Jed Rothwell wrote:
Edmund Storms wrote:
Well, let me provide a few examples. Never before was a "wrong"
decision able to eliminate most life on earth. We now have at least
three ways to do this - by nuclear weapons, by bioweapons . . .
Ah, well, that is not an increase in complexity, but rather heightened
consequences. I certainly agree that the consequences of decisions are
much more serious and far-reaching. As Jared Diamond shows in the book
"Collapse" people thousands of years ago made disastrous decisions that
caused widespread ecological calamities and the extinction of their own
tribes. They created vast deserts; nowadays our leaders can make a
desert out of the whole planet much more quickly.
The point I'm making is that disastrous decisions are made because the
system at the time is too complex for people to understand the
consequences using the knowledge and tools available at the time. No
one, even a greedy politician, would knowingly make a decision that
would destroy his country or society. The disastrous decisions are
always made out of ignorance about the consequences. Of course, greed
blinds. Consequently, some critical number of knowledgeable, honest
people are always needed, the number of which is reduced as the system
becomes too complex for this critical number to understand the
situation. Too few and their advice is ignored, just like the situation
with cold fusion.
Never before have the economics of the world been so inner rated and
complicated.
That's true, but ancient economies were pretty complicated!
What standard would you use to judge? Surely, past economies were not
as complicated as what we see today.
In the past a company, located in a particular country, made something
using local labor and materials. A simple ledger could be used to
keep track of their activities.
Most of them, perhaps, but since the 17th century there have been
hundreds of corporations and government agencies that are far more
complicated than that. For example, the 18th and 19th century life
insurance companies had manual data reporting and processing
capabilities that would be impressive even today, with a good-sized
computer.
Until modern computers came along, all recording had to be done by hand.
Of course methods were developed to make simple calculations. The
business models used today use equations that would take years to solve
using these tools. In fact, modern large corporations could not
function without computers and the complex mathematical models on which
decisions are based. As these models become more complex, only people
with special training can understand what is happening, thus the CFO is
born. The CEO can now plead ignorance and get off scot free when the
company goes belly-up.
Some companies are more wealthy and powerful than many governments.
The activities can only be understood using large computers.
You would be amazed at how well they managed to keep track of millions
of details without computers in 1800, in the Japanese government, at the
US Census Bureau, and at British life insurance companies. It was slow
but effective. Mechanized data processing only become necessary for the
US Census Bureau when the population reached 50.1 million, in 1880. That
data took 9 years to process. Since the census must be taken every 10
years, according to the Constitution, that was the limit.
Nine years to process just a few questions!! The information being
stored about everyone, on which taxes, employment, and credit are based,
would not have been possible until recently. Surely, you must
acknowledge that this is a level of complexity never before achieved.
Important decisions are made every day based on this information. Once
the amount of information becomes too great and the decision process
becomes too complicated, an increasing number of "bad" decisions will be
made and modern society will slowly regress. That process is happening
right now.
It took a lot of manual work to do an in-depth analysis of the data
sets, for things like actuarial tables, but 19th-century statisticians
did impressive work.
No doubt they were impressive given the tools available. What would you
expect to happen to society if the computer had not been discovered?
Would data collection have stopped? Or would the amount of information
have totally overwhelmed the system so that knowledge about the
consequence of decisions was no longer available? This would not have
stopped people from trying to make decisions. I suggest civilization
would have died as countries regressed to simpler forms. Instead,
development of the computer has put this event further in the future,
unless another big discovery is made that can reduce the complexity of
decisions.
Never before has scientific knowledge been so extensive and
complicated. Knowledge is growing so rapidly that it can only be
organized using computers and no single individual can understand the
general field of scientific knowledge.
Yes, indeed.
The British experience with the East India Company and later with
their colonies was so complicated that economists and historians
still argue about whether the British made money or lost money on the
deal, and it is even more difficult to determine whether the people
in India benefited more than they were harmed.
Yes, and this is a good example of my point. As a result of this
complexity, the British Empire Died.
The empire was not done in by complexity. It was destroyed by rising
nationalism in India and elsewhere, by the Labor Party in England, and
by World War II.
Most of those events, I suggest, were caused by the consequence of
decisions not being understood. For example, do you think Hitler would
have done what he did if he knew what the consequences would be? Of
course, Hitler went crazy later and, in that condition, ignored good
advice. We see that happen all the time, even in the US.
[The Shogunate government] decreed what kind of dishes people of
different classes and occupations would be allowed to use. They did
not just make these rules; they enforced them, with inspectors,
paperwork galore, centralized record keeping and so on. This was an
incredibly complicated undertaking.
I suggest the effort was designed to reduce the complexity for the
general population.
No, that had nothing to do with it. The government wanted to control
every aspect of people's lives and infiltrate every organization and
clan with informants. Their goal was to prevent opposition, and to
squeeze as much wealth out of the population as they could, in taxes. It
was a quintessential fascist organization. The only thing similar was
the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian governments, and the modern East German
government. The Italian fascists tried to monitor and control the
population, but they were inept at that. (Also, by the way, the trains
did *not* run on time, according to a retired Italian railroad conductor.)
OK, I agree the Japanese leaders had goals beyond limiting complexity.
Nevertheless, if this had been the consequence, the country would have
been more stable even without informants. However, as you say, the
rules were so complex that complexity was not reduced, but made worse.
When that happens, a society becomes unstable because most people do not
handle uncertainty well.
Ed
Ordinary people in Japan did not need to know very much, they only had
to follow the rules.
Actually they were the best educated premodern population on record.
They sure did have to follow the rules!
The people in charge had to understand the system very well, but these
people could be given sufficient education.
They were well-educated, but the rules and laws were deliberately
obscure. Some were actually state secrets. You could be hauled off to
jail for a breaking a law that no one was allowed to know about, based
on evidence that you were not allowed to hear. The same thing can happen
in the US today thanks to our recent anti-terrorism laws, but we
consider it anomalous.
Japanese government tends to be opaque even today. There are more hidden
"guidelines" and "suggestions" than there are laws, and many
extra-governmental organizations collect taxes and pseudo-taxes off the
books, such as the money from highway toll booths. Nobody knows how much
money comes in from the tolls, or where it goes to. Periodic scandals
erupt when it is revealed that most of the money goes into the pockets
of officials and ex-officials (amakudari). There are thousands of
semi-public organizations such as NEDO, which briefly researched cold
fusion. They take in and spend millions of dollars, but nobody knows how
much or what they spend it on. They do not answer to the Prime Minister
or the Parliament, because they are semiprivate, and they do not have to
report profit and loss the way a corporation does, because they are
semipublic.
Greed will always be present. The problem comes when complexity is so
great that greed can not be kept under control. ENRON is a good
example of a greed driven company that created a system that was so
complicated that government could not control it.
That is true. Enron thrived on a combination of complexity and opaque
obscurity.
- Jed
