And the Iraqi veterans in 2011 will get ?

During the late 50's the McGill biologist N. J. Berrill and others objected to the Interstate Highway System. If memory serves Dr. Berrill felt that the system might obstruct the natural flow of plants and animals in some parts of the US. He also expressed the belief that it might be useless when the oil was depleted.

I suspect you are conflating complexity with diversity. The more heterogeneous a system the better off it is - this is different than human complexity. (e.g. Tainter, Homer-Dixon, etc.)

I've tried to draw parallels between Tainter's notion of complexity with the world of biology and believe his diminishing returns on complexity theories need refinement. Living organisms are complex, extinctions of species can be more attributed to becoming too specialized rather than too complex. Genetic algorithms can design circuits that are complex that are as resilient as simpler circuits. I'm more of a mind that if a system breaks it is more because it is lacking in some fundamental way rather than its complexity.

A concept that tries to distinguish between complexity and diversity is called self-dissimilarity - see this paper http://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/safiwp/97-12-087.html.

My layman's understanding is that something like a person is very self-dissimilar - at each layer there is a completely different set of properties:

Atoms - described by physics
Molecules - described by genes and the chemical pathways (autocatalytic sets) of the various reactions
Cells and organs - described by engineering functions
Spirit and personality - computational science, psychology etc

I have not really thought about the financial world's complexity, but I guess that it also has a number of different levels, which makes it inherently complicated, so is inherently at risk of collapse.

Possible dissimilar levels would be:

Credit source
Market making
Analysis and strategy propagation
Stock aggregation (e.g. funds)
Derivative
Derivative squared

This gives us a problem becuase a person and a financial system are both "complex", but we don't expect a random collapses of a person, but we do expect financial markets to collapse. The missing part of the equation is criticality - being on the threshold of collapse. If you look at the work on sandpiles, criticality is a necessary condition for collapse, and the size of the collapse is determined buy how many areas at criticality are linked.

In the recent collapse of the financial markets, it is clear that a large number of different areas were at criticality, so a collapse in one area triggered a widespread collapse.

I have used these ideas at work to create a more robust organisation but reducing the criticality of the system. One of the problems accountants cause (speaking as an accountant) is that we like to drive optimisation, and optimising a system is very similar to driving it towards criticality. If you understand this you can engineer systems to be efficient without reaching criticality.

Jeremy

PS a great book on complexity is "At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

"The more complicated a system, especially one involving automation, optimization, and human oversight, the more likely it is to fail"

I challenge this axiom because I took a number of ecology and biology courses in university and was taught that the more complex an ecosystem is, the more stable it is. Monocultures (ex. crop fields) and degraded ecosystems are unstable...

When you take undergrad level ecology or environmental science courses you hear certain truisms, such as the "complexity = stability" theme, repeated sufficiently often that you tend to believe them. Then you take graduate level ecology courses and come to the realization that there are so many exceptions to this "rule" that it lacks any relevancy. It's sort of like that "i before e except after c" truism: correct only about 60% of the time. The fact is that there's little correlation between ecosystem complexity and "stability" (however one chooses to define it), and that virtual monoculture palm communities in lowland Amazonia and littoral kelp communities are some of the most productive communities that exist. Complexity, per se, is no indicator of either stability or failure proneness.

Another quibble: "Anasazi" (a racist term) civilization didn't collapse due to climatic or environmental factors. The people we apply that term to came under increasing pressure from Na-Dene speaking invaders from the north and accordingly moved to more defensible locations or locations with more ready access to water.

Good point, and my view also.
TOD needs more of Dennett and Pinker, to add some heterogeneity to a engineered centered view.

The Y2K problem IS a good example, but for another reason:
a) It was not irrelevant, and could lead to a lot of failures. We where lucky that the technicians raised the alarm and problems where solved.
b) Knowledge of the issue did eliminate the problem, but doing so, it was not a problem any more.
c) Because it was not a problem, people started thinking that the technicians over-reacted.
d) So, the next time something similar is about to happen, people will say: "nothing is not going to happen, like the Y2K ", and do nothing about it.

This is a feedback cycle. A problem is raised, do something, nothing happens, no reason to worry, another problem comes, do nothing, something bad happens, we should worry about these things. Just see NASA's history of accidents as an example...

I worked two years on Y2K. Installing programs, like Hourglass, in order to test the users applications...I was constantly resetting the CPU Time Of Day clock to leap year Jan of 2000 or many values inbetween.

Lots of bugs popped out. Lots of very hard work over many long hours.

Here is the bottom line. Most Murkans had not the slightless clue about programming. They are lucky to be able to use a remote control.

They are worse than frigging Joe 6 Pak..there were and are still sheer gomers of stupidity about those issues yet they sat and screamed..
"It didn't happen"....yeah right.

I gave up on trying to convince arseholes who had difficulty with reading their clothes labels. The ignorance was astounding.

So for the future? More of the same. Ignorance rampant.

Airdale-even the Data Processing mgrs were total twits and worse,,some days I felt like just go and have a big cry...and then a lot of alcohol after 14 hours of straight work. the ignorance , the pain and the remembrance still is stuck in my mind like an ugly refrain...I will never forget it and so I have zero belief in the Amurkhan citizen..he has crossed a threshold that he will never recross,never.

Don't believe the hype. Attacking the food supply isn't nearly as easy as it sounds.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/attacking_the_f.html

You might be interested in my thesis on sapience -- the basis of wisdom (when it is realized).
Sapience Explained:
Part 1. Introduction

Part 2. Sapience Relationship with Cleverness and Affect

Part 3. The Components of Sapience Explained

Part 4. The Neuroscience of Sapience

Part 5 is still under development (I am giving a paper this coming Thursday on the subject) but it covers the evolution of sapience, past and possible future. I will post it in my blog as soon as it is ready.

What humanity needs is not greater intelligence or creativity, but greater wisdom (sapience). Expansion and further development of the patch of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex known as Brodmann area 10 is a possible key (see part 4). I believe I have remarked occasionally on this site that evolution is the answer (solution). But, of course, evolution often involves selection against some non-adaptive trait (e.g., excessive cleverness without overarching wisdom). Our cleverness, the combination of intelligence and creativity, is directed at solving local short-term problems. We most always choose local optimization over global features and generally suffer the unintended consequences. Wisdom is knowledge of how to use knowledge (i.e. cleverness).

The better part of wisdom is imagining the future under different scenarios and choices made today. Judgment needs to take on a global perspective. I fear our current species is not quite competent, on average, for this. The trend toward integrating our emotions and intellects evolved and developed reasonably far, but not enough to deal with the world we have created (complexity and dynamics).

Collapse might actually be a good thing in the really long run. But it won't sell to the man or woman on the street! Perhaps there is a 1% of the population who are just sapient enough to make preparations for the collapse and an evolutionary bottleneck to follow. Perhaps.

Question Everything
George

I have to agree. If the 5% were those in power, understood the issues, and if they were altruistic and of one mind about the nature of the problem and the appropriate remedy, then maybe. If ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no work for tinkers.

The nature of our societies and ourselves is that those in power get there for reasons other than altruism, and while some of them are certainly aware of the problems we face, for the most part that leads them to try to figure out how to take advantage of that for personal gain. We all have those thoughts, it's just that some of us are more constrained in how we pursue it.

Meanwhile, probably most of those who see the train wreck coming are in no position to influence events beyond a very small horizon. Here we have the most incredible information tools in the history of man, and IMO sites such as TOD have been wildly successful in disseminating that information and stimulating discussion. But the direct influence of that will be a tiny fraction of 5%. Probably the greatest impact that forums such as this will have will be in how they influence a fairly small number of individuals to make changes and preparations, and how that in turn effects those around them. This will not much change how collapse occurs, but perhaps will help in times afterwards.

There are very large forces at work here. Even if 5% were aware, keep in mind that they must impact not just the 95% of the present population, but the cumulative decisions of all those who went before. We did not get here in an instant - the carbon burned by my grandfather is still up there, for example. The farther you go on the wrong course, the more severe must be the course correction to reach your target, to the point where that becomes impossible.

Greenish, brilliant insight!

You've made me realize that I'm part of the 5% that acknowledges my own mortality; I eat healthy, consciously exercise (more or less continuously for 36 years now), don't smoke, wear my seatbelt without being told to, etc. The fact that the vast majority don't acknowledge their own mortality and take appropriate long-term steps to live as long and healthy as possible is the most amazingly clear and simple indication that they would take no significant action even if they knew collapse was a certainty. They will wait till it is too late and then expect 'the experts' (in the case of their personal mortality, the physicians) to make a heroic effort to give them another chance.

Just this evening I was talking collapse to a neighbor while he stood there smoking a cigarette. Sometimes I fail to see the simplest signs....

TOD rocks, thank you everyone who contributes to these discussions!

Knowledge about the collapse of death (a complex collapse of the specialized infrastructure and network of hundreds of billions of individual cells), can also lead to qualitative decisions about lifestyle.

The late, great Bill Hicks did a routine comparing Yul Brenner who died from smoking and presumably an excessive lifestyle, to human cipher and health nut Jim Fixx who died while jogging.

Or as Doug Stanhope puts it, "You die at the end, didn't anyone tell you? Sorry."

The biggest secrets are all out in the open, hiding in plain sight.

I have spent a good deal of time wondering why the vast majority of people believe in some sort of eternal life.The short answer,that they do so because the elder generation believes so,is obviously a part of the answer but not the key part imo.

I think the real answer is that this belief is a sort of "garbage out" artifact of the way our brains are constructed.Our lower brain centers-our reptilian and mammalian core layers-don't savvy self.Only a very few of the most intelligent species can recognize themselves in a mirror-man,the rest of the great apes,maybe porpoises and elephants,I'm not keeping up in this area.

Self recognition is a facet of "high" intelligence which seems to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex brains.

Evolutionary theory tells us that our brains will gradually become more complex if the extra complexity contributes more to our survival as individuals than it costs in terms of energy consumption and other counterbalancing factors,such as difficulty in giving birth,and a low reproductive rate due to the our long childhood,which seems to be necessary to our mental development.

This is so far straight forward Darwinianism and probably familiar to most readers.

But most people never actually devote more than a few hours to the study of evolution in maybe one biology class,so they never really understand the many subtleties involved.

One is that an organ or structure such as a tooth has an evolitionary lineage that reaches so far back that a tooth is pretty well evolved to a high state of perfection,given it's function,and only very slow evolutionary changes are to be expected in teeth for this reason.

Our newly evolved intellectual abilities however are still very much works in progress.If we wipe ourselves off the planet with atom bombs,the blind watch maker will be seen to have taken a dead end path.For each and every living species there is a direct and unbroken path back to the beginning of GENERATIONS of species,in a manner of speaking,and for every green twig at the end of a living branch on the evolutionary tree,there are many dead (extinct) twigs.

Now there IS no PLAN or GUIDE of any sort involved.Mutations are RANDOMLY occuring changes that are PRESERVED IF they contribute to reproductive success.Most mutations are detrimental and are not preserved but a very small fraction do contribute to survival rates and are so preserved by the blind watchmaker and incorporated into future generations.

Now anytime you change anything there are always tradeoffs and consequences to be dealt with ,and the same holds true in evolution.A brain that is capable of recognizing-has recognized- that it's life support system is doomed to failure is getting output from it's recently(read newly evolved) installed "intelligence program" that is at odds with the "survival" code buried at the core of it's operating system.

(A team of engineers might be able to redesign a computer system from close to "scratch"and correct such a situation,but evolution can move only by the minutest of baby steps and every generation must survive.There is no possibility of a major overhaul of any biological system that does not involve extinction and /or long term change-in our case the time span seems to be measured on the order of tens of thousands of years as regards very minor PHYSICAL CHANGES in our brain.(Cultural change,which can be incredibly fast, is also amenable to Darwinian analysis but is not directly relevant to this line of thought at this point..)

The situation as described would cause a real computer to either sieze up or perhaps perform in a "good data in garbage out" manner.

Hillbilly humor describes a man faced with an insoluble but pressing problem as "thinking so hard that smoke is coming out of his ears."

Brains cannot both sieze up and reproduce,so they put out some "garbage"-which paradoxically is actually good data-it's only garbage in relation to the fact that it introduces a severe strain on the system that generates it..At another level of the receding horizon,personal awareness of mortality is potentially very useful,as it might cause parents to work harder to prepare children and grandchildren for survival on thier own.

Religion is evolution's software patch-the solution- that enables our brains to operate without the smoking ears.

Now the very word "solution" is a poor choice as it implies a conscious mind, or a God,directing the process.The watch maker does not exist.Evolution accumulates order in the form of living organisms with no more need for direction than water needs direction to run downhill.

(Any physics fans who believe the second law is violated should take a couple of biology classes,or just look at a baby,which after all is more organized by several orders of magnitude than any engineered system.)

Brains that sieze up wnen faced with insoluble dilemnas either evolve the software patches such as religion necessary to successful functioning or they fail to reproduce when confronted with such dilemnas.

A secondary software patch seems to be necessary to the functioning of the religion patch.This one is known as cognitive dissonance and enables us to pull of the amazing feats of self deception
that underpin day to day behavior.

It is cognitive dissionance that enables us to believe in both God and technology,and it is cognitive dissonance that enables most of the world's engineers,doctors,economists,and other highly educated people,as well as three billion or so Joes to ignore any evidence contrary to the herd consensus of eternal growth.

I do not believe that it is possible to overcome the shortcomings of our evolutionary inheritance within the context of democracy and thereby avoid the crash that seems to be about as certain as bankruptcy once you start using one credit card to obtain cash advances to make the payments on another card.

If by some miraculous means we could enjoy both fast worldwide economic growth and avoid ecological collapse,birthrates might take care of themselves worldwide even in the face of religious opposition.I once thought this might be possible,when I was young myself.

Given the realities of human nature and the inability of democratic governments to make really tough decisions until crises are obvious even to the Joes of the world-I'm talking Pearl Harbor obvious- democracies will not make the changes necessary to avoid the crash.A few more enlightened governments may make undertake ambitious programs but imo too little too late. All the windmills in the world will not offset the carbon that is going to be burnt,unless we are willing to nuke China and India,and tear down our own coal infrastrusture.

The only path that I can see that might insulate a large powerful country from the worst effects of overshoot involves the rise of a totalitarian government focused on survival by means of internal change rather than aggressive warfare.Personally I would rather be dead than red,but the Chinese have proven that population growth can be forcibly curbed,and Hitler proved that an economy in shambles can be forced to create a war machine such as had never been seen before in less than a decade.

Evolution jammed evolved intelligence into our brains without installing counterbalancing mechanisms that would prevent the ill effects of intelligence-such as atom bombes and ACC -from coming realities because that's the way evolution works.The corrective evolutionary mechanisms are external to the organism and known as extinction or population collapse,as the case may play out.

The contest is not always to the strong nor the race always to the swift,but that's the way to bet.My money is on collapse.

Anyone interested in the origins of these thoughts will enjoy the work popular works of Richard Dawkins,especially The Blind Watchmaker,and any of the evolutionary psychologists in general.

'They' continue to flock to Walmart and other remote factory outlets due to the cost and dollars that are available. We need to make localized consumer goods that compete head to head with outside sources--- at least to use the local advantages to full extent.

No problem. I'll start up a factory to start making stuff as soon as you and your friends agree to come to work for me for $0.50 per hour - And that is 10 hour days 6 days a week. And Heck no you don't get any benefits! We can't sell our new products for Walmart wholesale prices AND pay you big wages and benefits! Besides which, I need extra profits so I can pay for my new 38 foot sailing yacht. All the other business owners have one so I am entitled also?

Tongue in cheek, but much truth unfortunately.

Greenish i would say no re global system.

the size [i guess subset or some such-TOD speak} of any 'tight' group is directly related to the ability to 'leverage' this info in a manner to have better results.

i'll give a couple of examples re 'tight'- very close working together group. Communication in my family & a few close friends are such that 3 of us are working very closely together[ combining $ etc. - ain't easy though] to mitigate some of the worse scenarios of collapse.

recently we settled- waiting to close- on a property nearby- further away from population centers,& with some important natural resources/capital. we are currently semi-rural but i have become concerned we may have to get more distance from the nearby metro area. the small city there is struggling but has good leadership- relatively speaking of similar small towns. can this town 'get' it's act together early on during collapse- currently no acknowledgement of upcoming problems. i think it has a better chance because it is very small 500-1000- still probably too big actually, has a significant history[community], etc. [probably many will leave as some are now to get closer to 'services', living with relatives, etc.]

anyway foreknowledge gives leverage in mitigating our coming collapse[s]; but it can only do so where groups 'pull/push' in the same direction to add strength & backup for one another.

communicating/relating will be the key for mitigating PO.

let's hope for a 'global ' leader like Churchill??.

maybe obama truly has community organizer roots. that will a black swan i'd be thrilled to experience- along with powerful leadership at the right times; & u'd be correct then Greenish. it would/could make a huge difference globally; i just don't see this as the likely early on response.

The situation chnges in a stair-step manner.

So we've ditched the housing and auto sectors (or the biggest part).

The next thing to go might be the govts I guess when the debt can't be financed anymore (if they can't cut spending enough). The collapse of the govt doesn't mean the collapse of the military.

The military will take charge for a long while, "bailing out" (by providing security and food and other help to) the elites in the govt and business who didn't make preparatiuons before due to lack of foresight.

Then the military begins to lose control because of lack of energy resources, but by then the elites have gotten into better position to survive on their own (locally).

Stair-step.

It has to happen this way so that the people with the highest educations and salaries can benefit the most, and after all they do have most of the power. They intend to keep it. It doesn't men they're evil by the way, it's the laws of nature, survival of the fittest.

What is it I read recently "Life is a complex thermodynamic system, not a paragon of virtue".....so true.

Many elites are aware of the situation and they know it's impossible to turn the huge ship around in time.

For example, if a hightly paid doctor in NYC leaves his job and goes to live on a farm he's given up his salary, his professional status, all the interesting things he likes. He can't compete with his fellows anymore...what's fun?

He'll just wait until the situation develops and them trust his luck, his connections and his wits to get him through.

This is exactly the strategy Dmitry Orlov is advocating: work to hasten the collapse, in the hope enough natural diversity will survive to support the ragtag remnants of humanity after the bottleneck:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation...

Good comments, which I'll comment on in turn:

My takeaway from this video. Not only is mitigation NOT an option, it shouldn't be. Collapse must happen as part of the natural correction cycle to the signification growth we've experienced.

Collapse will, indeed, happen; but the nature of the collapsed state may vary qualitatively by human standards. For instance, the size of human wars, as measured by number of deaths, tends I think to become 2.6 times less frequent as you double the number of deaths. (I think this is called a Pareto distribution.) This sort of distribution - showing scale-invariant self-similarity - tends to be generated naturally in many slowly-driven nonlinear systems which seem entirely disparate on their face.

What this may imply is that the size frequency of forest firest, earthquakes, stock market drops, flu pandemics, and wars are all primarily generated by local interactions and the simple attributes of the "particles" in such a system, not by a vengeful god or a particular world leader invading someone. This means that retroactive narratives of such events are in one sense meaningless, supplying an additional perspective on all narrative history.

Of course, being human, we bloody well care WHO gets killed, so the subjective does creep in, and it should. Not all collapses are subjectively equivalent, and the states which are "collapsed into" by the series of frozen accidents which constitutes path-dependence may vary widely.

I guess that knowledge could then allow a triage plan so to speak, of who gets to stay and who has to go, and I doubt that will happen. If world leaders had this knowledge and attempted to manipulate this system (god forbid congress should ever vote on something like this!), first and foremost will be maximizing benefit to humans, not to the other species.

It's unlikely that selfless triage will be done. My work has focused on getting other species past the upcoming human resource/population bottleneck by increasing their odds. It may still come to nothing, but it isn't useless.

Humans seem greatly to prefer being felled by "natural causes" as opposed to controlling their numbers or appetites, since that doesn't encroach on monkey fairness doctrines. This will, I'm afraid, tend to represent a worst-case for the world as a whole, specifically including the huge numbers of humans who could have lived on a healthier planet over the coming millions of years. Our cultural default seems to be binge-purge, and Malthus bats last.

I say if anything should result from this knowledge, it should include the following criteria: work towards a very rapid collapse that minimizes suffering, produces as little impact to the environment as possible, and leaves the maximum number of species. At least that would be the best outcome in my opinion.

I've heard many smart people come to that conclusion. However, as a keypost it might get Nate and the gang sent to Gitmo.

Thought experiment: IF it was possible to trigger a major earthquake, like the San Andreas, at a specific pre-planned time by voting for our leaders to press a foolproof button, would we do it? It would drastically improve planning and deployment of assets, remove the stress for another 100 years, and probably prevent any deaths. I submit that despite the obvious benefits and the inevitability of a huge catastrophe otherwise, we wouldn't do it because of the fine-scale structure of our current culture, which is the way each of us thinks on average.

I guess that knowledge could then allow a triage plan so to speak, of who gets to stay and who has to go, and I doubt that will happen. If world leaders had this knowledge and attempted to manipulate this system ...

Have you considered that this may already be happening? One could make the argument that a large number of things have been done of late that do not seem to be in the interest of the general population, do seem to be at least partially related to the crises at hand, and benefit a very small and wealthy segment of the population.

Historically it's been images and moving images that have tended to solve some of these cognitive logjams. I envision a time when those of us who spend our time addressing water, energy and population will need to more habitually use images to confront the reductive, binary mind.

I did an impromptu post - on a draft way of thinking about this in general - on some TOD topic in the past, using the made-up word "smemes" which I coined for the occasion, shouldn't be hard to search for if anyone's interested in what I'm saying today.

But yes, this dynamic is important, and for reasons related to the complex/critical landscape of aggregate human thought.

Aside from being born semi-autistic and teaching myself to see the things around me in an unusual visual-abstract way with some seeming similarities to some of the newer insights into complex systems, I also had the good luck to work in parallel with Bob Hunter for years, who was quite an artist at what he called "media mind bombs".

However, this is just one piece of the puzzle, and timing - as well as preparation of context for directed collapse of information - is equally important to make it work.

I've done it many times, and it's nearly like magic.

That's why his 'toy models'; the fire/forest, predator/prey models. in this lecture are so powerful. It would be interesting to see similar models with human populations, fossil fuel use, etc..but my guess is they would be too simplistic to be valid.

one thing I've learned in past few years (and Phil Zimbardo suggested 30 years ago) is that the prison guards won't necessarily make better leaders when they take over unless there has been an educational/culture shift in the interrim, (which is why this discussion is so important). If _____ events occur in next 5-15 years that DO result in a phase transition/collapse of current system, but future leaders learned nothing going through them and we rebuild our existing model with remaining resources, THAT would be a path worth avoiding at nearly all cost in my opinion.

The downtrodden will always be downtrodden until they aren't and someone else is. What would break that cycle if anything? It is not enough to point figures at what the current leadership lacks unless we have a better model and a bridge to get there...

Far from crazy, it is the most rational response. Lead a life that matters to you, and do what you can on a personal level.

beggar, history bears you out.

Europe and Southern Brittain are dotted with the ruins of splendid Roman villas. I would have thought that after the collapse of the empire, local warlords would have taken them over and maintained them as headquarters/status symbols. But no, by the middle ages they were all burned-out ruins. Further, folks with metal detectors have learned to search near these ruins, finding hoards of precious metals buried by the elite to be reclaimed later. Obviously, they never made it back.

Maybe to the recommendations "stay light" and "stay flexible" we should add "accept vulnerability".

Twilight and Not-into-denial.

As Nate noted way above, these questions about what is happening and what to do about it really do relate to the "why are we here?" questions.

Individual vulnerability and mortality blend with generational and even species-wide vulnerability and mortality.

Most of our species depend on conventional definitions of strength and intelligence to give confidence about survival.

The problem is that the most significant characteristics related to survival have to do with sensitivity to changes in one's habitat, and an ability to respond to these changes.

We humans still tend to panic, get frightened and angry, and then rationalize our deepest fears and prejudices with some religio-political meta-narrative to justify the mass murder we call war.

We try to kill each other and take each other's good shit.

Now we play on a scale and with such godlike technology that our wars can suck up scarce resources and deliver defeat to us all.

The last person standing will be lonely and in great physical pain.

The last person standing will not live very long to suffer anyway.

I would love it if we would decide to put our resources into dismantling weapons of war and into a huge variety of efforts for sustainability.

What are the chances of that?

So I hope and pray and do as much of my bit for positive change as I can, even though things look hopeless.

Hope is a verb. Hope is not passive. Hope struggles for life even harder when the odds are looking very, very bad.

True. However, the peak oil aware not being "organized in any meaningful way" could be a strength rather than a weakness. The fact that this is such a non-ideological group (as a whole) makes it more resilient. And that's exactly the point that Noah Raford was making, I think, that heterogenous systems and groups are less likely to collapse than homogenous groups and systems.

By the way, I hear a lot of references to "survivalism" being prevalent, but after going to many meetings of Transition, ASPO-USA, etc., I have not yet actually met a survivalist. I wonder if it is a function of the tendency of internet discussion groups to bring out survivalism. Just a thought.

Keith

I am amazed about the wisdom, beauty of thought and consequence shown by building this monument - I wish I could do the same in Europe.

The WIRED article talks about people looking for a hidden meaning: but to me it is as plain and simple as it could be: everything that has to be done for a saner planet has been spelled out on these stones.

A true marvel indeed. One could have wished for the inclusion of some important scientific formulas, facts and figures, but this monument is probably the best investment in the future of mankind ever.

Excellent. When I was a teacher this was my preferred method for lessons but you expressed it so well.

I consider play anything that takes you out of any habit and carries with it a feeling of liberation when you engage in the act.

Games like you expressed I have played in the past were "Pretend I was homeless", "No more computers", "Isolation", "No more food", and my current game - "Only walking" which has me traveling about 2 to 8 miles a day.

very nice 710.

envisioning, reshaping[touch], replaying[listening], ... all the senses & modes; especially personal strong & weak ones.

I'm glad you bring up the topic of games. I've spoken several times at conferences about the nature of games and why they are so useful.

For one thing, games seem to be able to take the charge out of attaining any sort of goal. Seeing this, some people mistakenly think games are frivolous but that's because they confuse the concept of "significance" with "seriousness". A game does not have to be "significant" (i.e. dour, heavy, laden with meaning, no fun) and yet can still be played with seriousness. Sports teams play with seriousness all the time. When the game becomes "significant" then the fun disappears.

A game allows for human self-expression and play because it frees people from the constraints that come from a "significant" activity. Top performers in any field often describe the sheer joy of being able to do what they do and they take their "work" with all seriousness. You'll often hear winners of sports competitions say things like "I was in the zone. I went all out and I had a ton of fun." Many coaches will work with those they coach to free them up from the significance humans naturally add to situations. Music, dance and drama teachers often pay special attention to this if they see the performer become "stiff" or the smile has disappeared from their face.

As for new games to play, one of the participants in the first UnCrash Course said that they practiced a weekend without electricity and running water as a way to test their level of preparedness, just like you suggested. They described how eye-opening it was. The way they described it I could tell that they were deeply engaged and their learning was dramatically accelerated.

It struck me how fabulous that game would be to play. I have never done it myself and want to. I think it would be a ton of fun. I'm maxed right now so I can't organize it but if someone out there is particularly well-prepared and is good with people, drop me a note and we can create a course out of it.

prof mills - if you want to elaborate these ideas into a 1,000-2,000 words guest post, please do.
nate

We need to develop a strong "social narrative" of mutual cooperation on a finite planet.

Like with most (or all) civilisations, we had one at our foundation, called in this case Christianity. It has now been largely forgotten amidst the noise of "I want to enjoy myself" capitalism, even to the extent that most people nowadays falsely knee-jerk associate Christianity with aggressive military campaigns and oppression of others, and do so while assuming themselves to be speaking with competence even though they have never read even one chapter of the Gospels or Acts of the Apostles.

A new social movement is needed - a sustainability movement.

But I'd be amazed if it comes to dominate until such time as the existing corporatised dominance ends. Just like Christianity in fact, which had to wait for the Roman traditions to die.

We can enjoy films, TV and photos because they were not part of our ancestral environment. We have no adaptations to counter these novel tricks -- we often have difficulty distinguishing between virtual reality and reality.

Actually I am a strange exception to this. I find films etc to be so clichéd that there's no danger of being tricked. Even the "best" film stars talk and act in ways that are too artificial to fool myself. I've no idea why! Possibly that I did not grow up in a tv/films culture.

good morning. (at least it is in my time zone). I like many of your comments here; if I may I'll reply with things they brought to mind:

There are those that speak as if collapse is a certainty. Nothing in life is a certainty, the universe is always about probabablity.

A probabilistic worldview is, IMO, one of the most useful possessions one can have in life.

The word "collapse" is sometimes used in a narrative way to imply that all possible "collapsed" states of a system are essentially equivalent. That's simply not correct, as you point out. The potential states the system may settle into are bounded, but still huge. These states represent a huge range in the quality and quantity of subsequent human and nonhuman life occupying the earth for the next ten-million-plus years.

However, it is not nonsense to speak of a 100% certainty of collapse in some contexts. My odds of still being alive in ten million years are low, since the complex system which is me has no known stepwise path to attain this. What do you think my odds are?

Capital will search the world for the highest return with acceptable risk. The surplus of low-wage workers, lax environmental laws and a command economy has lured much capital to China to take advantage of U.S. first world excess. As the standard of living scale tips slightly in favor of the Chinese, the scale sinks for its competitors. As energy becomes more expensive, Chinese advantage will only be amplified. China may continue to show some net growth even after much of the rest of the world is in contraction. Just as the demise of GM may be beneficial to Ford, so too will the contraction and financial failure of first world countries benefit the Chinese.

Capitalism will provide every superfluous product possible as long as there is a profit to be made. It is a fire that will burn through every energy source that it can metabolize. I think the collapse of standards of living will be a long slow squeeze with many punctuating events along the way. What we are beginning to experience is not sudden death but rather a chronic wasting disease that will eventually take us to the same destination.

Wallstreet,
I'm with you concerning the many ways shapes and forms of collapse,and the various degrees of severity.

Personally I am highly confident that survivors will continue to enjoy quite a bit of technology,and that they will be fairly numerous.

I have remarked here before that I believe that the US and other highly developed countries can achieve a controlled descent similar to your scenario except more austere by means of rationing and other emergency measures that might well extend to martial law-but nearly all of us would at least survive.A trigger event of some sort capable of focusing the attention of the public to a very high degree would be necessary to set the nation on such a course.

If we are VERY lucky you may be right.On the other hand as an avid reader of history,and a serious student of agriculture(which is now in developed countries almost totally dependent on ff and the industrial infrastructure) it is obvious to me that the four horsemen are rested and ready to ride.My bet is collapse involving one hell of a lot of gunpowder.Peak lead may be a term used tongue in cheek by future historians of the next fifty years.

I was recently discussing the possibility of an industrial collapse with an elderly mechanic who is a relative and a good friend a while back and he "got it" almost immediately.Before I was well started he said something to the effect that we can't go from tractors back to mules cause there ain't no mules and even if there wuz they couldn't pull a wagon from where the farms are to where the people are.(He is well traveled within the US because he used to drive trucks.)A little while later he came up with his own analogy as to why if our modern economy ever crashes really hard we can't get it started again:

It's like you're driving a loaded truck along in high gear and everything is ok as long as you don't have to stop.If you ever have to stop you ain't got no firstsecond third gear to git going agin cause the oldtimers that built everthin we used to build what we got now are gone an there ain't hardly noboby left that can do nothing the old ways.

Now it may be that he is more open minded in this one respect than most people because the only book he ever reads other than a service manual is the King James Bible and collapse is a very real part of his world view.He expects to meet his deceased parents again some day with the same certainty that most of us attribute to tomorrow's sunrise.

My buddy is a grade school dropout but he could have been a fine engineer if fate had dealt him a better hand.

It's good to know there are still others here who do not have an 'all or nothing' mindset. So many of the most vocal here seem to view total collapse of all societies in the entire world forever as a virtual certainty. Of couse in reality there are a range of possible outcomes post peak oil, from improvement of civilisation, to the aforementioned total collapse.

Realistically, no-one has ever predicted the future accurately about anything and it is pure arrogance for anyone to state that they know what is going to happen. The only correct course of action is to plan for a reasonable range of possibilities.

Incidentally, if collapse does occur, it would be very difficult to plan in any reasonable way for the aftermath as that future would contain so many uncertainties and be so different from the current situation that any attempt at predicting what would be most useful to a particular individual is likely to be rather difficult.

Hmmm.... appears to be a quiet monday too.

I also wanted to state - but thought that the above was getting long - that just because our society has a lot of information does not mean that it has a comparable amount of wisdom or ability to act.

Here at TOD we are viewing the change of things (?collapse) through one lens, that of peaking oil extraction. We are basically in agreement that there will be a point of maximum extraction followed by a diminishing rate of extraction. We are also in agreement that if this peak has not already happened then it is just about to. Beyond that, however, all bets are off. We cannot agree on some rather basic things - the ELM, the impact upon agriculture(mechanics, chemicals, transport)and thereby our food supply, the impact upon resource extraction, the impact upon lifestyle. For every dire scenario painted there is a response either directly minimizing the impact or outlining mitigation sufficient to minimize the impact.

And peak oil is only one of the issues facing our civilizations these days. What do we do to address the others (environmental, economic, resource, population)? Since just about any decision we make will result in hardship in the short term and only hopefully result in improvements in the long term it is not difficult to see why BAU has such appeal. As an analogy - does the captain run from the storm (which may or may not catch him according to the weather office)hoping to steer around the rocks or does she sail through looking for calm on the other side (if the ship even makes it to the other side with all hands)? It's a hard decision to make - with positives and negatives and potential for mutiny along any decision trajectory. And this is just a ship and a storm - not our society with multiple stressors, cohorts, special interests and leaders.

I don't think it is hard at all to see why no real action is taken on a grand scale.

When we think of easter island I'll bet we think of one lone mature tree in a barren landscape falling victim to the axe. It likely was something quite different. Likely the last mature tree was felled in an environment where there were lots of juveniles around. But people underestimated how long it took trees to mature, they underestimated firewood needs, they underestimated the effects of predators on seedlings, they underestimated the effect of a few bad years of growth. And then one day there were no more trees.

Sound familiar?

Regards,

Al

guest post welcome on your experiences, especially if you could parse it down in conclusion to the several core aspects that makes those cultures more resilient (what traits are reinforced and what ones are punished/ostracized and how did these come about, etc.)

Cooperation has a purpose and can be in one's self interest and maybe it can work sometimes but here is an interesting different story. (Read Thomas Sowell).

When the Puritans arrived in Plymouth, Ma. in 1620 to settle they decided on a communal type economic approach. This was America's first experiment with socialism. They decided that everyone would work togeather and they would share the fruits of their labor and share all their food. Well, after a few years of this approach the colony was almost wiped out by famine.

Here is a clip;

The Pilgrims’ Governor, William Bradford, described the folly of embracing the theory of collectivism:

“The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

“For this community was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors everything else, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

The Pilgrims, a pious and decent people, discovered that even the best of men cannot thrive under socialism’s incentive-crushing system. This experiment with socialism—probably its best chance for success amongst such selfless, righteous people—failed miserably. The Puritans discovered that government cannot deny man’s inherent desire to work hard to provide for his own family and be rewarded when his labor exceeds his neighbor’s.

(clip credit to Thomas Sowell and Merideth Turney)

The next year, a self interest based system was installed (before famine finished the colony) in which plots of land were alloted and each took the fruits of their own harvest to do with what they liked. That very next year the colony began to thrive and the famine was finally ended.

I'll take my chances on Adam Smith's invisible hand, especially in a large country.

Recall that Steve Jobs just had a liver transplant: from one Hyena to another? How's that for resource maximization in the scheme of keystone predation? I'm an organ donor myself when the time comes..

Interesting Roman analogy, You cann't mean starving people living in absolute dictatorships with no freedom.

See post above on Plymouth on 6/21 6:26

Right, I was about to say the same thing. The inhabitants of the Roman empire were more or less aware of the ongoing collapse. They DID think about it; many of the writings and analyses have vanished, but some remain, as do many of the records of the mitigating actions the authorities took, as Majorian detailed above. And the thinking was certainly more sophisticated than "the gods are angry with us because of our moral lapses," ALTHOUGH the most influential of all the analyses, Augustine's "City of God" ended up taking an altogether different tack, that basically "the truth" is ahistorical and not to be found on Planet Earth.

Interesting that the most influential of all the commentaries was the one least constrained by trying to understand the "facts on the ground."

I wonder if there's been any systematic study of all the Romans' reactions to societal collapse? Probably; that's the advantage of two thousand years' worth of historiography :-)

That is exactly what first came to my mind.
It seems like a variation of the uncertainty principle but the small numbers that are aware of the dire predicament aren't going to have any impact.
On second thought uncertainty in the quantum physical sense only applies to distortions that are possible because the observers scale is so much larger than the system being studied and the act of observing can change the conditions.......that is definitely not the case here.

No politician, government nor any other group of people or institutions can change the overarching system that controls our actions. As we cannot alter the rules governing the system,

Strongly disagree. A great idea can change the system, which after all was made from ideas in peoples' heads in the first place.
After many years research and thinking I put forward a practical handbook on how to do exactly that, in my book http://www.lulu.com/content/140930.
The only reason that has stalled is I was seriously ill with chronic dental mercury poisoning and just after printing some copies (for stalls etc) a horrendous harassment scheme was launched against me www.2020housing.co.uk .... and now the system looks likely to collapse of its own within a few years anyway, so I'm not returning to chase up that project.

Burgundy

On the whole I agree with you that some kind of collapse is baked in. But I differ in looking at it as deterministic in the way you portray. I think we are in for a lot of surprises.

For instance, a front runner might assume that the banks are failing and having your savings in cash is a good strategy. But, the banking industry and the government are also worried about a bank run. Since most money these days is already electronic the easiest thing to do would be to eliminate cash altogether. You go to the bank for cash they give you a debit card in that amount or you go to the ATM machine and it reloads your debit card. This would of course have other effects such as eliminating much of the underground economy - drug buying, under the table payments, informal purchases etc. And you with your wad of cash have to turn it back into the bank or lose it.

It's straightforward enough to get out of a bubble, but very hard to anticipate changes by others meant to counter the same trajectory you assumed was what you were countering.

There is something to be said for either waiting until you must act or being one of those that seemingly had no clue. The actual conditions at that time might open a path that had never occurred to you because the new conditions themselves were unanticipated.

I see the slide down as just one damn thing after another. The way down will be just as ad hoc as it was on the way up. Better to be lucky than rich has been my lifelong motto.

Vicky

Is that a bug of a feature? I am much more comfortable with gradual political changes that adapt the present systems to the new realities then initiating some kind of revolution. Gradual changes has worked for generations and the local political system do work with mitigating medium term problems like an underfinanced pension system or the need to plan for climate changes and prepare for the post peak oil era. The market parts of the "system" adapts faster and that is how it should be from my p.o.w. since it is very hard to reduce the complex reality down to a short policy document.

I dont think we will save the world but a fairly smooth working culture and political system is good for us AND other people that we trade with as we muddle through whatever happens. It might not be enough but it is better then nothing or turning everything upside down.

Lot of sense in there Twilight.

Unnecessary/inappropriate using of equations is not bizarre. It is just an example of the standard normal pretentious behaviour of authoritarians who know how it helps to give the impression of being intellectually superior and rigorous even though they actually aren't.