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Whenever I see a tragedy, calamity, crash or whatever I almost always see one common factor: a lack of diversity somewhere. In this case it was in domestic food
by jmward01 2y ago
Whenever I see a tragedy, calamity, crash or whatever I almost always see one common factor: a lack of diversity somewhere. In this case it was in domestic food production. Whenever you look in nature and say 'that looks like a healthy ecosystem' it is almost always a system that is diverse and conversely when you see an ecosystem in distress it is generally lacking in diversity. As far as I know, diversity is the only real long term survival algorithm out there.
[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.
- epistasis 2y agoThe lack of diversity was not in food production, but rather in land ownership, and being able to own the fruits of your own labor. Plenty of food, just none of it for the Irish because they did not own the land.
- baq 2y agoDon’t forget to mention what happened when you tried to get some of that not your food so you could attempt to survive…
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoWhat, like stealing Cromwellian corn so the young might see the morn? Win a free trip to Australia!
- Gibbon1 2y agoI made a guesstimate that it was cheaper for Britain to send unemployed people to Australia than it would be to feed them.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoDefinitely not. My line was from a very famous Irish song, called the fields of athenry, about exactly this.
- I_complete_me 2y agoIs this a deliberate replacement for Trevelyan?
- SwtCyber 2y agoDiversity isn't just nice to have, it's a survival mechanism
- 7952 2y agoAnd efficiency is mutually exclusive with flexibility. The more you optimise to do one thing the less you can easily do other things.
- jmward01 2y agoI think the evidence says you can have both. When I say 'the evidence' I mean just looking at nature. In nature you clearly see animals and plants that are massively more efficient at tasks than their ancestors all while living in more diverse environments and in larger numbers so clearly you can get both efficiency and flexibility gains. I think though your point has merit but I am finding it hard to write a super clear example of it. Maybe this is because there is a confusion between efficiency and temporary advantage? I think of efficiency more like an attempt to get the maximum infinite gain while a temporary advantage attempts to maximize the immediate gain only. It isn't an efficiency gain if you go out of business in 5 years just so you get a windfall now. With that in mind it is clear that you can create temporary advantages very easily but they may not be long term efficiency gains. Figuring out what is just a temporary gain and what is a long term efficiency gain is hard though. There are no crystal balls to tell you the truth of the future. Diversity in a system means that you will have a lot of different approaches to the problem to try which gives you more of a chance to find the long term efficiency instead of just a temporary advantage.
- froh 2y agogreed. food was produced in ireland and exported for profits while irish were starving. greed is not a matter of diversity. get me right: I love diversity, diversity is a "must have". but greed is unrelated to diversity, isn't it?