Reading Nature’s Signals

Jan 25,2010 comment Re: Alternative Energy Newswire’s We need not make any important sacrifices for natural life style

I wish I could get the next level of thinking to spread as easily as the old thinking keeps spreading… The waves we’re making in nature are indeed simply too big, but we regularly take the wrong message from that.

It’s so important to not take that as meaning that there is something wrong with making waves in nature. What we need is to discover why the waves we make have kept getting so much bigger.

My little essay “Throwing our energy at impossible dreams” (also linked there) is about these kinds of logical tricks nature plays on us, particularly when so many of our environmental relationships are changing all at once. There’s a problem with trying to reduce impacts by buying better products. That’s part of the formula for economic growth. It’s actually been by learning to produce things more efficiently that we kept adding %’s to the scale of our uses of the earth, and outgrew its limits in the first place.

There are two kinds of addition, addition by totals and addition by %’s. For some mysterious reason, pure social convention of it seems, people don’t distinguish between them. The physical difference is that the first kind of addition is self-limiting and the other kind of addition measures ever multiplying imbalance. Somehow in the past two hundred years we came to define social stability as addition by %’s, or ever multiplying imbalance in relation to the earth.

It means we organized all our institutions around making waves “just a bit bigger” all the time. That actually creates waves of ever multiplying scale. That we add by %’s instead of by totals is why our equations never add up, or add up only to ever more dramatic mistakes now. Green products or blue, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in the least if we skip over the need to learn how to add up the totals.

Could we change the questions we’ve been asking.. and learn how to add maybe? I don’t know. It’s an enormous blind spot it seems.

letter to NPR -

You say “all things considered”.

How about looking around to see what you’ve been missing? If familiar ideas seem exhausted, what chance is there someone with surprising new observations on our various “wicked problems” would have something worth looking into?

What if such a person were a physical systems scientist, who’s been right about how the present financial crisis would develop for 30 years, and has not really needed to change their story over and over like virtually everyone else, but to only confirm it over and over? What if they still maintain the problem is an accumulation of misinformation in the economy, and that makes it basically correctable?

If there’s something about money, our *measure* of wealth, causing it to multiply when the *reality* of wealth doesn’t, nothing will work right till that’s fixed.

The economy is a physical process, running into continually increasing difficulty with the physical world, and still projecting growth with ever less difficulty… Why don’t you ever hear about that on ATC??

Try me. I can help.

letter to NPR -

You say “all things considered”. How about looking around to see what you’ve been missing? If familiar ideas seem exhausted, what chance is there someone with surprising new observations on our various “wicked problems” would have something worth looking into?

What if such a person were a physical systems scientist, who’s been right about how the present financial crisis would develop for 30 years, and has not really needed to change their story over and over like virtually everyone else, but to only confirm it over and over? What if they still maintain the problem is an accumulation of misinformation in the economy, and that makes it basically correctable?

If there’s something about money, our *measure* of wealth, causing it to multiply when the *reality* of wealth doesn’t, nothing will work right till that’s fixed.

The economy is a physical process, running into continually increasing difficulty with the physical world, and still projecting growth with ever less difficulty… Why don’t you ever hear about that on ATC??

Try me. I can help.

See the original which had a typo in the name. This entry created to point to it.

.. pointing out how holding corporate money to a higher standard of truthfulness can now becomes profitable with the supreme court’s removal of all controls on corporate speech ..

Friends,

I’ve been sort of waiting for this.

“Fiduciary duty > noun: the legal duty of a fiduciary to act in the best interests of the beneficiary”

It occurred to me some time ago that it would be possible to completely reverse a supreme court decision on campaign finance like what we just got today.

You just need to force “fiduciary duty” to be reinterpreted from having its *habitual meaning* to its *natural language meaning*. Fiduciary duty actually requires acting in the best interests of stockholders and the public *without qualification*.

How it has been treated is meaning that trustees are only obligated to maximize their own short term financial gains in which shareholders would get some share, as if money were the only interest stockholders and the public could have. The world has changed radically in the time since that usage developed.

Now that business is directly causing major threats to the survival our the ecology and economy by broadly shirking responsibility for their environmental impacts and disrespecting their own natural limits and sustainability, the tables are completely turned. Businesses make the physical decisions for how our life support system evolves and adapts to its environment, and so physically steer our path toward or away from sustainability.

The actual meaning of the word “fiduciary” then implies acting in the whole interest of stockholders and the public. That would mean that their public speech would need to meet unusually high standards of balance, clarity, truthfulness and realistic assessment of the possibilities.

How would that sound? ….just fabulous, just simply fabulous!

It seems it could be the law today simply by someone using it, as it already is the law today.

There’s an enormous omission being made. This week is a critical time to raise it. Human culture is part of a physical world, and the spectrum of physical causes of the collapse is being neglected. You should write about it, your way, but I can help a lot if you like too.

Despite the rather long list of directly contributing physical causes the major media and government panels are discussing ONLY the cultural causes, policy and greed, etc. That’s crazy. It looks like a matter of preferring to only talk about familiar subjects. It keeps other subjects unfamiliar, of course, amounts to disguised hand wringing to avoid learning, and causes the calmaties we then fail to see because of it.

There are several I could mention, but one large group come under the heading of “ever bigger plans” for “ever shrinking resources”. You’d think that would be a simple concept to grapple with. Once you pick the low hanging fruit it’s a stretch to get any fruit.

As any doctor learns, it always takes patience to understand the patient. If you don’t pay attention to these issues no one learns to become comfortable discussing them. For the physical causes influencing cultural events there is a deficit of neglect to overcome.

The most direct and immediate physical cause contributing to the collapse was what we saw as the global commodity price spiral that began in about 2003. It was set off by the world hitting a surprisingly inflexible physical limit, resource supplies becoming inflexible in responding to increased demand (i.e., no low hanging fruit).

The leading factor was an unexpected lack of response at the well head. The world petrol industry became unable to pump increasing amounts of oil. Emerging fields failed to materialize as fast as declining fields ran short, and “peak oil” occurred. That is actually nature’s most common way of rationing the supply of low hanging fruit, but industry and consumers were not expecting it and got caught flat footed.

Our over leveraged economy of the time, with the help of speculators, drove food and fuel prices through the roof. That price spiral, with commodity prices growing at 25%/yr, constituted a “law of unlimited price” violating all the assumptions of economics. THAT was the totally unexpected ‘black swan’ everyone casually discusses, “what went wrong with the numbers”, and it was not some sort of magical accident. That was caused by nature, not malfeasance, except for why we all got caught off guard by it.

We live in a physical world, and seem to do our best to ignore that wherever possible. For connecting the physical with the cultural I could help a great deal. There are several other major direct causes, a convergence of multiple causes really, being neglected. I think you could use me.

In response to a post by Marshall Goldsmith of Harvard Business review on Dan Arley, the author of “Predictably Irrational”, for which Marshall posted a thank-you note.

December 26, 2008 at 1:32 PM (w/ minor edit)
Marshall,
There’s a great way to actually trace a lot of these phenomena as they happen, and learn how to recognize some of the early signals that people who don’t know how to read complex processes get tripped up bye. It’s by considering them as complex system learning processes.

Recognizing that many system processes are back and forth response patterns between a local system and an environment helps a lot. The changes in direction of accumulative change then read as reflecting changes in what each is ‘learning’ about the other, and opens lots of doors to understanding what they are learning.

I have a number of approaches. Watching learning curves (records of developmental change generally) takes learning to ask questions about derivative rate signals of diminishing returns and things, but quite helpful. Curvature reversal points signal whole system changes in developmental directions.

In any developmental process from first beginning to final end there are always two principle inflection points (with curvature reversals) that point to reversals in the rate of return, the accumulative environmental response or the the accumulative system assembly or disassembly process, ¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸, or both.

Best, P.F. Henshaw

re: Chris Nelder - Real Solutions to the Energy and Climate Crises posted on Energy & Capital

Yes, the overweening influence of corporate lobbyists has effectively neutralized policy and confused the public debate on our most serious problems. Yes, the capitalistic system favors short-term concentrated profits over long-term public good. And yes, the simple human preference for happy talk over sad stories plays a role in our denial. The real problem is much more pervasive. Those actors cannot explain more fundamental questions:

Why has our economic theory failed us?
Why is the reality of climate change so hard to accept?
Why does climate change dominate public dialogue while the more proximate threat of peak oil remains far off the radar?
Why do we have such resistance to change?
Why would anyone ever think Dubai World was a good idea?
Why is talking about population control — arguably the only real way out of our predicament — taboo?

Chris,

The issues you raise (12/11/09 “Energy and Capital”) are rather close to what I’ve used as conceptual levers for understanding the deeper problem for some time. The simple part of our cognitive difficulty is fairly easy to state and understand I think. Even scientists tend to switch back and forth between words and phrases that refer to physical things and those that express emotional or cultural values, without clearly distinguishing one from the other. So it’s quite easy for us to “dream the impossible” when it’s clearly impossible, or put all our efforts into accelerating growth as a way of escaping our growth limits…. These and your list of conundrums are indeed real problems, for sure, but they’re also great levers for tracing down their source!

Nature is simply chock full of uncontrolled physical systems. However human culture has been nursing a magical idea that everything in the universe is controlled by either gods, priests, laws or environments for at least 5000 years it seems. That’s now getting in our way, as we try to understand a planet going completely out of control… ! To start seeing the solution you might just begin to list the many kinds of things we rely on that need to remain uncontrolled, and individually learning about their own environments, by themselves.

There’s the weather, ecologies, friends, associates, all of life, etc, etc. Nature is chock full of independently learning systems. Their learning is not controlled, it’s discovered or enabled or prevented and things, but not controlled. Nature’s systems learn for themselves. Science, though, is based on modeling all things in the world as mathematical relations between controlled variables…. I think in a case of discovered error like this the good “due diligence” choice is to just say “Oops… back to the drawing board!”

I went back to the drawing board this one over 30 years ago, and have made a lot of progress. I still meet many of the same barriers you mention, but am getting better at tearing them down or slipping through. The core problem, though, is that our cultural construct of the world fails to distinguish between physical things and cultural values. That’s how even scientists fail to keep track of whether their words refer to things or values of beliefs, we make a basic learning mistake. We let consciousness represent our own imaginations as reality.

Given the deep natural confusion, and that my own writing is not that good, you’ll need to poke around my website for things that strike your fancy. I developed a whole new scientific method for using physics as a tool for learning about uncontrolled systems, reversing the purpose of models from representing the learning systems of nature as machines to helping you discover what they are learning. That’s one way to say it. I guess the short piece I’m most pleased with at the moment is “Peak Zucchini”, about the learning tasks that sudden overabundance naturally brings up.

The fact is that in building uncontrolled systems nature uses growth, and quite frequently comes perilously close to wrecking everything, leaving only some narrow path of escape for them to discover. Consider a seedling when it switches from explosive use of it’s little seed of carbohydrates, finding itself a spindly little shoot with only two little almost useless leaves. That’s when it’s exponential growth ends. Consider an infant in he womb, having multiplied from 1 cell to 1 trillion, doubling in size every 7 days for 9 months. Then it’s REALLY time to leave!! (and be nearly helpless as you start to learn about a whole environment of other living things to interact with).

So… apparently that’s what we need to do mentally, but we’re making the mistake (since we don’t really distinguish) of trying to do it physically, trying to sustain physical growth to escape from our physical limits… Boy, do WE have another thing coming!!

Thanks for bringing it up!!

posted to Nature.com-climate feedback and Dot Earth

Maybe this is a break in the log jam… in disguise, a real opportunity to ask the tough questions.

Take China’s promise to slow carbon release by decreasing its economic carbon intensity. The strange fact, that points to our need to deeply rethink how we’ve been trying to slow down ALL kinds of environmental impacts, is that reducing carbon intensity does not reduce carbon emissions. China’s carbon emissions have been increasing ever faster as they have repeatedly reduced the carbon intensity of their economy, all along.

The curious fact is that this is exactly what has been happening for ALL our impacts, all along, and is a key to what got us into this dead end trap we now find ourselves in.

I know a lot about it, from using physics to study the systems of change. There are still ways to turn our direction until going up that ever steeper slope of natural resistance brings us to a standstill. There won’t be after that, is the problem. see www.synapse9.com

We must address the tough questions to survive here, and can if we show a little interest in watching the momentums of change.

The strange fact, that points to our need to deeply rethink how to slow down ALL kinds of environmental impacts, is that reducing carbon intensity does not reduce carbon emissions. China’s carbon emissions have been increasing ever faster as they have repeatedly reduced the carbon intensity of their economy. The curious fact is that this is exactly what has been happening for ALL our impacts, all along, and is what got us into this dead end trap we now find ourselves in.

I know a lot about it. There are still ways to turn our direction until going up that ever steeper slope of natural resistance brings us to a standstill. There won’t be after that, is the problem. We must address the tough questions to survive here, and can if we show a little interest in watching the momentums of change. This dilemma is actually a great opening to lots of other ways to understanding what our core problem is and how to fix it. Find something on my site you find curious, and let me answer your questions.

www.synapse9.com

See also Concept and Comment - Happy Thanksgiving 2009

Peak Zucchini - 11/20/09 The story of overabundance and when to give it away for our Thanksgiving…
What in the world is really going on here? - 11/15/09 How our work ethic accidently pushes us up an ever steeper learning curve
How we get out of this - 11/11/09 What to do when it’s your solutions that become the main cause of your problems
Inside Efficiency - 11/10/09 The mystery of why doing tasks ever more efficiently multiplies their services and impact growth
The Missing Variables in Thermodynamics - 10/24/09 The unhidden but missing energy that builds energy flow systems
Lines of Sustainability - research notes on defining the limits of sustainability and points of vanishing returns.
Economies That Become Part of Nature - how we can, why we have to
When = becomes a sign of change - The real “millennium bug” is all the = signs becoming ? marks.
Efficiency Mistake - the main unwanted reverse effects of efficiency & productivity 5/27/09