The Principles of Prognostication
by Jason GodeskyPredicting the future is hard. Our knowledge is nowhere near the equal to our ignorance, and the unknown often intrudes itself into our world with unforeseeable consequences. But forecasting the future is something all animals do. Being able to tell certain facts about the future is essential to staying alive. How can we predict the future, in an unpredictable world? The fact of the matter is that unpredictability is, itself, fairly predictable—and complexity itself is actually fairly simple. That means that, while some predictions are almost impossible to make reliably, others are almost impossible to avoid. I’d like to share some of these “principles of prognostication� with you, so you can understand why there are some things where I just shrug, and others where I act like I’m making prophecy from the gods.
In 1830, Charles Lyell published, The Principles of Geology. While the strata of the earth have proven a major cornerstone of archaeology, the incredible age of the earth has continued to defy literalist interpretations of traditional, Bronze Age poetry held sacred by certain large modern sects. Perhaps even more importantly, Lyell pioneered the concept of uniformitarianism—the idea that the past has been shaped by essentially the same forces still in play today. Uniformitarianism holds that the exceptional is, well, exceptional—there was no point in time during which miracles were routine matters, no point at which the laws of physics have been suspended.1 That was Lyell’s contribution: the concept that the way things have been is probably the way things will continue to be, making extrapolation into the future possible, because if the forces that shaped the past are the same forces shaping the present, then it is almost certain that those same forces will continue to shape the future. It’s a fundamental assumption to nearly all sciences now.
The First Principle of Prognostication: Unusual events are unusual.
But uniformitarianism is by no means the only force at play. 65 million years ago, a comet hit the earth, resulting in a mass extinction that changed life on the planet forever. On one level, this seems to violate uniformitarianism. On another, though, it confirms it: asteroids and comets are, themselves, uniform, flying about under the same principles they have always flown about. We can fail to accurately predict the future using uniformitarianism if we fail to apply it to a sufficiently wide scale.
And yes, there is the exceptional wild card. An asteroid is still fairly unpredictable. Nuclear war is completely unpredictable, because it comes down to the most mercurial and unpredictable element of all: the individual human being.
Yet we often over-estimate our own “agency,â€? as that chaotic element of individual free will has been dubbed by the social sciences. While the “great men and great deeds” approach to history has been largely out of vogue since Marx, neither are we entirely comfortable seeing ourselves as mere cogs in the mechanistic playing out of a deterministic history, where everything was determined at the Big Bang. The questions of free will and fate that have preoccupied humanity from the beginning are simply recast, once again, only now in terms of cold, uncaring mathematics, rather than the wiles of fate, or the plans of an angry god. Cultural materialism is a post-Marxist ideology. It accepts the Marxist view that history is determined not by individuals, but by economic reality; however, it removes from Marxism the ideas that class struggle is the only such economic reality, or that this mechanistic view of history must end in a classless, Communist utopia.
Giuli’s family comes from a very interesting place. Her grandparents were card-carrying members of the Communist party; her mother and uncles were all what she calls “red diaper babies.” They are by no means Communists themselves, by any stretch of the imagination (Giuli and I probably agree with Marx more than any of them), but that philosophical influence is quite evident. They also make for some of the most stimulating conversationalists you’ll ever meet. At dinner with them in St. Louis this weekend, the question was put to me: “What would have happened, if someone along the line had taken the time to really understand Hitler and his feelings of vulnerability, and rejection as an artist and all that psychological baggage that made him ‘Hitler’?”
I think Hitler was definitely motivated by the trauma of his own personal history–the death of his mother, his failure as an artist, and the feelings of vulnerability he experienced as a youth. The biographies of most ruthless dictators carry this theme of the abused, neglected, or uncared-for child. That drives them to become dictators–to create an order where they will never be vulnerable again. The failure of a single life thus becomes afflicted upon us all. That kind of agency certainly speaks to the argument of free will, and yet, had someone taken the time to understand Hitler, how much would have changed? After Versailles, Germany was crushed and humiliated. Fascism had to arise there; it had to play itself out in a bid for conquest, and it had to ultimately destroy itself. The grand currents of history were already at play, and could not be stopped. If it had not been Hitler, it would have been someone else. Europe was full of people like that; every such country is. The play was written; only the casting was left undecided.
This is where the much-vaunted concept of “personal responsibility” makes its debut. We have no say over the great sweep of history, but we do have a say as to what part we will play in it. Hitler was “responsible” for his part in the atrocities of the Nazis not because he could have stopped it from occuring, but because he chose to be part of it. Hitler the artist would have borne no blame, terrorized by some other dictator who would instead bear the responsibility. It may not have been the Jews to be massacred, but some other group instead. The campaigns and battlegrounds would shift drastically, but the general outline of it all would have remained largely unchanged.
It is certainly true that in a chaotic world, a butterfly might flap its wings in the Amazon and result in a monsoon in India, but to conclude from this that prediction is impossible is far too simplistic. The world is not inhabited by just one butterfly; there are many butterflies, and while the actions of any particular butterfly may be utterly unpredictable, the actions of all butterflies are quite predictable. This is the first principle of prognostication.
The Second Principle of Prognostication: The actions of individuals are completely unpredictable, but the actions of groups are very predictable.
Why is that? Groups are not simply the sum of their parts. “Mob mentality” is just one of many different ways that individual psychology shifts in a group, to make the group itself a very different thing than simply a collection of individuals. The unpredictable actions of individuals begins to form a bell curve. Most people act normally most of the time–creating a mean of behavior, with fewer and fewer examples as one deviates from “normal” behavior in any direction. Even the standard deviation of this curve tends to be static. All of this is because unusual behavior is, well, unusual. It happens sometimes, but not often. Most complex systems alow for such deviation to occur.
Primitivists have often written on the mechanisms complex societies use to incorporate those elements that might otherwise pose a threat–the protest culture, Michael Moore, mainstream environmentalism, hippie fashion, American liberalism, all of them ways of co-opting radical movements that might otherwise pose a serious threat to complex society, and finding sanctioned avenues for the expression of unusual behaviors. Complex society rarely succeeds in squashing its discontents; it very often succeeds in co-opting them. Thus, part of any complex system is to make the unpredictable, ultimately, predictable.
Trying to understand each and every element in a complex system is something very close to impossible. But we don’t need to understand each and every element to understand the system itself. At one level, everything is chaos–and thus, unpredictable. But if we take a view from a higher level and look at more general patterns, then prediction becomes simple.
The Third Principle of Prognostication: It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough.
Consider Newtonian physics. They’re completely wrong. We know this now. They only have the appearance of truth because of our scale. But at the atomic level, and at the galactic level, we see them break down, and we see that there is a totally different physics at work here, which only superficially resembles Newtonian physics. It’s all an illusion of scale.
All the same, we teach schoolchildren Newtonian physics, even knowing it to be wrong. Why? Because it’s good enough. It’s not often that we find ourselves in the heart of an atom, spinning galaxies about, or stuck in the middle of the Big Bang. These are scenarios that we really don’t need to worry ourselves with.
The human mind is not terribly well-equipped for logic or reason. Sure, it’s capable of those things, but it’s not what it was designed to do. The human mind doesn’t operate like a machine; it operates on heuristics. Heuristics are never 100% true (otherwise, they’d be facts, not heuristics), but they’re usually true.. Heuristics serve an evolutionary purpose that logic never could. Logically, you should determine if a lion charging at you intends to eat you before expending the energy to run away. With that approach, the cubs will be sucking on your marrow before you’ve calculated your probabilities. We use heuristics–a lion is charging at me, I’ll run away now. You don’t know he intends to eat you, and many people have ended up attacked by animals because they ran away. But it remains a very good heuristic.
Heuristics are not perfect, but they’re good enough. Heuristics allow us to make conclusions about the world, without knowing everything about it. Complete knowledge is impossible; our ignorance will always be greater than our knowledge. But we need to predict the future anyway, with at least some high probability of accuracy, in order to have something to base our actions on. Heuristics allow us to do that.
The Fourth Principle of Prognostication: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There’s a reason that this is a proverb, and a reason it applies especially to technology. Human innovation is an incredible force; but it’s also a fairly predictable one. The achievements of the twentieth century certainly make it very difficult to doubt the power of human invention. Yet, those achievements were easily predictable by anyone who was willing to take a serious look. We can all name those short-sighted individuals who discounted invention in the 1800s, but the achievements of the twentieth century were primarily achievements of scale–and mostly achieved because of greater energy sources, namely, the use of fossil fuels.
Making things bigger, faster, stronger, smaller, lighter or more efficient is generally not much of a problem. I have no doubt in our ability to keep increasing our food supply to meet the needs of an ever-larger human population, nor of our ability to make rockets that go to Pluto and back. But we will never create a sustainable way to support billions of human beings. We will never find any combination of energy sources to replace petroleum. These problems are simply not possible.
We’ve said a great deal on “complexity,” but to computer scientists, it means a very different thing. Complexity theory takes a “meta” look at a problem to see what it would take to solve it; computability theory looks at a problem to see if it is solvable at all. There are problems which are completely incomputable–no matter how many resources you throw at them. No innovation will ever change that. There is likely no innovation that will ever solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in polynomial time.
So there are limits to what can be innovated. Besides that, there’s also the fact that innovation isn’t always effective. According to Jevons Paradox, any invention that allows for more efficient use of a resource will result in more, not less, consumption of that resource. So, if we do succeed in making cars that require less gasoline, we’ll have succeeded in increasing the demand for gasoline, not decreasing it as we might intuitively expect. Computers made it easier to execute many tasks, but their widespread adoption increased our workload at a still greater rate–leaving us working harder than ever before.
Finally, there’s the unforeseen consequences of technology. As unforeseen as the specific consequences are, their overall effects are actually fairly predictable. The result of all of these is that, by and large, technological innovation causes as many new problems as it solves. It certainly shifts everything about–a great deal, sometimes–but the overall curve of “resources” in the abstract remains the same. We may be able to externalize like a corporation to something we don’t consider a “cost,” but the total cost doesn’t change very much.
The Fifth Principle of Prognostication: P.T. Barnum knew how to predict.
“There’s a sucker born every minute.” This profound and unassailable truth came from Mr. P.T. Barnum–the very same fellow who, along with Bailey, turned the “circus” from the neo-tribal affair Daniel Quinn discusses in My Ishmael and Beyond Civilization, to the cruel, mercenary machine we know today. That principle was fundamental to his success, and it’s given its name to something most introductory psychology students are forced to memorize for their midterms: the Barnum effect. That’s the tendency of individuals to see a very broad, vague prediction, and interpret it as something very specific. This is the general principle behind your daily horoscope.
There’s a definite negative side to this, but I think the same principle can be applied to help us understand how to accurately predict the future. That is, it’s a lot easier to predict something very general, than something very specific. It goes back to the second principle, as well, that things are easier to predict if we take increasingly expansive views. Thus, the course of the whole of civilization is much easier to predict than the course of a single community. At large enough scales–such as all of civilization–prediction becomes almost trivial.
Predicting the course of an entire country might be possible, but predicting the course of individual politicians or parties is probably not (individual politicians and parties have much less to do with the general course of a country than their political opponents usually like to think). Pinning the progression of events down to a span of a few years is certainly possible, but be wary of any prediction that cites a specific date–much less seconds.
So, to sum up:
The Principles of Prognostication
- Unusual events are unusual.
- The actions of individuals are completely unpredictable, but the actions of groups are very predictable.
- It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough.
- The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- P.T. Barnum knew how to predict.
So what does this mean for my predictions of collapse? Sure, something could come out of the sidelines and clip it all off early. George Bush could get an itchy trigger finger and we’d all die under a mushroom cloud; Yellowstone could explode and leave us all choking on a cloud of ash; an asteroid could wipe us all out–there’s any number of probabilistic disaster scenarios that could end us all. We have no way of predicting any of these; if they happen, they happen. They would have happened anyway, and there’s precious little we can do about it, regardless.
But besides these complete wild cards, there is also a very mechanistic, deterministic process unfolding. Complex societies grow on energy. Their overall history–barring the completely unusual–follow some unknown equation. I’m not quite sure what that equation is, but I can start to see the general shape of it–and that all complex societies follow it exactly. That equation ends in collapse. The question is when, and how. How is likely impossible to predict2, but we have a few prime suspects we’ve been keeping our fingers on. When is very likely soon–in the next few decades. The reason that’s the case is the subject of many articles we’ve already written, and many articles we’ll continue to write, applying the principles of prognostication to the current crisis, for the same reason humans have always predicted the future: to get out of its way.
Footnotes
- An important caveat to this might be the Big Bang. If that’s how the universe began, then I understand the laws of physics changed several times during the first few seconds of existence. That said, the changes in the laws of physics seem to be, themselves, set by the laws of physics—besides the point that this is precisely one of the incredible exceptions that we’ll be discussing later. [ Back ]
- Every collapse has an ultimate cause, and a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is always the same–the diminishing marginal return curve for complexity–but the proximate cause can be anything. By analogy, nobody has ever died of AIDS–they die of cat flu, or some other weak infection they never would have succumbed to, had they never contracted AIDS. That is the role of the proximate cause in civilizational collapse–the same role as, say, cat flu. [ Back ]
See also Deconsumption’s “Timeline for Unfolding Crisis of Mankind.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 October 2005 @ 11:01 PM
Interesting read…wouldn’t we also be limited by the number of factors we can consider? I mean, won’t cultural bias and blind spots, or just a lack of curiosity about something alter the predictions? Do predictions get more accurate the more people learn, or is it more static?
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 5 October 2005 @ 1:53 PM
If you can get the right high-level view, then knowing what factors are in play are not necessary. For example, you don’t need to know about sodium ionization to understand human psychology, or to make predictions about human psychology. So if you can get to a high enough level, then “unknown unknowns” cease to be a major issue.
The more you know, of course, the more specific your predictions can be. “Civilizations collapse,” is a very prediction you can make based on very little understanding of how civilizations function. But if you add to that some knowledge of demographics, agriculture, Peak Oil, epidemiology, foreign affairs, climatology and other such things, then you can begin to make much more specific predictions–like when civilization will collapse. By understanding agriculture, metallurgy, ethnology and other such fields, you can make better predictions about the implications of that collapse.
So, I think that learning more allows for more specific predictions, but a good prediction is made at a sufficiently high level where “unknown unknowns” don’t need to be worried about too much.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 October 2005 @ 2:36 PM
“I have no doubt in our ability to keep increasing our food supply to meet the needs of an ever-larger human population…But we will never create a sustainable way to support billions of human beings.”
You do realise that is a contradiction? If we can keep increasing the food supply for an indefinite amount of time then it is by definition sustainable. Sustainability is not a matter of cute, fuzzy, local concepts. It is about what can be done in the longer term.
Comment by DigitalDjigit — 7 October 2005 @ 9:49 AM
There’s no contradiction at all. I’m well aware of some of the more draconian possibilities of sustainability, but people do more than simply eat. Those are the resources that cannot be scaled to an ever-growing population. If the only resource people needed was food, there would be a contradiction. But it’s not.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 October 2005 @ 9:56 AM
G’day from Auz.
I started reading the Anthropik Network by following a link to “The Mechanics of Collapse” which I broadly disagree with,. back-tracking to “The Principles of Prognostication” the flaws in your folks process become readily apparent. The first two Principles, are spot on but “The Third Principle of Prognostication: It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough.” as explained is potential very dangerous. My back-ground is Knowledge Engineering (among other things) so where it was written “Heuristics are never 100% true (otherwise, they’d be facts, not heuristics), but they’re usually true.” I strongly concur from years of professional experience. BUT be they Heuristics OR Facts is irrelevant without ‘Applicability of the Knowledge Domain’. The textbook example relates to MYCIN an Expert System in the bacterial infections domain. Rather than answering MYCIN prompts with clinical data about a sick humans as intended, students feed MYCIN answers about the condition of the paint-work on a decrepit automobile, which MYCIN dutifully diagnosed as a particular bacterial infection! Likewise if your techniques, facts or heuristics are not applicable to the object of prognostication, they are worse than useless. Thus I suggest principle three should be;- “The Third Principle of Prognostication: ‘Given the applicable Knowledge Domain, Heuristics are as useful as Facts’
Not so. The crucial point to any analysis process is neither to understand the whole complexity, nor to look only at the big picture, but rather to identify then examine the level that is critical to the problem. A quick historical example the Miasma (bad air) blamed at the time, was immaterial to the Cholera outbreak in nineteenth century London, rather than the bad smell, the cause was bacteria in the water supply. So I would suggest an additional ‘Principle of Prognostication: The veracity of any prediction is dependent on the correct isolation then analysis of the critical level.”
That should be a good start for now. For my own thought on Peak Oil & any collapse see http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/2265/no-oil.htm
C’ya
Comment by W. W. Shawn Gray (aka AuzGnosis) — 12 October 2005 @ 6:57 PM
PS.
When considering COMPLEXITY it is good not to forget the role of ABSRACTION. A helpful read is “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Best of luck. Shawn
Comment by W. Shawn Gray (aka AuzGnosis) — 12 October 2005 @ 7:03 PM
I find it interesting you choose the quote above to critique, and then mention the importance of abstraction in understanding complex systems, becuase it was precisely that, that I was trying to express in the section you quoted.
I suppose my attempt to communicate that was not terribly effective….
Both of your clarifications have a good deal of merit to them, but it was actually the importance of abstraction itself that I was driving at here. Namely, the point that while individual factors are very difficult to predict (and subject to the nuances you clarify), the general trajectory of any complex system can be understood through abstraction. So, for instance, we should not look at food or fossil fuels specifically, but simply energy throughput.
I agree with most everything in your peak oil piece linked to above. I believe that your outlook is slightly rosy, and I think that comes from a belief you seem to admit to quite openly: that cultural complexity is not necessarily tied to energy.
To my mind, this is nearly tautological. Everything requires energy–especially complexity. The more complex a system is, the more energy it requires. Perhaps I am simply again failing to communicate the concept very effectively, as I apparently failed to do in this article, as well as in “The Mechanics of Collapse.” As a synopsis of Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, I am not entirely pleased with it, and I will no doubt make a new attempt at it some time soon. My apologies for that. In the interrim, if you have the time, I highly recommend Tainter’s book. I’m sure it will convince you of this concept, even if I have failed to communicate it effectively.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 October 2005 @ 8:24 PM
G’day Jason,
Oh the joys of the English language. What we have here is the common devide between everyday langauge, and more obscure technical meanings. Your example and I assume your usage of the word “Abstraction” as;- a Summing-up, a characture, a simplification to aid understanding. Then what I was trying to say before, was while this approach is often rewarding it does have big traps.
By contrast the “Abstraction” talked about in Hofstadter and the more technical AI usage is a Consdensing of complex elements as loaded symbols with high leverage in a schema. In this context the concept of a single ‘atom’ is an Abstraction of all the sub-atomic complexity that modern physics has found there-in.
Thus you start to see two differnt sorts of Complexity. 1: Numerical compexity, ie increase the population of people, or cars, or cows etc. needs more energy to maintain the increased numerical complexity. However increased cultural complexity only consumes energy in the creation of variety, not in the continuing cultural / knowledge heritage.
Does that help?
Best of luck, Shawn
Comment by W. Shawn Gray (aka AuzGnosis) — 14 October 2005 @ 4:37 AM
Actually, that is the “abstraction” I meant. (I do have a degree in comp. sci., after all…)
But, complexity does consume more energy, not only in creating greater variety (that is, creating greater complexity), but also in maintaining itself. The more complexity there is in a culture, the harder it is to find a new variety (the low-hanging fruit problem), and the more it takes to teach everyone (in an increasing population) all the variety that already exists.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 October 2005 @ 8:06 AM
‘degree in comp. sci.’ that’s cool. So you also have a good grasp of the history & philosphy of Science, specifically the role of ‘Paradigm shifts’.
So you say;-
A quick quiz:
Which ecosystem consumes more energy,
a/ 10 sq.k of grassland reclaimed from the Amazon rainforest, or
b/ the highly complex virgin rainforest close-by?
The enviromental energy inputs, sun, rain etc are identical for both eco-systems. But contrary to your argument it is actually the less-complex grasslands that requires external energy inputs byway of fertizlers to prevent the soil leaching to useless desert. The complexity in this case requires LESS energy WITH long-term sustainability.
Or for historical social example, in terms of energy & complexity why did the more energy intense, complex Eastern Roman Empire survie when the Western Roman Empire, with the better land, less complex ethnic mix colapsed?
Energy as indicative of social complexity and surivability, is just another fashionable paradigm,
with similar powers as Marx’s flawed model.
The Energy ~ Cilivization paradigm has some very sobering lesson for the USA at the moment, if there is still time to stop a colaspse there. But the world as a whole is not all cast from the same mold with the same limitations or fates.
C’ya
Comment by W. Shawn Gray (aka AuzGnosis) — 14 October 2005 @ 11:28 PM
Ah, now here I must confess to the sin of imprecision. You are correct that biological complexity does not always suffer from this effect. I was speaking of cultural complexity, and using simply “complexity” as a shorthand.
Why did the less complex Western empire collapse, and the more complex Eastern empire survive? Because the Western empire lost its sources of energy. Preceding the real collapse–precipitated by the barbarian horde that crossed the Rhine in 409 CE–the main sources of food for the Western Roman Empire–the Gallic diocese, especially Britain–were decimated. We know that the population dwindled, and much land that was once farmed was abandoned. Britain , which was apparently to the West what Egypt was to the east (that is, the primary source of food), was largely unaffected by this depopulation, and remained prosperous right up to the moment when Constantine III came to power in Britain and decided to press his imperial claim on the Continent. He failed, but at the same moment, Honorius was losing Italy itslef to Alaric. Rome never had a new opportunity to press its claim on Britain, and the island–and most of the Western empire’s food supply–was lost forever. You’ll see that it’s after this that the Western empire begins its slide into total collapse.
The collapse of the Western vs. the Eastern empires is one of the cases that Tainter points to as one of his best examples. Well worth a read.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 October 2005 @ 11:01 AM
G’day Jason,
Getting back to my Western / Eastern Roman Empire question. Your explanation about why the West collapsed is interesting but hard to reconcile with your statements over on Ish-Con like;-
So why then when the less-complex Western Roman Empire did collapsed {because of internal failures}, didn’t the more complex Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire (consistent with your statement) follow this “… surrounding complexity has NO CHOICE but to restore it” axiom?
No answer expected. I know the whys as wherefores of what happen. I’m just trying to highlight that this ‘Civilisation & Complexity & Energy” linkage, while a helpful explanation of PAST events is not a robust theory for every occasion. It is just too simplistic for the Prognostication task you are attempting to apply it too.
See ‘Mechanics Of Collapse‘ thread for further clarification.
Best of luck, Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 30 October 2005 @ 4:59 PM
At the time of that collapse, neither the East nor the West was more complex than the other. But, the Eastern Empire did try to restore the West (Justinian), but failed. They didn’t have the resources to do it. So they didn’t. Ultimately, there was no longer sufficient energy to maintain that level of complexity in both the East and the West. It tried to expand, but there just wasn’t enough energy.
You may not have expected an answer, but there is a very simple one, which shows quite clearly why the linkage really is every bit as robust as I’ve suggested. Your counter-examples are not counter-examples at all, but very good example of my theory, outlining precisely what one would expect based on the framework I’ve suggested.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 October 2005 @ 7:06 PM
Excuse me, ‘giving up after a failed attempt’ IS-A Choice, different to;-
“… surrounding complexity has no choice but to RESTORE IT”
Then if you go back and check the context I quoted you from on Ish-con that has already ruled out the possibility of giving up.
My previous post was never intended to be a ‘counter-example’ more a koan. I have no argument with your basic thesis, which seems perfectly suited to explanation of how civilisation evolved. I just think your contextual roots have restricted the thesis’s applicability to futurology.
Best of Luck, Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 31 October 2005 @ 10:45 PM
If you’re trying to drive to NYC, and you run out of gas and have to ditch your car by the side of the road, did you “choose” not to go to NYC? The Byzantine Empire didn’t reconquer the West because it wasn’t capable of reconquering the West, It didn’t have the energy for that kind of complexity. So it gave up on the idea; that doesn’t seem like a choice to me, that seems like accepting the reality of the situation. If they’d had the capability of reconquering the West, they would have. They did try, after all, and gave it up only when it proved impossible.
OK, let me clarify — if it is at all possible, then complex societies cannot stop until it is done. If it is not possible, then complex societies can stop when that fact becomes apparent. You’ll note that Justinian’s conquests did increase the size and scale of the Byzantine Empire as much as it could be expanded. So, my point stands: complexity will always grow, as big and as fast as it possibly can.
My previous post was never intended to be a ‘counter-example’ more a koan. I have no argument with your basic thesis, which seems perfectly suited to explanation of how civilisation evolved. I just think your contextual roots have restricted the thesis’s applicability to futurology.
Well, the ultimate test is whether or not it’s able to make accurate predictions. So far, it fits the past perfectly. We’ll see if the miraculous throws off its future reliability. I tend to be a uniformitarian in these things, though; the forces shaping the future are the same forces that shaped the past.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 11:15 AM
That is all cool now.
From some of the thrust of ‘We All Fall Down’ I thought you where implying that the ‘no-choice’ was that the complex societies must charge off, sacrificing themselves in the effort.
Here is the main difference between us. I only think that the past informs us of the future when the majority of the facts in both cases are akin, which this time around they seem far from.
Many thanks Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 1 November 2005 @ 10:09 PM
You can have more complexity in a smaller area, or less complexity over a larger area, for the same amount of energy. What can’t happen is to bypass the opportunity to maximize one or the other.
The present isn’t as unique as we think. Oil, timber–they’re both just energy sources, as far as complexity is concerned. Abstraction allows us to distill principles general enough that we can see how it shaped the past, and use them to accurately predict the future.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 10:46 PM