14 ms·

The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)

206 points by simonebrunozzi 4y ago

triska 4y ago
I also highly recommend this book! Regarding the sentence "One that he doesn’t discuss much but that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws and regulations." which appears in the review: I think all these laws and regulations can be regarded as being part of the increasing bureaucracy that Tainter identifies as the cause of eventual collapse of complex societies. One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable. A related book I recommend particularly in that regard is Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps by René Guénon.
- agomez314 4y ago
  I also focused in on this sentence. How difficult it becomes for an average person to start new things on his/her own nowadays! The only solution to the diminishing of widespread bureaucracy i can think of is war - but is costly, can take a long time, and most societies don't make it past a civil war. Like a forest fire, it clears away the hubris and overgrowth of process that accumulates over time.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might even do the opposite). Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction of lots of several codes into one, for example). There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.
    - _alxk 4y ago
      The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).
      - RandomLensman 4y ago
        Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for example. Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the "state", so not sure war does generally shrink administrative systems.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal system. As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to shrink an administrative system that just won a war.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848. They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure. Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.
        wizofaus 4y ago
        Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Huh? I started a company for a small project on Tuesday. It took me 30 minutes and I never left my chair.
    - paganel 4y ago
      Maybe the OP hadn't in mind the actual process of incorporating a company per se, but the process of "starting" a company as in getting it off the ground in terms of money coming in/revenues. And, imo, it's more difficult now to do that compared to 10, 20 years ago, and not only because of increased competition.
    - recyclelater 4y ago
      Get some employees, have some of them turn out to be pain in the ass, then find out how annoying west coast labor laws are. Hire some employees, spread them across multiple states, find out the complexities of employment law in multiple states. Start up a health plan, same thing. There a million examples, none of them are bad by themselves, but every aspect of a multi employee business has rules and regulations that if you run afoul of, there are consequences. No one gives you a manual of these, you find them out along the way and it costs you money and time.
      - Spooky23 4y ago
        I was an exec at a small company in a union building in Manhattan. I’m familiar with annoyances. That’s life. It’s full of annoyances. Our forebearers had a lot more.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    What people arguing against accretion of regulations tend to miss is that this accretion (as currently experienced in the US at least) goes hand-in-hand with accumulation of capital and consolidation of industries. The large corporations can afford to comply with complex regulations. For them, maintaining complex regulatory regimes (through legalized bribery and regulatory capture) is part of the defensive fortifications that maintain their monopoly/oligopoly positions. As an optimist, I believe we can reform the system (e.g., through antitrust enforcement, which the FTC under Ms. Khan is doing more of than in recent decades), rather than burn it down.
    - starkd 4y ago
      I applaud your optimism, but don't let optimism cloud realism. There's comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses This is historically untrue. When complex societies civil war, they tend to fall apart. (Wars of unification being an exception.) Their citizens’ living conditions permanently fell, often for generations, until an outside power subsumed them. This trend looks to be strengthening as time goes on, probably on account of increasing species-wide firepower and mobility. Instead, peaceful (if politically violent) “revolutions” reboot the society from time to time. One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system.
        jdkee 4y ago
        "One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system." A better argument would be the case that American involvement in WWII resulted in a larger restructuring of American lives. Women entering the workforce. The U.S. military fighting racial segregation. The resultant boomer generation and the rise of labor until 1980. Lowered income inequality. The GI bill providing affordable higher-ed to a broad swatch of the populace.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    There are more opportunities for 'regular folks' to do something on a 'grand scale' than at any time in history, but not everyone can do it. Paradoxically, starting your own business in the 'old time' way, i.e. plumbing or roofing contractors ... it's like guaranteed work for great income. Plumbers are the new Dentists. That said, there are areas in which regulatory issues are obviously a problem. This talk of 'war' is hyperbolic.
- jxramos 4y ago
  reminds me of that Elon Musk quote > “Rules and regulations are immortal. They don’t die … there’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations.” Piling rules upon rules instead gradually “hardens the arteries of civilisation, where you are able to do less and less”.
- wjnc 4y ago
  Perhaps you know since you’ve read the book: Does the book _really_ decide on declining marginal returns to complexity as an ultimate factor? Or is that the interpretation by the reviewer? The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) If the author does, now I’m wondering why I missed this book & going to read. First thing as a counterpoint that comes to mind is biological complexity. There are marginal diminishing returns to complexity in biology as well, but not a rise / collapse rhythm in biological complexity outside of external events that I know of.
  - archduck 4y ago
    > The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) So Karl Marx and Max Weber are just chopped liver?
    - wjnc 4y ago
      Ah true point. Perhaps the addition /in the modern scientific era/ would be in place. Begging the question when that starts of course. Let’s say that economics was earlier embracing quantitative techniques in the 20th century and that there was a rift between the fields especially when sociology was young that nowadays is less pronounced. It’s all interpretation.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I would have said that the 1960s and part of the 1970s were filled with attempts to synthesize, among other things the fields you've mentioned. It wound down with Reagan and Thatcher's elections, which may or may not be proximate cause - the new right at that time were certainly not fond of the humanities in any way.
  - najarvg 4y ago
    This is a great point of comparison. I feel that societal systems (and associated complexities) are more rigid than biological systems in the sense that a biological systems evolve efficient solutions in response to changing internal and external stimuli while societal systems cannot/will not due to man-made laws, norms, expectations etc. The latter (biological systems) shows first order adaptation while the former (societal) shows, at best second and third order adaptations, if it even adapts.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  > trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable For me this is particularly maddening as I run into it frequently. Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it happens to be the wrong decision. But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. Meaning there really aren't any metrics that can reliably 'measure' them. Instead of just acknowledging this plain and simple fact, they just create more metrics and/or define the criteria with even more detail. It just makes more work but adds no further insight because ultimately, the issue is subjective and no volume of measurements will help. Think about coming up with a formula about how 'good' art is by measuring how many colors it has, how many curves, right angles, etc. It just doesn't work that way and but they keep trying.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. They're still objective, it's still objectively wrong to order your employees into a battle royale to the death or paint everything they can find teal as a response to pretty much any problem even when the$e are multiple right answers with a human component. It's just that measuring can cost more than the benefit the task brings, and change what is being measured to destroy anyvalue produced.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      The belief that all problems can become objective provided enough data is measured is the problem. It's not anywhere close to practically true, and I doubt its even theoretically true even with all the assumptions of a frictionless spherical cow in vacuum type scenarios. This belief is what is driving the both the wasted resources in pointless data gathering, but also a paralysis of decision making by those in positions to make them. The key above is 'all'. There are many, a majority even, of problems for which data gathering and analysis is absolutely the best the approach. These would be the objective problems. Not all problems fall into this category.
- _n3lh 4y ago
  Imo it is not the existence or ineffectiveness of complex laws/regs that leads to problems. Rather, their lack of understanding among the population, and difficulty of execution/implementation. I actually had a startup project the I shelved specifically aimed at addressing this. Wonder if I should revisit it...
  - oblak 4y ago
    Not sure you had to be downvoted for stating a simple opinion. While I don't believe you are right, I'd like to ask for the reasoning that led you to this conclusion.
- starkd 4y ago
  There is also the phenomenon of regulatory capture, when the bureaucracy responsible for implementing regulations gets captured by the corporations and entities involved. Very relevant to what's happening today.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    I can’t say much about the veracity of her arguments, but there is a journalist named Sarah Chayes that has been investigating the US failures in Afghanistan as, primarily, a reflection of America supporting (and helping to build) a culture of corruption that undermined our primary nation building objectives in that country. She extends this argument to American political and business culture that shares these same qualities of corruption (that we conveniently label as something other than “corruption”).
- pbronez 4y ago
  > the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable. Helloooo paperwork reduction act https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_Congress.pdf https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_...
- zwkrt 4y ago
  In the book A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge outlines a kind of bleak future for humanity in which societal collapse is inevitable. Despite interstellar communication and wild technology, there always comes a point at which the machinery of a given society is too complicated and heavy handed and over-fitted to handle some change in circumstances. The result is the survivors are thrown back to pre-industrial society. Of course in his book the machinery of society is more intrinsically enmeshed with high technology—a failure in supply chain could result in a failure of resource allocation or governance.
  - jasone 4y ago
    I found the prequel, "A Deepness in the Sky", even more compelling. The book's theme is the inevitable collapse of legacy software under the weight of its own complexity. And the book views codified government as a form of legacy software.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency Hello, Agile.
- teddyh 4y ago
  “Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” — https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  - jollybean 4y ago
    There is some insight in this, but it's also deeply cynical to the point of being very misleading and maybe a bit wrong. Teachers and Administrators are equally as committed to 'keeping their jobs'. It just so happens that 'teaching' is mostly 'teaching' and all you can do is 'teach' and so long as you have kids in front of you 'it's working'. The scope of their roles doesn't allow for them to go too far away from 'the mission'. Administrators are not default committed to the 'org' they're just in a position where their decisions and actions may or may not further the mission. 'Very Bad Teaching' is rare and usually self evident. With administration, it's not so clear. NASA Engineers are not like teachers, in that, the could be wasting a lot of time and energy. Maybe the risk is worth it in some cases (?) in others, maybe not so much. FYI - in teaching, the biggest costs are generally the 'teachers'. etc.. Regular Public Schools aren't a good opportunity so much to demonstrate this 'Law'. A not-quite-independent entity like a Post Office might be. They often fight directly against innovation due to the risk it may create to jobs for rank and file, and don't quite have the same competitive basis as others.
    - jaybrendansmith 4y ago
      Pournelle was not cynical enough. You only need to spend time in corporate America to watch the bureaucrats, administrators, and bean counters take over. It always starts small, but every day, while you are focused on making a better product, or a better process, or service to the customer, they are focused on control of the finances and core decisions, because it is in their nature to do so. And one day you look up from your work, and find that you are no longer permitted to make the decisions that are best for the company's goals. It is inevitable, because these people are like barnacles on a boat, or scum on a pond, or tarnish on silver. They dull and destroy every good thing they touch.
- jdkee 4y ago
  "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -Oscar Wilde
jxramos 4y ago
> Second, Tainter proposes a very simple and general mechanism leading to collapse: declining marginal returns to complexity. Over time the benefits of complexity diminish and its costs increase. This makes me think of the US Federal Tax code, the pure opportunity cost of the entire tax industry and legislation that could be otherwise spent if we just had a flat tax with it's full regressiveness accepted. Any charity, favoratism, etc from the government should come in the form of grants etc from some other agency--keep the taxes simple.
- pfisch 4y ago
  How can you just have a "flat tax" if you pay employees, or have inventory costs? You need deductions so you need to track everything anyway. That is the hard part. So having a flat tax or not barely saves any complexity at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Werewolf255 4y ago
  So, real question, why does the tax code need to be -that- simple? Like, we've got computers and stuff to do the math these days? It sounds like an easy way to say that one is for 'a simple, common sense solution' while papering over the very real harm it's going to do to at-risk and impoverished communities. To contribute, why should those communities that a flat tax harms be forced to bear that weight of simplification? It looks like you'd be ignoring the reviewer's second point: that the other factor in societal collapse is when those portions of society that bear undue weight no longer can bear additional burdens.
  - jxramos 4y ago
    I’d say when it’s that simple there’s nothing to argue with and no major brain power demanded, let alone a computer program needed to crunch the numbers and optimize in some highly complicated multidimensional space. There’d be no competing interpretations to battle out between lawyers and CPAs. The only thing that would be argued about is at what tax rate. I’ve often dreamed about what the tax formula would look like in its full gory details as an unevaluated expression full of variables and piece wise functions and all that. To the second point I’d say why wait until collapse to trim off unproductive regulatory churn. I guess that’s the fundamental thing—is it a productive pursuit on net and compared to what exactly. It’s hard for me not to imagine the free market filling the void with something more productive even though I can’t single out anything specifically.
hydrogen7800 4y ago
The author was a guest on the Omega Tau podcast back in 2015 [1]. There is a sort of follow-up podcast with a different guest on the same topic [2]. [1] https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-collapse/ https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-coll... [2] https://omegataupodcast.net/238-societal-complexity-part-ii-todays-perspective/ https://omegataupodcast.net/238-societal-complexity-part-ii-...
- gtsnexp 4y ago
  Super interesting podcast (in general)! Thanks for the links.
newaccount2021 4y ago
In every complex societal collapse prior to the present day, subsistence agriculture was either the most common occupation or well-known to a substantial portion of the population. I caution against turning doomerism into an intellectual fetish - unlike past societies, we don't know how to feed ourselves without "the system".
- peteradio 4y ago
  Is the implication that common people had an obvious choice to collapse into, now we don't so we kind of can't?
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    It's more that 'wandering off into the wild and doing your own thing until society settles down/it being worth it to try again' was an option. Now we're at population levels that require some amount of technological complexity to maintain and therefore a certain level of complex organization.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  yes but that was because the lower class was largely responsible for food generation. today they are responsible for so much more. Technology, especially hi-tech contributes to our current complexity.
brakmic 4y ago
Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter: https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization: https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  Joseph Tainter was recently interviewed by Nate Hagens: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainter https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainte...
  - ambientenv 4y ago
    Came here to mention the interview by Nate and am happy to see you did. In addition, and on a similar conceptual basis, I'd recommend: The Great Simplification [1] The Century of the Self [2] Can't Get You Out of My Head [3] The Resilience web site content [4] The Consilience Project [5] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 [2] https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ [3] https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top [4] https://www.resilience.org/ https://www.resilience.org/ [5] https://consilienceproject.org/ https://consilienceproject.org/
    - fullstackchris 4y ago
      This is just scratching the surface of anthropology, if you want to go on a wild ride, read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve... Oxford also has a similar shop to Resilience / Consilience, the Future of Humanity Institute: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ Toby Ord is a member, his book The Pricipe: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is quite interesting: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice
gtsnexp 4y ago
Just a very superficial comment/thought after reading the review: There seem to be an underlying implied correlation between complexity and failure (or collapse). If that premise is, indeed, part of the book's thesis then, in this context, would be fair to say that "simple" societies are less prone to collapse?
- Werewolf255 4y ago
  I think there might be room for misreading/misinterpretation of that part. I read that part of the review as saying complex societies have 'bucked the trend' by not being -as- prone to collapse; but with a big caveat that it looks like complex societies may operate on longer time scales, so the collapse might be staved off for longer. It's an open question about what 'long enough' would look like though, one that's probably beyond the author's scope.
- bratbag 4y ago
  In the same way that a boulder at the bottom of a valley is unlikely to roll downhill.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    To be more exact, primitive societies can still collapse demographically (e.g. through a widespread plague or famine), but they don't have any extra complexity to lose.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Primitive societies do not collapse or grow much. They just stagnate. It might be nice living (I would surely enjoy some hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle), but there is basically no progress over centuries or even millennia. To look at one extreme example, Neanderthal stone tools (Mousterien) haven't changed very much over 100 000 years of their existence.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    It's profoundly incorrect to say that nomadic societies "stagnated". They adapted to incredibly variable and harsh conditions from the equator to the Arctic and invented much of the technology of the modern world like agriculture. Archaeological horizons and the lack thereof are only partly related to the societies that produced them. If you're just getting into the subject of what ancient societies looked like and how diverse they could be, I'd recommend Dawn of Everything as an approachable instruction to the topic.
bobcostas55 4y ago
>One that he doesn’t discuss much but that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws and regulations. Tainter does discuss this, and rejects it (incorrectly imo).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Could you be more specific as to where and how?
jason-phillips 4y ago
> First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. To add to the discussion, I submit this entertaining docu-series[0] describing the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean. The authors proffer that one possible cause for their near-total collapse could have been a breakdown within Bronze Age society's well-structured and complex systems from which recovery was simply not possible. Apologies to the history purists for the inevitable inaccuracies to be found herein but this was an approachable series for me as a codemonkey. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q
- udkl 4y ago
  I thought about posting this exact video, but you beat me to it ! Extra credits really has some very well done entertaining historical docu-series .... I recommend other historical buffs to subscribe and go through their videos
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    It's quite good, isn't it? I really enjoy their videos.
- Muehe 4y ago
  I can also recommend the FallOfCivilizations channel on YouTube.[0] It's basically a podcast that later started adding video footage to its episodes. As the name suggests each episode deals with the rise and fall of one specific civilization. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos
BMc2020 4y ago
Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks...Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo. Honestly Albert, I'd like to see you working on bringing del.icio.us back.
drivebycomment 4y ago
I am highly skeptical there'a any clear causal relationship between complexity and collapse, but let's say there's some. I would rank nuclear war and a few others (climate change, or more broadly environmental imbalance caused by humanity) much more plausible and realistic cause for the collapse, way higher than what meager change this has, and thus this is mostly a distraction and intellectual pastime than something that is worth our collective attention.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  Chance of nuclear war is low. Climate change exasperates the underlying scarcity of resources that pressures those not at the top.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    NB: exacerbates. https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/exasperate-vs-exacerbate https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/exasperate-vs-exace...
    - yomkippur 4y ago
      hey you should take a break from HN, your posting history frequency is a bit disturbing.
  - vkou 4y ago
    The chance of nuclear war in any particular year is low, but I wouldn't say that the chance of a nuclear war is low. We were seconds away from midnight multiple times in the twentieth century. The political and technical failsafes against it need to work every time.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Long, slow, persistent frictions and rot tend to be more destructive over time than sudden attack or incident, though the rot may enable a specific incident to become a determinative trigger. C.f., Bonhoeffer on the danger of stupidity --- unlike determined malice, it never rests and knows no bounds or restraints: Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. ... https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-entire-quote.html https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-e... (The essay continues, I strongly recommend it.)
fallingfrog 4y ago
It’s my opinion, having worked in IT in various roles, that there are 3 kinds of systems. First, the informal systems, which are just everyone doing whatever works for them. Those systems are flexible, simple, and inefficient. Second, the rigid systems, which tend to crop up when the org grows big enough that the informal systems start getting in their own way. Those are simple, inflexible, and efficient. Third are the complicated systems, which happen when the simplifying assumptions in rigid systems become problems. These are complicated, a bit less efficient than rigid systems, and a bit less flexible than informal systems. Now, the problem with the complicated systems- which tend to become more and more complicated over time- is that they require a dedicated staff to maintain, which tends to grow over time, and so the organization has to be big, and needs to have access to a big profit margin/energy surplus. If that goes away, then yes you have to collapse down to rigid or informal systems. The same process no doubt plays out on a civilizational level too.
mrwh 4y ago
Does this cover the Bronze Age collapses, triggered as societies moved to iron? That could be a counterexample: the long-range trading for copper and tin was no longer required, and that decrease in complexity (combined with the increase in killing power of iron over bronze) led to multiple collapses across the Mediterranean world.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Yes, though quite briefly and indirectly. The historical cases covered are (chapter 1): The Western Chou Empire, the Harappan Civilization, Mesopotamia (includes the Bronze age collapse period, though not detailed as such), The Egyptian Old Kingdom, The Hittite Empire, The Olmec, The Lowland Classic Maya, The Mesoamerican Highlands, Casas Grandes, The Chacoans, The Hohokam, The Eastern Woodlands, The Huari and Tiahuanoco Empires, The Kachin, and the Ik. These are brief accounts (14 instances in 13 pages), but common themes are highlighted.
peter_d_sherman 4y ago
>"While these are essential tools for maintaining complex societies it is particularly easy to see how over time their benefits decline and their costs rise when you only ever add laws and regulations but never do a partial or complete rewrite. It is the societal equivalent of the accumulation of technical debt in startups." What a great analogy! At least for people that truly understand what technical debt is...
- dial9-1 4y ago
  there are many analogies that could be made comparing software development to society. for example, distributed vs centralized is akin to communism vs capitalism. web-development, like modern-day societies, only want to "scale", but forget that scaling goes both ways, up and down.
  - amelius 4y ago
    And using laws in ways they were not intended to be used (loopholes) corresponds to hacking. It's never punished in the same way as hacking, though. In fact, it's often considered a fair practice.
havblue 4y ago
At the risk of mentioning Trump, I thought this was what executive order 13771 was supposed to alleviate: make the regulatory state self-pruning by forcing it to repeal two regulations for every one that was passed. It was environmentally controversial, certainly. I don't see how the government will ever reduce its complexity unless it has a similar mechanism in place to force existing regulations to be removed to make room for new ones.
- objectivetruth 4y ago
oblak 4y ago
D-D-Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in... We kept it grey
t_mann 4y ago
> easy to see how over time their benefits decline and their costs rise when you only ever add laws and regulations but never do a partial or complete rewrite written by someone who has thoroughly avoided learning even superficially about how laws and regulations are actually being created and curated. or even just thinking it through. how would append-only regulation even work? you'd have multiple slightly differently worded paragraphs right below each other, and only the last one counts? that's clearly not how it's done, also not in the bigger picture.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  You’re missing the point completely. It’s not about law and regulation literally being append only, it’s rather about the number of laws and regulations consistently growing over time, with very little repeal of old regulation, which are mainly removed only to be replaced by more complex and extensive ones on the same topic. If you even superficially learn about how regulations and laws are created and curated in the US, you will find that this is exactly how things work here.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    An important counterexample that comes to mind is the Glass-Steagall banking act, the repeal of which arguably led to the greatest financial crisis in a century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation#Aftermath_of_repeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... shows that a) laws do indeed get repealed in the US and b) reducing regulation may even increase the risk of chaos, not reduce it
    - yyyk 4y ago
      > arguably led to the greatest financial crisis in a century The act did not ban securitization or buying derivatives. Even wiki can't find any justification for this argument beyond an unsourced 'cultural shift'.
      - andrewprock 4y ago
yomkippur 4y ago
Anybody else feel like the advanced economy countries are complex and starting to collapse? I do.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  The world seems to be entering a crisis, but I don't see any overall trend over "advanced economy countries" (you mean rich ones, right?), nor I see reasons for this specific crisis to be very different from any other. You may be thinking about one or two countries, and overgeneralizing.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  This is a fairly broadly-held view, yes. It's also one that emerges throughout history. The term "Seneca Cliff" refers to an observation by the Roman rhetoritician. Apocalyptic concepts are common in the Bible. Eastern religions tend to take a more cyclical view, of recurring expansion and collapse. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West is a classic. There's a modern literature largely spawning from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972) of which I'd include Tainter. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency is a more recent take on that. Broad-brush observations and gut feelings tend to be less substantive and articulable than specific indicia and mechanisms. Tainter's work is of interest in that he does point to a general rule that is common to multiple instances.
lucas_membrane 4y ago
Diminishing returns on complexity might just mean that when thing get complex, they get harder to figure out, so a larger percentage of attempts at improvement (even attempts at simplification) are likely to fail. Given that complex societies take a long time to rise, the perpetrators thereof may see the long-term upward course as a law of nature, and become a little over-optimistic about the advantages of change. The most universal law of nature: Periods of exponential growth always end.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  I am reminded of software that has entered its "Big Ball of Mud" phase, where it has become impossible to understand, even to debug or simplify, and so it can no longer evolve to meet changing needs, and is eventually replaced with something newer (and, for the moment, simpler).
  - lucas_membrane 4y ago
    I'll agree that complexity is part of the Ball of Mud phenomenon. The worst I've seen was attributable to what used to be called 'coupling', mostly accidental, incidental, or pathological, between different parts of what was said to be a 'system,' mostly for lack of a better word. With all the incomprehensible consequences of any software changes, bug fixes of the buggy code were discouraged by management, because the average number of new bugs caused by each repair was approximately equal to 1 + the number of programmers involved in creating the fix.
  - klysm 4y ago
    I believe the tendency of all software to move in that direction is also relevant
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> a larger percentage of attempts at improvement (even attempts at simplification) are likely to fail If we are talking about laws, there is no "fail" - no politician ever will recognize a mistake. Failed laws are never revoked - they are either ignored, unenforced or continue to do harm.
deleted 4y ago
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emiliano2022 4y ago
Society is a dissipative structure, and there is a thermodynamic logic that applies to it. Energy goes into a society, and outputs are metastable systems and the inevitable entropy. And sooner or later the amount of energy needed to maintain that metastability will exceed the energy available, this is in rough analogy to the Carnot engine efficiency, where efficiency is proportional to the temperature differences along the system boundaries. Everything makes perfect sense if you cast it in this heterodox framework.
pessimizer 4y ago
I think the mechanism is simple "imperial overstretch." Societies that go to war give a lot of their resources to the people who produce military material. Those people's disproportionate control of resources gives them a disproportionate influence in politics, which they then use to encourage more wars, creating a virtuous circle. As long as war delivers plunder and expansion, society has the resources to continue this. But the incentive of war suppliers to encourage war is not the same as an incentive to win wars. War suppliers profit more from wasteful use of the military, and endless extension of wars, than wins (which replace them with peacetime producers.) This slows down the rate of plunder and expansion until the resources expended on war material become a huge drain on the rest of society. This brings general unrest as the lower classes become desperate, civil war when different factions argue about which wars to pursue or end and on strategy, and secession at the borders, especially the areas that were the fruits of expansion. This is weakness, and invites invasion by a neighboring society in the growth phase of the same process. I think the association with complexity is just because complexity in society rises with the size and organization of the military and its infrastructure.
Animats 4y ago
There's now a movement trying to accelerate the collapse: "accelerationism".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Yeah, I know. People without a functioning moral compass, to whom all the pain and death involved mean nothing? Romantic dreamers, who think that it will make everything better? Short-sighted escapists, who think that to not have their current set of problems means not having problems? Revolutionary true believers, who think that we will inevitably wind up at their version of The Way Things Should Be? Egotists, who think that sure, there will be lots of pain and suffering, but they will be fine? A mix of all of the above? Whatever, it's a view that seems blind to all the death involved. Do they just think all that death won't happen? Or do they think "it will be worth it"? I am profoundly uneasy with accelerationism. It seems like a view for sociopaths.
  - froh 4y ago
    in addition to your enumeration there are the religious fanatics who take current problems as the "signs" for the "last days" and who are longing for some "second coming". some of them are fatalist some of of them actively long to accelerate the process.
    - Animats 4y ago
      That's dispensationalism.[1] It's a weird mixture of Jewish tradition and evangelical Christianity invented in the 1840s. It's tied in with "Left Behind", the building of the Third Temple, the second coming of Jesus, and Jerusalem as the world capital. Wikipedia has a good summary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism
  - klysm 4y ago
    > Short-sighted escapists, who think that to not have their current set of problems means not having problems This is such a universal thing it should have a name, is escapism that in general?
lawrenceyan 4y ago
I notice that the people who tend to be pessimistic more often than not are those that don’t have much direct exposure to technology (whether through work or interest) in their daily lives. I personally would be somewhat pessimistic as well if not for technology (energy generation/storage and AI primarily in terms of resource creation, though improved AI without a corresponding implementation of some form of basic income would be worrying).
- marto1 4y ago
  On the contrary: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomposting https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomposting There is an entire generation raised on "doom porn", having almost constant exposure to tech.
- zionic 4y ago
  FWIW The most pessimistic person I know is a ruby developer. Great guy, just very skeptical and pessimistic about just about anything.
  - klysm 4y ago
    Not against RoR at all but that does make sense
contingencies 4y ago
Quite a few societies don’t collapse but simply go into a long decline and then get taken over by other societies. Do we even have multiple societies anymore? IMHO this is becoming debatable, and ceding heterogeneity could be viewed as a dangerous gamble.
- marto1 4y ago
  I think that's a very good point. Maybe not that we don't have multiple societies, we definitely do[1], but that no one is willing to take the wheel of the so called "globalized" part of the world. [1] See e.g. China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, large swaths of people without internet. The list goes on and on.
  - contingencies 4y ago
    While differences do currently exist, China is increasingly similar to the west in many ways (source: lived here on and off 20 years, also lived AU/UK/US). One of the main differences is entrenched centralized political control not subject to electoral terms, although that comes with really significant downsides it also creates a truly impressive potential for rapid change on critical issues (eg. environment). The disconnected peoples are effectively systemically marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as "societies". They will likely suffer from climate change, sea level change and other coming catastrophes more than the global society. I see only one path forward, a hegemony of global capitalism unbound by political will and environmental destruction. One of the few avenues for potential resolution is private sector mitigating technology development. If only people would stop going to work for FAANG and selling ads.

I also highly recommend this book! Regarding the sentence "One that he doesn’t discuss much but that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws and regulations." which appears in the review: I think all these laws and regulations can be regarded as being part of the increasing bureaucracy that Tainter identifies as the cause of eventual collapse of complex societies. One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable. A related book I recommend particularly in that regard is Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps by René Guénon.

agomez314 4y ago
I also focused in on this sentence. How difficult it becomes for an average person to start new things on his/her own nowadays! The only solution to the diminishing of widespread bureaucracy i can think of is war - but is costly, can take a long time, and most societies don't make it past a civil war. Like a forest fire, it clears away the hubris and overgrowth of process that accumulates over time.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might even do the opposite). Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction of lots of several codes into one, for example). There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.
  - _alxk 4y ago
    The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).
    - RandomLensman 4y ago
      Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for example. Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the "state", so not sure war does generally shrink administrative systems.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal system. As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to shrink an administrative system that just won a war.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.
        inglor_cz 4y ago
        Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848. They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure. Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.
        wizofaus 4y ago
        Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Huh? I started a company for a small project on Tuesday. It took me 30 minutes and I never left my chair.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Maybe the OP hadn't in mind the actual process of incorporating a company per se, but the process of "starting" a company as in getting it off the ground in terms of money coming in/revenues. And, imo, it's more difficult now to do that compared to 10, 20 years ago, and not only because of increased competition.
  - recyclelater 4y ago
    Get some employees, have some of them turn out to be pain in the ass, then find out how annoying west coast labor laws are. Hire some employees, spread them across multiple states, find out the complexities of employment law in multiple states. Start up a health plan, same thing. There a million examples, none of them are bad by themselves, but every aspect of a multi employee business has rules and regulations that if you run afoul of, there are consequences. No one gives you a manual of these, you find them out along the way and it costs you money and time.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      I was an exec at a small company in a union building in Manhattan. I’m familiar with annoyances. That’s life. It’s full of annoyances. Our forebearers had a lot more.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  What people arguing against accretion of regulations tend to miss is that this accretion (as currently experienced in the US at least) goes hand-in-hand with accumulation of capital and consolidation of industries. The large corporations can afford to comply with complex regulations. For them, maintaining complex regulatory regimes (through legalized bribery and regulatory capture) is part of the defensive fortifications that maintain their monopoly/oligopoly positions. As an optimist, I believe we can reform the system (e.g., through antitrust enforcement, which the FTC under Ms. Khan is doing more of than in recent decades), rather than burn it down.
  - starkd 4y ago
    I applaud your optimism, but don't let optimism cloud realism. There's comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses This is historically untrue. When complex societies civil war, they tend to fall apart. (Wars of unification being an exception.) Their citizens’ living conditions permanently fell, often for generations, until an outside power subsumed them. This trend looks to be strengthening as time goes on, probably on account of increasing species-wide firepower and mobility. Instead, peaceful (if politically violent) “revolutions” reboot the society from time to time. One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system.
      - jdkee 4y ago
        "One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system." A better argument would be the case that American involvement in WWII resulted in a larger restructuring of American lives. Women entering the workforce. The U.S. military fighting racial segregation. The resultant boomer generation and the rise of labor until 1980. Lowered income inequality. The GI bill providing affordable higher-ed to a broad swatch of the populace.
- jollybean 4y ago
  There are more opportunities for 'regular folks' to do something on a 'grand scale' than at any time in history, but not everyone can do it. Paradoxically, starting your own business in the 'old time' way, i.e. plumbing or roofing contractors ... it's like guaranteed work for great income. Plumbers are the new Dentists. That said, there are areas in which regulatory issues are obviously a problem. This talk of 'war' is hyperbolic.
jxramos 4y ago
reminds me of that Elon Musk quote > “Rules and regulations are immortal. They don’t die … there’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations.” Piling rules upon rules instead gradually “hardens the arteries of civilisation, where you are able to do less and less”.
wjnc 4y ago
Perhaps you know since you’ve read the book: Does the book _really_ decide on declining marginal returns to complexity as an ultimate factor? Or is that the interpretation by the reviewer? The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) If the author does, now I’m wondering why I missed this book & going to read. First thing as a counterpoint that comes to mind is biological complexity. There are marginal diminishing returns to complexity in biology as well, but not a rise / collapse rhythm in biological complexity outside of external events that I know of.
- archduck 4y ago
  > The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) So Karl Marx and Max Weber are just chopped liver?
  - wjnc 4y ago
    Ah true point. Perhaps the addition /in the modern scientific era/ would be in place. Begging the question when that starts of course. Let’s say that economics was earlier embracing quantitative techniques in the 20th century and that there was a rift between the fields especially when sociology was young that nowadays is less pronounced. It’s all interpretation.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      I would have said that the 1960s and part of the 1970s were filled with attempts to synthesize, among other things the fields you've mentioned. It wound down with Reagan and Thatcher's elections, which may or may not be proximate cause - the new right at that time were certainly not fond of the humanities in any way.
- najarvg 4y ago
  This is a great point of comparison. I feel that societal systems (and associated complexities) are more rigid than biological systems in the sense that a biological systems evolve efficient solutions in response to changing internal and external stimuli while societal systems cannot/will not due to man-made laws, norms, expectations etc. The latter (biological systems) shows first order adaptation while the former (societal) shows, at best second and third order adaptations, if it even adapts.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
> trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable For me this is particularly maddening as I run into it frequently. Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it happens to be the wrong decision. But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. Meaning there really aren't any metrics that can reliably 'measure' them. Instead of just acknowledging this plain and simple fact, they just create more metrics and/or define the criteria with even more detail. It just makes more work but adds no further insight because ultimately, the issue is subjective and no volume of measurements will help. Think about coming up with a formula about how 'good' art is by measuring how many colors it has, how many curves, right angles, etc. It just doesn't work that way and but they keep trying.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. They're still objective, it's still objectively wrong to order your employees into a battle royale to the death or paint everything they can find teal as a response to pretty much any problem even when the$e are multiple right answers with a human component. It's just that measuring can cost more than the benefit the task brings, and change what is being measured to destroy anyvalue produced.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    The belief that all problems can become objective provided enough data is measured is the problem. It's not anywhere close to practically true, and I doubt its even theoretically true even with all the assumptions of a frictionless spherical cow in vacuum type scenarios. This belief is what is driving the both the wasted resources in pointless data gathering, but also a paralysis of decision making by those in positions to make them. The key above is 'all'. There are many, a majority even, of problems for which data gathering and analysis is absolutely the best the approach. These would be the objective problems. Not all problems fall into this category.
_n3lh 4y ago
Imo it is not the existence or ineffectiveness of complex laws/regs that leads to problems. Rather, their lack of understanding among the population, and difficulty of execution/implementation. I actually had a startup project the I shelved specifically aimed at addressing this. Wonder if I should revisit it...
- oblak 4y ago
  Not sure you had to be downvoted for stating a simple opinion. While I don't believe you are right, I'd like to ask for the reasoning that led you to this conclusion.
starkd 4y ago
There is also the phenomenon of regulatory capture, when the bureaucracy responsible for implementing regulations gets captured by the corporations and entities involved. Very relevant to what's happening today.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  I can’t say much about the veracity of her arguments, but there is a journalist named Sarah Chayes that has been investigating the US failures in Afghanistan as, primarily, a reflection of America supporting (and helping to build) a culture of corruption that undermined our primary nation building objectives in that country. She extends this argument to American political and business culture that shares these same qualities of corruption (that we conveniently label as something other than “corruption”).
pbronez 4y ago
> the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable. Helloooo paperwork reduction act https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_Congress.pdf https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_...
zwkrt 4y ago
In the book A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge outlines a kind of bleak future for humanity in which societal collapse is inevitable. Despite interstellar communication and wild technology, there always comes a point at which the machinery of a given society is too complicated and heavy handed and over-fitted to handle some change in circumstances. The result is the survivors are thrown back to pre-industrial society. Of course in his book the machinery of society is more intrinsically enmeshed with high technology—a failure in supply chain could result in a failure of resource allocation or governance.
- jasone 4y ago
  I found the prequel, "A Deepness in the Sky", even more compelling. The book's theme is the inevitable collapse of legacy software under the weight of its own complexity. And the book views codified government as a form of legacy software.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency Hello, Agile.
teddyh 4y ago
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” — https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
- jollybean 4y ago
  There is some insight in this, but it's also deeply cynical to the point of being very misleading and maybe a bit wrong. Teachers and Administrators are equally as committed to 'keeping their jobs'. It just so happens that 'teaching' is mostly 'teaching' and all you can do is 'teach' and so long as you have kids in front of you 'it's working'. The scope of their roles doesn't allow for them to go too far away from 'the mission'. Administrators are not default committed to the 'org' they're just in a position where their decisions and actions may or may not further the mission. 'Very Bad Teaching' is rare and usually self evident. With administration, it's not so clear. NASA Engineers are not like teachers, in that, the could be wasting a lot of time and energy. Maybe the risk is worth it in some cases (?) in others, maybe not so much. FYI - in teaching, the biggest costs are generally the 'teachers'. etc.. Regular Public Schools aren't a good opportunity so much to demonstrate this 'Law'. A not-quite-independent entity like a Post Office might be. They often fight directly against innovation due to the risk it may create to jobs for rank and file, and don't quite have the same competitive basis as others.
  - jaybrendansmith 4y ago
    Pournelle was not cynical enough. You only need to spend time in corporate America to watch the bureaucrats, administrators, and bean counters take over. It always starts small, but every day, while you are focused on making a better product, or a better process, or service to the customer, they are focused on control of the finances and core decisions, because it is in their nature to do so. And one day you look up from your work, and find that you are no longer permitted to make the decisions that are best for the company's goals. It is inevitable, because these people are like barnacles on a boat, or scum on a pond, or tarnish on silver. They dull and destroy every good thing they touch.
jdkee 4y ago
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -Oscar Wilde

jxramos 4y ago

> Second, Tainter proposes a very simple and general mechanism leading to collapse: declining marginal returns to complexity. Over time the benefits of complexity diminish and its costs increase. This makes me think of the US Federal Tax code, the pure opportunity cost of the entire tax industry and legislation that could be otherwise spent if we just had a flat tax with it's full regressiveness accepted. Any charity, favoratism, etc from the government should come in the form of grants etc from some other agency--keep the taxes simple.

pfisch 4y ago
How can you just have a "flat tax" if you pay employees, or have inventory costs? You need deductions so you need to track everything anyway. That is the hard part. So having a flat tax or not barely saves any complexity at all.
deleted 4y ago
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Werewolf255 4y ago
So, real question, why does the tax code need to be -that- simple? Like, we've got computers and stuff to do the math these days? It sounds like an easy way to say that one is for 'a simple, common sense solution' while papering over the very real harm it's going to do to at-risk and impoverished communities. To contribute, why should those communities that a flat tax harms be forced to bear that weight of simplification? It looks like you'd be ignoring the reviewer's second point: that the other factor in societal collapse is when those portions of society that bear undue weight no longer can bear additional burdens.
- jxramos 4y ago
  I’d say when it’s that simple there’s nothing to argue with and no major brain power demanded, let alone a computer program needed to crunch the numbers and optimize in some highly complicated multidimensional space. There’d be no competing interpretations to battle out between lawyers and CPAs. The only thing that would be argued about is at what tax rate. I’ve often dreamed about what the tax formula would look like in its full gory details as an unevaluated expression full of variables and piece wise functions and all that. To the second point I’d say why wait until collapse to trim off unproductive regulatory churn. I guess that’s the fundamental thing—is it a productive pursuit on net and compared to what exactly. It’s hard for me not to imagine the free market filling the void with something more productive even though I can’t single out anything specifically.

hydrogen7800 4y ago

The author was a guest on the Omega Tau podcast back in 2015 [1]. There is a sort of follow-up podcast with a different guest on the same topic [2]. [1] https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-collapse/ https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-coll... [2] https://omegataupodcast.net/238-societal-complexity-part-ii-todays-perspective/ https://omegataupodcast.net/238-societal-complexity-part-ii-...

gtsnexp 4y ago
Super interesting podcast (in general)! Thanks for the links.

newaccount2021 4y ago

In every complex societal collapse prior to the present day, subsistence agriculture was either the most common occupation or well-known to a substantial portion of the population. I caution against turning doomerism into an intellectual fetish - unlike past societies, we don't know how to feed ourselves without "the system".

peteradio 4y ago
Is the implication that common people had an obvious choice to collapse into, now we don't so we kind of can't?
- Mezzie 4y ago
  It's more that 'wandering off into the wild and doing your own thing until society settles down/it being worth it to try again' was an option. Now we're at population levels that require some amount of technological complexity to maintain and therefore a certain level of complex organization.
yomkippur 4y ago
yes but that was because the lower class was largely responsible for food generation. today they are responsible for so much more. Technology, especially hi-tech contributes to our current complexity.

brakmic 4y ago

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter: https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization: https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA

seltzered_ 4y ago
Joseph Tainter was recently interviewed by Nate Hagens: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainter https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainte...
- ambientenv 4y ago
  Came here to mention the interview by Nate and am happy to see you did. In addition, and on a similar conceptual basis, I'd recommend: The Great Simplification [1] The Century of the Self [2] Can't Get You Out of My Head [3] The Resilience web site content [4] The Consilience Project [5] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 [2] https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ [3] https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top [4] https://www.resilience.org/ https://www.resilience.org/ [5] https://consilienceproject.org/ https://consilienceproject.org/
  - fullstackchris 4y ago
    This is just scratching the surface of anthropology, if you want to go on a wild ride, read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve... Oxford also has a similar shop to Resilience / Consilience, the Future of Humanity Institute: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ Toby Ord is a member, his book The Pricipe: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is quite interesting: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice

gtsnexp 4y ago

Just a very superficial comment/thought after reading the review: There seem to be an underlying implied correlation between complexity and failure (or collapse). If that premise is, indeed, part of the book's thesis then, in this context, would be fair to say that "simple" societies are less prone to collapse?

Werewolf255 4y ago
I think there might be room for misreading/misinterpretation of that part. I read that part of the review as saying complex societies have 'bucked the trend' by not being -as- prone to collapse; but with a big caveat that it looks like complex societies may operate on longer time scales, so the collapse might be staved off for longer. It's an open question about what 'long enough' would look like though, one that's probably beyond the author's scope.
bratbag 4y ago
In the same way that a boulder at the bottom of a valley is unlikely to roll downhill.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  To be more exact, primitive societies can still collapse demographically (e.g. through a widespread plague or famine), but they don't have any extra complexity to lose.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Primitive societies do not collapse or grow much. They just stagnate. It might be nice living (I would surely enjoy some hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle), but there is basically no progress over centuries or even millennia. To look at one extreme example, Neanderthal stone tools (Mousterien) haven't changed very much over 100 000 years of their existence.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  It's profoundly incorrect to say that nomadic societies "stagnated". They adapted to incredibly variable and harsh conditions from the equator to the Arctic and invented much of the technology of the modern world like agriculture. Archaeological horizons and the lack thereof are only partly related to the societies that produced them. If you're just getting into the subject of what ancient societies looked like and how diverse they could be, I'd recommend Dawn of Everything as an approachable instruction to the topic.

bobcostas55 4y ago

>One that he doesn’t discuss much but that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws and regulations. Tainter does discuss this, and rejects it (incorrectly imo).

dredmorbius 4y ago
Could you be more specific as to where and how?

jason-phillips 4y ago

> First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. To add to the discussion, I submit this entertaining docu-series[0] describing the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean. The authors proffer that one possible cause for their near-total collapse could have been a breakdown within Bronze Age society's well-structured and complex systems from which recovery was simply not possible. Apologies to the history purists for the inevitable inaccuracies to be found herein but this was an approachable series for me as a codemonkey. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q

udkl 4y ago
I thought about posting this exact video, but you beat me to it ! Extra credits really has some very well done entertaining historical docu-series .... I recommend other historical buffs to subscribe and go through their videos
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  It's quite good, isn't it? I really enjoy their videos.
Muehe 4y ago
I can also recommend the FallOfCivilizations channel on YouTube.[0] It's basically a podcast that later started adding video footage to its episodes. As the name suggests each episode deals with the rise and fall of one specific civilization. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos

BMc2020 4y ago

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks...Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo. Honestly Albert, I'd like to see you working on bringing del.icio.us back.

drivebycomment 4y ago

I am highly skeptical there'a any clear causal relationship between complexity and collapse, but let's say there's some. I would rank nuclear war and a few others (climate change, or more broadly environmental imbalance caused by humanity) much more plausible and realistic cause for the collapse, way higher than what meager change this has, and thus this is mostly a distraction and intellectual pastime than something that is worth our collective attention.

yomkippur 4y ago
Chance of nuclear war is low. Climate change exasperates the underlying scarcity of resources that pressures those not at the top.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  NB: exacerbates. https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/exasperate-vs-exacerbate https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/exasperate-vs-exace...
  - yomkippur 4y ago
    hey you should take a break from HN, your posting history frequency is a bit disturbing.
- vkou 4y ago
  The chance of nuclear war in any particular year is low, but I wouldn't say that the chance of a nuclear war is low. We were seconds away from midnight multiple times in the twentieth century. The political and technical failsafes against it need to work every time.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Long, slow, persistent frictions and rot tend to be more destructive over time than sudden attack or incident, though the rot may enable a specific incident to become a determinative trigger. C.f., Bonhoeffer on the danger of stupidity --- unlike determined malice, it never rests and knows no bounds or restraints: Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. ... https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-entire-quote.html https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-e... (The essay continues, I strongly recommend it.)

fallingfrog 4y ago

It’s my opinion, having worked in IT in various roles, that there are 3 kinds of systems. First, the informal systems, which are just everyone doing whatever works for them. Those systems are flexible, simple, and inefficient. Second, the rigid systems, which tend to crop up when the org grows big enough that the informal systems start getting in their own way. Those are simple, inflexible, and efficient. Third are the complicated systems, which happen when the simplifying assumptions in rigid systems become problems. These are complicated, a bit less efficient than rigid systems, and a bit less flexible than informal systems. Now, the problem with the complicated systems- which tend to become more and more complicated over time- is that they require a dedicated staff to maintain, which tends to grow over time, and so the organization has to be big, and needs to have access to a big profit margin/energy surplus. If that goes away, then yes you have to collapse down to rigid or informal systems. The same process no doubt plays out on a civilizational level too.

mrwh 4y ago

Does this cover the Bronze Age collapses, triggered as societies moved to iron? That could be a counterexample: the long-range trading for copper and tin was no longer required, and that decrease in complexity (combined with the increase in killing power of iron over bronze) led to multiple collapses across the Mediterranean world.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Yes, though quite briefly and indirectly. The historical cases covered are (chapter 1): The Western Chou Empire, the Harappan Civilization, Mesopotamia (includes the Bronze age collapse period, though not detailed as such), The Egyptian Old Kingdom, The Hittite Empire, The Olmec, The Lowland Classic Maya, The Mesoamerican Highlands, Casas Grandes, The Chacoans, The Hohokam, The Eastern Woodlands, The Huari and Tiahuanoco Empires, The Kachin, and the Ik. These are brief accounts (14 instances in 13 pages), but common themes are highlighted.

peter_d_sherman 4y ago

>"While these are essential tools for maintaining complex societies it is particularly easy to see how over time their benefits decline and their costs rise when you only ever add laws and regulations but never do a partial or complete rewrite. It is the societal equivalent of the accumulation of technical debt in startups." What a great analogy! At least for people that truly understand what technical debt is...

dial9-1 4y ago
there are many analogies that could be made comparing software development to society. for example, distributed vs centralized is akin to communism vs capitalism. web-development, like modern-day societies, only want to "scale", but forget that scaling goes both ways, up and down.
- amelius 4y ago
  And using laws in ways they were not intended to be used (loopholes) corresponds to hacking. It's never punished in the same way as hacking, though. In fact, it's often considered a fair practice.

havblue 4y ago

At the risk of mentioning Trump, I thought this was what executive order 13771 was supposed to alleviate: make the regulatory state self-pruning by forcing it to repeal two regulations for every one that was passed. It was environmentally controversial, certainly. I don't see how the government will ever reduce its complexity unless it has a similar mechanism in place to force existing regulations to be removed to make room for new ones.

objectivetruth 4y ago

oblak 4y ago

D-D-Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in... We kept it grey

t_mann 4y ago

> easy to see how over time their benefits decline and their costs rise when you only ever add laws and regulations but never do a partial or complete rewrite written by someone who has thoroughly avoided learning even superficially about how laws and regulations are actually being created and curated. or even just thinking it through. how would append-only regulation even work? you'd have multiple slightly differently worded paragraphs right below each other, and only the last one counts? that's clearly not how it's done, also not in the bigger picture.

xyzzyz 4y ago
You’re missing the point completely. It’s not about law and regulation literally being append only, it’s rather about the number of laws and regulations consistently growing over time, with very little repeal of old regulation, which are mainly removed only to be replaced by more complex and extensive ones on the same topic. If you even superficially learn about how regulations and laws are created and curated in the US, you will find that this is exactly how things work here.
- t_mann 4y ago
  An important counterexample that comes to mind is the Glass-Steagall banking act, the repeal of which arguably led to the greatest financial crisis in a century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legislation#Aftermath_of_repeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... shows that a) laws do indeed get repealed in the US and b) reducing regulation may even increase the risk of chaos, not reduce it
  - yyyk 4y ago
    > arguably led to the greatest financial crisis in a century The act did not ban securitization or buying derivatives. Even wiki can't find any justification for this argument beyond an unsourced 'cultural shift'.
    - andrewprock 4y ago

yomkippur 4y ago

Anybody else feel like the advanced economy countries are complex and starting to collapse? I do.

marcosdumay 4y ago
The world seems to be entering a crisis, but I don't see any overall trend over "advanced economy countries" (you mean rich ones, right?), nor I see reasons for this specific crisis to be very different from any other. You may be thinking about one or two countries, and overgeneralizing.
dredmorbius 4y ago
This is a fairly broadly-held view, yes. It's also one that emerges throughout history. The term "Seneca Cliff" refers to an observation by the Roman rhetoritician. Apocalyptic concepts are common in the Bible. Eastern religions tend to take a more cyclical view, of recurring expansion and collapse. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West is a classic. There's a modern literature largely spawning from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972) of which I'd include Tainter. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency is a more recent take on that. Broad-brush observations and gut feelings tend to be less substantive and articulable than specific indicia and mechanisms. Tainter's work is of interest in that he does point to a general rule that is common to multiple instances.

lucas_membrane 4y ago

Diminishing returns on complexity might just mean that when thing get complex, they get harder to figure out, so a larger percentage of attempts at improvement (even attempts at simplification) are likely to fail. Given that complex societies take a long time to rise, the perpetrators thereof may see the long-term upward course as a law of nature, and become a little over-optimistic about the advantages of change. The most universal law of nature: Periods of exponential growth always end.

rossdavidh 4y ago
I am reminded of software that has entered its "Big Ball of Mud" phase, where it has become impossible to understand, even to debug or simplify, and so it can no longer evolve to meet changing needs, and is eventually replaced with something newer (and, for the moment, simpler).
- lucas_membrane 4y ago
  I'll agree that complexity is part of the Ball of Mud phenomenon. The worst I've seen was attributable to what used to be called 'coupling', mostly accidental, incidental, or pathological, between different parts of what was said to be a 'system,' mostly for lack of a better word. With all the incomprehensible consequences of any software changes, bug fixes of the buggy code were discouraged by management, because the average number of new bugs caused by each repair was approximately equal to 1 + the number of programmers involved in creating the fix.
- klysm 4y ago
  I believe the tendency of all software to move in that direction is also relevant
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
>> a larger percentage of attempts at improvement (even attempts at simplification) are likely to fail If we are talking about laws, there is no "fail" - no politician ever will recognize a mistake. Failed laws are never revoked - they are either ignored, unenforced or continue to do harm.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

emiliano2022 4y ago

Society is a dissipative structure, and there is a thermodynamic logic that applies to it. Energy goes into a society, and outputs are metastable systems and the inevitable entropy. And sooner or later the amount of energy needed to maintain that metastability will exceed the energy available, this is in rough analogy to the Carnot engine efficiency, where efficiency is proportional to the temperature differences along the system boundaries. Everything makes perfect sense if you cast it in this heterodox framework.

pessimizer 4y ago

I think the mechanism is simple "imperial overstretch." Societies that go to war give a lot of their resources to the people who produce military material. Those people's disproportionate control of resources gives them a disproportionate influence in politics, which they then use to encourage more wars, creating a virtuous circle. As long as war delivers plunder and expansion, society has the resources to continue this. But the incentive of war suppliers to encourage war is not the same as an incentive to win wars. War suppliers profit more from wasteful use of the military, and endless extension of wars, than wins (which replace them with peacetime producers.) This slows down the rate of plunder and expansion until the resources expended on war material become a huge drain on the rest of society. This brings general unrest as the lower classes become desperate, civil war when different factions argue about which wars to pursue or end and on strategy, and secession at the borders, especially the areas that were the fruits of expansion. This is weakness, and invites invasion by a neighboring society in the growth phase of the same process. I think the association with complexity is just because complexity in society rises with the size and organization of the military and its infrastructure.

Animats 4y ago

There's now a movement trying to accelerate the collapse: "accelerationism".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Yeah, I know. People without a functioning moral compass, to whom all the pain and death involved mean nothing? Romantic dreamers, who think that it will make everything better? Short-sighted escapists, who think that to not have their current set of problems means not having problems? Revolutionary true believers, who think that we will inevitably wind up at their version of The Way Things Should Be? Egotists, who think that sure, there will be lots of pain and suffering, but they will be fine? A mix of all of the above? Whatever, it's a view that seems blind to all the death involved. Do they just think all that death won't happen? Or do they think "it will be worth it"? I am profoundly uneasy with accelerationism. It seems like a view for sociopaths.
- froh 4y ago
  in addition to your enumeration there are the religious fanatics who take current problems as the "signs" for the "last days" and who are longing for some "second coming". some of them are fatalist some of of them actively long to accelerate the process.
  - Animats 4y ago
    That's dispensationalism.[1] It's a weird mixture of Jewish tradition and evangelical Christianity invented in the 1840s. It's tied in with "Left Behind", the building of the Third Temple, the second coming of Jesus, and Jerusalem as the world capital. Wikipedia has a good summary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism
- klysm 4y ago
  > Short-sighted escapists, who think that to not have their current set of problems means not having problems This is such a universal thing it should have a name, is escapism that in general?

lawrenceyan 4y ago

I notice that the people who tend to be pessimistic more often than not are those that don’t have much direct exposure to technology (whether through work or interest) in their daily lives. I personally would be somewhat pessimistic as well if not for technology (energy generation/storage and AI primarily in terms of resource creation, though improved AI without a corresponding implementation of some form of basic income would be worrying).

marto1 4y ago
On the contrary: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomposting https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomposting There is an entire generation raised on "doom porn", having almost constant exposure to tech.
zionic 4y ago
FWIW The most pessimistic person I know is a ruby developer. Great guy, just very skeptical and pessimistic about just about anything.
- klysm 4y ago
  Not against RoR at all but that does make sense

contingencies 4y ago

Quite a few societies don’t collapse but simply go into a long decline and then get taken over by other societies. Do we even have multiple societies anymore? IMHO this is becoming debatable, and ceding heterogeneity could be viewed as a dangerous gamble.

marto1 4y ago
I think that's a very good point. Maybe not that we don't have multiple societies, we definitely do[1], but that no one is willing to take the wheel of the so called "globalized" part of the world. [1] See e.g. China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, large swaths of people without internet. The list goes on and on.
- contingencies 4y ago
  While differences do currently exist, China is increasingly similar to the west in many ways (source: lived here on and off 20 years, also lived AU/UK/US). One of the main differences is entrenched centralized political control not subject to electoral terms, although that comes with really significant downsides it also creates a truly impressive potential for rapid change on critical issues (eg. environment). The disconnected peoples are effectively systemically marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as "societies". They will likely suffer from climate change, sea level change and other coming catastrophes more than the global society. I see only one path forward, a hegemony of global capitalism unbound by political will and environmental destruction. One of the few avenues for potential resolution is private sector mitigating technology development. If only people would stop going to work for FAANG and selling ads.