COMPLEX SYSTEMS
Aristotle said it best. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".
Many people believe that their actions produce only the results they intend, because the world works in a linear fashion. No, it does not.
Please look at http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century.htm It's a long read, but well worth it. Michael Crichton was a true Renaissance Man. The bulk of his fiction work deals with the dangers of approaching complex systems with hubris.
According to Complex Systems Science Society, (What are Complex Systems? (cssociety.org) “Complex Systems are systems where the collective behavior of their parts entails emergence of properties that can hardly, if not at all, be inferred from properties of the parts. Examples of complex systems include anthills, ants themselves, human economies, climate, nervous systems, cells and living things, including human beings, as well as modern energy or telecommunication infrastructures.”
It’s Not Crazy
I first learned of the existence of complex systems in about 1975, when I observed that the world did not operate in a linear manner. The next thing I learned was that, while many people considered themselves clever by defining crazy as "Doing the same thing and expecting different results," that was more cleverness than truth. Anyone who is married will understand this. It is possible to do exactly what you did earlier, and your spouse will react in a completely different manner. With teenagers, it's more probable than possible.
Everywhere I looked I found complex systems and began to do some self-study. The first thing I learned is that complex systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and we are foolish to believe we know all of them. The first thing we need to do is to identify all the actors in the complex system. We have not yet done that for the global climate. After identifying all of them (a hopeless task) we must rank order them in terms of power of their influence (another hopeless task). The hardest thing to do is to accept that understanding a complex system is a hopeless undertaking, one we can never accomplish.
Humility, Not Hubris
Does that mean we should give up? No, it means that we should always approach complex systems with humility instead of hubris.
In the "spouse" example, above, the second interaction is not a precise duplicate of the first. Your spouse weighs 2.4 grams less than yesterday, talked with your mother-in-law in the intervening period, watched the news and got a massage. All these things affected your spouse and you're interacting with a different person.
The lecture by Crichton is about fear, complexity, and environmental management. Crichton set out to write a book about a global catastrophe in the late 1990s, so he looked at the Chernobyl meltdown. He read the predictions of up to 3.5M or more eventual deaths and the destruction of ecosystems. Articles about the event were heavily sprinkled with fear-inducing words such as cancer and catastrophe, and there were calls for urgent immediate action to save the planet. Then he looked at reality: 56 people died. The health issues with residents near Chernobyl were largely a reaction to bad information about direness, certainty of destruction, urgency, cancer, catastrophe, etc.
He winds his way through a series of predicted civilization-ending imminent catastrophes with calls to set aside all normal rules and turn over resources to experts’ control, none of which actually came to pass. He concluded that the planet is far more resilient than doomsayers understand. And the pattern is too obvious to ignore. We are controlled through fear, created by bad information from authorities. Today's existential crisis is decarbonization, but Crichton notes that is already underway without surrendering control to authority. That appears typical of the successes claimed by authorities due to their actions. They urged action that was already underway, and he uses Y2K as an example. Governments' contribution to solving the real problem was negligible, not to mention unnecessary, since banks, heavily dependent on old mainframe systems, had already identified the problem and were working to fix it.
Unaccountable Authorities
We're told many things by authorities, who are rarely held accountable for prior bad information, to maintain a State of Fear, the title of one of one of his last books. About global warming, we're assured that the earth will end in 12 or 50 or 100 years, and this time we're smarter because we've got all the information. That is exactly what we were told about Global Cooling in the 1970s. "But this time is different." Right.
The Biden Administration acts as though the world works in a linear fashion. That is the only explanation I can find for Biden’s denial that added spending wasn’t the cause of inflation. He referred to the spending bills as efforts to help people. Yes, they probably were an effort to help people, but the non-linear nature of the world and the little we understood about the complex system known as the global economy should have clued us that other consequences were not only likely but unavoidable.
Explaining shortages with “supply chain problems” is simply an admission that supply chains are complex systems and we know nothing about how to put them back together once they break. The truth is that trying to manage something, or worse tinkering with something you don’t understand, is dangerous. It is often best to leave it alone and hope it heals itself.
Coupled with Biden’s industrial policies of permitting other countries to steal U.S. intellectual property, and energy policies that target US fossil fuels production, we have lost foreign affairs leverage in Europe. We bullied Germany and other countries into reliance on renewable energy, which wasn’t ready to replace fossil fuels. That left Germany vulnerable to energy cut-off by Russia and had a chilling effect on opposing Russia’s war on Ukraine. That only increased China’s certainty that its Belt and Road initiative to strengthen Chinese power in Africa, Europe and Asia is the right approach.
Losing Our Place
Now we have lost our advantage as the world’s sole international settlements agency, with China offering the same services for yuan holders. Our international settlements primacy forced all other countries to hold dollars to pay for dollar-denominated commodities such as oil and agricultural products. That is no longer the case, meaning that excess dollars printed by the US no longer have an automatic international market. That is now shared with the Chinese, who have an “unlimited partnership” with Russia.
And round and round it goes.
Climate activists are supremely insolent. (I think the previous statement is true even with removal of the word climate.)
Doomsday know-nothings notwithstanding, a casual look around will reveal that nobody actually gives a shit about the phony threat of death by changing weather. But the activists will persist in their nonsense because that is what they do best.
I care as much about the changing climate as I do the fate of Ukraine, which is to say not at all. Excuse me, crybaby activists, but I have a life to lead. Huddle and mumble Kumbaya all you like. Seven-billion of us are not listening. We will never listen because we are not afraid of the climate; and we are little more than amused and bothered by the fear-stoking of all you insignificant, frustrated little busybodies.
BANDWAGON, n. : that rickety vehicle of cacophony onto which clamber the self- righteous mobs of those who, declining to pay the fare, grab at the tailgate and hoist themselves aboard; The latecomers always wait until there is a full drum of steam and a downhill grade up ahead before deciding to take a ride, and they seldom have the slightest idea as to whence the wagon came, or its destination. They see merely the opportunity to hitch a ride on board the efforts of another, in hopes of capitalizing on the journey somewhere down the road. The majority jump off when called upon to stoke the boiler or grease a wheel, and those who remain seated usually perish when the wagon careens in the Curve of Truth and crashes lucklessly down the embankment of Lost Causes.
Michael Crichton won me over with his description of Gell-Mann Amnesia:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I no longer suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia.