complex systems research. They tend to take some theoretical stances certain fields might consider controversial, but there's a lot of smart people there nonetheless. I'd also recommend Marten Scheffer's work on the stability of complex systems as particularly relevant to this thread.

k__ 4y ago

Would you argue that social systems of the past failed mostly because of technological advancement?

jostmey 4y ago

Perhaps the solution to preventing complex systems from collapsing is to built in a reset button to rest and restart. Most of us became used to regularly restating our early PCs, which is how we delt with these complex systems collapsing. I speculate the human body does something similar when we sleep, which is an example of a highly complex system

AlotOfReading 4y ago
A lot of the relevant researchers basically define complex systems as the systems that you don't or can't understand well enough to simply reset and restart, nor would that be an appropriate intervention strategy most of the time. Should we drain lakes and put in new soil and water every time there's an algal bloom? Similarly, you can't truly reset an economy, or a polity with anything we'd call "reasonable methods".
- blep_ 4y ago
  Eh, just remove all the laws and invalidate all the money every n years. I'm sure this will have no negative consequences.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Invalidating money every n years could work because it forces people to make an arrangement with people in the future. However, it would be simpler to introduce a three month expiry date to cash bills that demands you pay 1% once it expired, resulting in -4% interest per year. People will be glad to lend out money at 0% as they avoid the -4% interest on cash.

taylorius 4y 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.

civilized 4y ago
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.
- taylorius 4y ago
  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.
  - civilized 4y ago
    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.
    - pharrington 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that's just called "cancer" when it happens in animals.
      - civilized 4y ago

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

I think it’s less a matter of complexity and more a matter of dependencies. In the case of our society, we have enormous dependency on centralized systems for energy, heat, water, medical, and more. That is where the real risks exist.

luis_cho 4y ago
I agree with you, the other problem is to rely on only one system. Our global economy is fragile in this sense.
sammalloy 4y ago
I think you nailed the problem. I once had a car that had a single chip control various subsystems. You couldn’t easily get to the chip because it was buried behind the dash, and you had to remove the entire dash to replace it. Once the chip went bad, the collision detection system stopped working, which is kind of important to the modern driver, since you want to know if you are too close to objects or if something is too close to you. Then, the radio stopped working, which is kind of important if you like to listen to news or get weather updates. Then, the various stereo components stopped working, which is kind of important if you like to listen to music, the CD player, podcasts, or use the phone hands free to talk with people as you are driving. Etc. All because of one bad chip buried in the vehicle dash that nobody could get to in order to replace it.

m3kw9 4y ago

Complex systems can form feedback loops under just the right set of conditions.

asimpleusecase 4y ago

Seems like any highly complex system can have elements that are chaotic- in the sense that they are very subject to small changes that can lead to a threshold. You may be moving a number of levers and all is going well. Then you make a change or fail to adapt to a change that in the past was not of consequence - but now it is. Only in this case you quickly find yourself at a threshold you did not expect and no amount of effort can keep you from it. If you had full understood the situation you could have easily prevented the unraveling but you did not have compete knowledge due to the complexity.

immigrantheart 4y ago

Mildly related, I am currently reading “Thinking in Systems” and came upon the idea of positive reinforcing feedback loop. I immediately have 2 questions: - how to make a positive feedback loop for self - can positive feedback loop be sustained indefinitely

luis_cho 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

AlotOfReading 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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%20250/210%20Reasons.htm https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...

im3w1l 4y ago

Complexity can stabilize an unstable system, allowing it to stick around long enough for us to notice how unstable it really was all along when the stabilization eventually fails.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

My understanding of the article is that complex systems don't collapse faster, they simply need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all. Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on. So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history. They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not. A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
>need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that I think this is a very good judgement. It's a lot easier to deplete resources than to allow them to retain their value, or with even more difficulty achieve growth.. Sometimes things really fly off the shelf (viral) but mostly it takes a lot of work with a focused mindset for growth to be initiated to begin with and continue to take place for any length of time. For a large multi-generational system like that the tremendous strength required to get it flying and keep it going will often have to result in some remarkable upward momentum. The initiative required can sometimes be lost over one or more generations and the average person may not notice as the upward momentum alone prevents things from faltering immediately. Until it's too late because the collective talent's focus needed to be retarding collapse as soon as the elusive initiative was lost, but that event did not register against the macro upward momentum still remaining. So the whole thing comes crashing down while presided over by those who seemed OK at stewarding upward trends, while they were actually not capable of continuing the mindset or making equivalent contributions over one or more generations, and completely out of their element when downward pressure arises that would otherwise be overcome.
skohan 4y ago
Intuitively it makes sense to me that more complex systems collapse faster because potentially they have more points and modes of failure. For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of our current modern global society depend on the availability of Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively rare element, with concentrated extraction. Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap, powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems which have that dependency. This creates a single point of failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the whole system. I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more likely it is that you have many of these weak points floating around.

tarkin2 4y ago

More things to go wrong?

olah_1 4y ago

Simple systems are also easier to dismantle, which seems to hint that they are more fragile. If a tertiary goal is to have job security, designing a more complex system could be in your favor.

snapcaster 4y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "simple systems are easier to dismantle". It seems easy to think of counterexamples if I'm understanding what you mean. Even with technology, the bitcoin blockchain (simple) seems way harder to dismantle than layer 2+ web3 DeFi projects running on smart contracts (complex)

TedShiller 4y ago

The headline implies a conclusion which is not necessarily true. There are many complex systems that don’t collapse faster than many simple systems.

paulpauper 4y ago

Netflix became popular around 2004-2005, but it took another 5 years after that for blockbuster to fail, and it was sudden. A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless. A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion. In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.

bobthepanda 4y ago
a lot of times the trigger is usually some kind of massive payment that needs to be made, but then all of a sudden whatever was enabling these payments to happen before is no longer happening and the company goes into default.
animalgonzales 4y ago
> A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.
mschuster91 4y ago
The key thing is the same as in the coronavirus pandemic, it's exponential growth - think of Facebook as the virus, Myspace as the immune system and word-of-mouth being the infection way. The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.
fnord77 4y ago
it doesn't have to be that long .... VisiCalc, the first "killer app" collapsed about a year after Lotus 1-2-3 was released.
scoopertrooper 4y ago
At least in the case of Blockbuster, I'd say the lag can be accounted for by the fact Netflix got into streaming in 2007. Prior to that Netflix started eating Blockbuster's lunch, but the service really took off once they managed to mainstream streaming. This was helped, in no small part, by the rapid rise in broadband penetration of that same time period. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro... https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall-of-Blockbuster-Chhabria-2017_fig4_332091515 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...

joebob42 4y ago

The roman empire seems like an especially terrible example of complex systems failing quickly given it existed in a partially collapsed state for longer than most major empires existed period.

baybal2 4y ago
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t_mann 4y ago
Exactly. Even considered on its own it's a really bad example of rapid collapse. Roman civilization lasted for about 1000 years until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD (250 more if you include the pre-republican period). One could argue at length when its decline started, but a reasonable starting point would be ~250 years prior to that, with the great crisis of the third century. That's a quarter (fifth) of its entire existence, and a lot of human generations, who would mainly have noticed significant up- or down-swings during their own lifetimes (with somewhat equal probability). Only the most historically literate would maybe have perceived a general downward tendency over the centuries.
cedilla 4y ago
I have yet to see one comparison to the fall of Rome that wasn't complete horse shit - and this is no exception. It's just madness from the beginning - "Rome" began to fall as soon as it was relevant, it lasted for more than a millenium, and if you just pick the right point in time, you can make an argument for almost anything. Except in this case the author didn't even bother to pick the right time, instead opting for some quote "A few centuries" before the "rapid" descent. Most empires last only a few decades.
- joebob42 4y ago
  Even the fall of the republic to "tyranny" / dictatorship took a pretty long time. You could pick a number of different starting points I guess but I think it'd be hard to argue it wasn't in progress post Sulla, which is like 30 or 40 years before Caesars whole thing. I guess on the scale of history that's pretty short but that's still multiple lifetimes for most people back then.

superb-owl 4y ago

Everyone seems to be focusing on the crazy assertion that the Roman Empire collapsed quickly. But what stood out to me was citing Blockbuster as a complex system. They didn't die because an interconnected web of dependencies started to rot, they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared. It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really weak.

DoughnutHole 4y ago
> they died because their entire reason for existing disappeared. That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores" rather than just "distributing media". Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote business model. Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped along for years past it being needed until it disappeared practically overnight. You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a dime given a massive change in conditions.
- superb-owl 4y ago
  Very true! I'd be curious to learn why they failed to make the shift to digital. I imagine having to support hundreds of storefronts was a huge distraction.

eternalban 4y ago

The human body is a very complex system. It's an incredibly complex system with 30 trillion moving parts (cells). And it doesn't stop there. Layer upon layer of abstraction culminating in organs, sub-systems (cardio, nervous, GI, ..), and finally a thinking hairy biped. It operates in a hostile environment subject to ceaseless assault by germs, viruses, and other organisms. Complexity clearly can not be the issue, otherwise evolution would favor simpler organism, but we're the ones lording it over simpler systems. I think our design thinking is lagging. We need to work on that front.

lamontcg 4y ago

What about the British Empire?

O__________O 4y ago

Attempted to find critical counter points to the “seneca curve” — but was unable to find any via Google, Wikipedia, etc. As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite. While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that: — most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones. — many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system. Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking. ________ As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.

prepend 4y ago
Isn’t Rome itself a counter example? It peaked in expansion and size in 117AD but didn’t really collapse until hundreds of years later (or a thousand of you consider Constantinople through Istanbul). My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
imtringued 4y ago
You have noticed the problem with humans. They don't like modeling decay. So decay is simply ignored and assumed away. Meanwhile biological systems model decay. There is no obsession with growing forever. People's height is limited by nutrition and genetics, nothing else really. If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.

drewcoo 4y ago

This model of complexity just doesn't make sense to me. So I looked it up on Wikipedia: > Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.[1] Is a star topology wih 50 nodes more complex than a star topology with only 5? To me, there are concerns of size and scaling, but not complexity only given that as a problem. And according to Wikipedia, the difference in leaf nodes wouldn't increase complexity. But that's exactly what the article is calling complexity, more nodes in a star topology! And then it calls other things complexity that make even less sense: > Blockbuster, too, was a network: one formed by the links that the company had with its customers [star topology again, like I pointed out above]. But by the early 2000s, those links started breaking down: The company was losing customers because its business model had become obsolete [and not because the business was too "complex," so let's blame complexity]. Maybe complexity works differently in physical chemistry. Maybe that just doesn't translate well outside of chemistry. I don't know. I just don't get it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity

deltaonefour 4y ago
There's no formal theory behind complexity. There's qualitative and scientific studies but I have seen any strict mathematical formalism around it that fully fleshes out that system A is more complex then system B definitively. I remember reading that currently there is a movement take intuition of of complexity and transform it into a formalism. If you squint it looks like it's possible, however this isn't always true. For example the term "life" can't really be formalized because the intuition encompasses a set of things that are over complicated and even blurry at times. It's a loaded word that spawns philosophical debates and nobody realizes they're debating about a poorly defined arbitrary concept. It could be that "complexity" is the same thing... personally it doesn't look that way to me, but I'm not sure.

onos 4y ago

In some models, this picture of slow gain followed by rapid decline is actually the worst possible situation for happiness, with the inverse (rapid gain followed by slow declines giving optimal happiness). See here: https://www.efavdb.com/utility-engines https://www.efavdb.com/utility-engines

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Key word: complex. As complexity increases so do unknowns. As in, if X and Y changes what happens to Z or Q for that matter. Futhermore, as complexity increases, often historically so does hubris. Look no futher than the current state of the world and say The Fed.

Threeve303 4y ago

Speaking of which, hope someone is watching the Feds' Reverse Repo Market Rates

decebalus1 4y ago

As someone who frequently gets great book recommendations from HN, I will try to return the favor and mention https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10258783-drift-into-failure https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10258783-drift-into-fail...

gkanai 4y ago

The author: "Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy." If you want to read about the collapse of complex societies from an actual anthropologist, I recommend Joseph Tainter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collaps...

Konohamaru 4y ago

This guy/gal is writing sensationalist propaganda. Spectacular collapses of systems are rare, which is why it's noteworthy when they happen. Rather, systems transform. Even his/her example of the Roman Empire wasn't a true collapse but rather a transformation: most of medieval Europe's institutions were continuation of Roman institutions.

ftyers 4y ago

A nice book about this subject that I haven't seen references here yet is Joseph Tainter's "The collapse of complex societies".

seventytwo 4y ago

Makes intuitive sense. The corollary to this might be that linearly increasing complexity requires a non-linear amount of input energy. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen from human civilization development and evolutionary development.

larsrc 4y ago

Junk writing with cherrypicked examples. As mentioned by others, the collapse of the Roman empire was not slow. Blockbuster may have fallen quickly, but it wasn't any more complex than other companies of our time that have risen quickly or fallen slowly. Complexity can be fragile or it can be stable. A system with redundancies and ways to adapt can be quite complex and yet stable. And many, many simple systems collapse quickly, for instance most start-ups. It's just not as noticeable as a huge system collapsing quickly.

lkrubner 4y ago

Queue theory suggests the more nodes you add to handle your queue then the longer your queue can survive (facing rising traffic) but the faster it will collapse when it finally runs out of capacity. Zach Tellman went over this in one of his talks and he had a nice graphic to demonstrate what this looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0 I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed. Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies: ”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. ”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.” Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch: ”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” lifted from: https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-law-of-motion-gradually-then-suddenly/ https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-la...

vivasvan 4y ago

> All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness. Uh, what about India?

jollybean 4y ago

"Already in the time of Seneca, the first century CE, the problem of mine depletion may have been felt. By the third century CE, Roman mining production collapsed. At that point, gold started vanishing from the empire; most of the gold that was in circulation went to China to pay for luxury items, like silk. Eventually, no gold meant no money. No money meant the troops couldn’t be paid." ??? 'Gold' is not 'money'. We just use it as such. We can use anything. If there is 'less gold' to go around, we can just value it in higher denominations, i.e. deflation. Of course that can have practical problems, and an expanding economy, you generally want more 'currency' ... ... but you can just as easily say '1 ounce of Gold' is '1 plot of land' ... and then make it worth more. Or use salt. Or silver. Or whatever. And oddly, the Roman Empire took forever to really come undone.

imtringued 4y ago
>If there is 'less gold' to go around, we can just value it in higher denominations, i.e. deflation. Imagine borrowing $300k for a house denominated in gold and then the price of gold doubles. Now you owe $600k even though you haven't agreed to this amount in the original contract. You have taken something less valuable and now you are returning something more valuable. In any other business context one would expect to get paid for providing this service. The illogical nature of gold demands compensation instead, as the lender could just do nothing with his gold and get the same benefit despite the fact that doing nothing is actively harmful to the economy. Ancient Egypt simply used grains as money. You deposit the grains at a local grain bank, get a clay tablet in return. They never had a "not enough" money problem. Because borrowing grain and returning it in pristine condition was actually considered the service it is. If the lender does nothing, his grains will spoil in front of his eyes.