Emmeline, at ethicalcorp.com was looking for recent innovation in sustainability to review for recognition. In a short email exchange she persuaded me to try to find a simple explanation again, for my recent radical discovery. It’s that our information on the scale of energy demands that business place on the economy is “far more holes than cheese“. See also
Thanks very much for your nice reply. If you care to consider it for recognition, last fall I published a long paper on the evidence of a true 80% hole in our information on business end product energy use and CO2, sorely needing attention.
We don’t have information on what supply chain people and business are doing, because they don’t record it or don’t pass it up the chain.
The study identifies a deep structural problem in what we know about complex business supply chain networks. We don’t have information on what supply chain people or businesses are doing, because they don’t record or report it up the chain.
In a contrarian way that large gap in our information is exactly what gets missed by a “focus on transparency and clarity and measurement, being more accurate”. It has to do with estimating known kinds of impacts that go unmeasured for lack of information. It’s only due to the nature of outsourced business services having evident impacts that are individually untraceable, and so provide no data to count. Continue reading SEA – energy accounting “far more holes than cheese”→
“Endless exploding energy” is quite temporary, of course.
Think of any example, any case where it’s not just the start of things. We might start our day or a new business effort with a burst of “endless exploding energy”, but not really mean that literally. “Endless exploding energy”, if you mean it literally, generally causes things to rip themselves apart, destructively. With our economy there’s little doubt we mean it literally, is the problem, inherent in the universal plan for “real growth” at stable positive exponential rates.
Think of any of the quite common examples, and then wonder: Why haven’t people been curious about it? Our whole design for economic prosperity involves using energy to multiply energy use, to take endless exploding control of the earth’s energy resources, for empowering our social relationships,
…to “take off”, and keep using ever more, ever faster,
the more we use.
The idea of our ever exploding future... literally!
I don’t know why I am perhaps one of the only living people to have had the curiosity to break free of the misconceptions leading our culture to be so committed to increasing our energy use by bigger steps the more we use, forever. Somehow I both:
noticed the signs of there being something deeply wrong with our knowledge of life, and
discovered the universal solution for how to respond upon finding one’s own life rides on an exploding bomb of energy use, with no built in method of turning it off.
Survival is only possible if we use the energy it grows by… for something better,
The use of our own and the earth’s energies for further multiplying our energy uses, managed to explode at maximum rates forever,… is very explicitly managed for doing just that. It’s readily apparent in our normal uses of money, if you look, found to be innocently posing as if designed to serve everyone’s “self-interest”. Continue reading With endless exploding energy…→
“Kin and Kind” is an article in the Mar 5 New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, on the remarkable career of E.O. Wilson and his quest to explain apparent “altruism” in animal behavior. The reigning explanation for evolution is pure competition, and he’s beginning to think there must be more to it, asking “…is goodness an adaptive trait?” I note that the very first ecologist to study complex ecological behavior, S.A. Forbes, had much the same way of raising the question, in 1887.
The question, possibly, is not how mutations affect behavior, but our having not looked squarely at what is common to the behaviors of life that are so successful.
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for The Mail,
E.O. Wilson is remarkable among scientists for being willing to question his own dogma. Where the article ends is with his next seeming breach of scientific etiquette, his now beginning to ask if “goodness is an adaptive trait”.
Very surprisingly, that is where the very first scientist to study complex organization in ecologies, S.A. Forbes actually began. In 1887, in “The Lake as a Microcosm”, Forbes observed that somehow networks of many species evolved to respect each other enough to not make food chains highly unstable, as they would be if their competition had winners. Continue reading Kin and Kind – Some learning in progress?→
In “Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism” John Fullerton reviews “Sustainable Capitalism” by Generation Investment Management LLP, as still not respecting our finite world. Maximizing long term gain doesn’t make it sustainable, for example, given the difficulty people have had identifying future liabilities for currently profitable plans. I add a graphic example, of how defining the world as what we know about it is deceiving, and results in:
simply enormous omissions from the information set we usually think of as needed for making good decisions
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It’s great to see such a solid critique of Generation’s “Sustainable Capitalism”, that on the surface seems like remarkably responsive to environmental issues as an investment strategy, far more than than ANY sustainable investment plan of ten years ago. The whole attitude toward avoiding environmental conflict, as a business strategy, may be applied inconstantly today but seems to have really swept the corporate world too.
With more and more information, and noticing that much of it travels in circles, there’s both “information overload” and “separate information worlds”, causing the communication of ideas to lose resilience. They’re barriers to communication, and can easily turn into “worlds of miss-information” leading everyone in them astray.
there’s both “information overload”
and
“separate information worlds”
CLAY JOHNSON has good links and discussion on the problem , relating to his interesting “Information Diet” book and “Information Diet Pledge“. By self-selecting our information sources we can create a world of miss-information for ourselves, so he suggests some rules for a healthy information diet. I wrote him the following comment on the “next steps” his “Information diet remainders“. Below that is my comment on his radio program on WNYC on 2/9/12.
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Clay, There’s an easy step beyond noticing that no one is really the author of information that travels in circles. It’s seeing that the author is really the social network it develops in, using the information as part of a social story of one kind or another.
People speaking different languages have different realities.
The next step is noticing that such authoring social networks and cultures invent rather strongly held circles of storytelling, which are very different from each other’s. They become the “reality” the culture creates and form “silos” of thinking that people in them are then structurally separated from others by. Continue reading Coping with every culture having a different reality! (& what’s multiplying them)→
This is an exchange with Frits Smeets on Azimuth, John Baez’s wide ranging mathematical physics blog. The original topic is the 12/13/11 “What’s up with the solar transition“, and why isn’t it happening when seeming so “logical” to so many.
The basic problem is that systems that are highly organized as cells of complex relationships and work by themselves, like the great proliferation of systems that develop by growth, the working relationships between their internal parts is untraceable. So other parts of the universe “out of the loop”.
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In a world of systems leaving us “out of the loop” an observer’s view is riddled with holes, like Swiss Cheese!
The exchange starts on that topic, and in the last two entries turns to the deeper problem of why the natural holes in our information about nature are missing from the physicists notion of a world describable by equations, or “phase space”. fyi, you might browse at the start and read carefully toward the end.
Holes in our information for things built from the inside. (Oh gee, never thought of organization as something different from enumeration.... )
From a Pharaoh hardening his heart to confused children refusing to budge… complexly organized systems pushed to their limits often display emergent rigidity.
Things that develop their organization by new parts being added to existing ones, develop accumulative designs that become harder to change over time. It leads to organizational rigidity, that can either be seen as inhibiting change or enabling structure. These are aspects of the systems physics of self-organization.
Accumulative designs become harder to change over time
Crystallization works by replicating a pattern from a starting pattern, that remains the origin of the pattern throughout the process, like the process that creates snow flakes of a single design. It’s similar with road systems, that as you add connecting roads it becomes both unnecessary to add more and harder to change the established network.
Even with advanced computers the world financial system gets built around trusted expectations, leaving a rigid imprint of past thinking in our models for the future. If it becomes unmanageable and overwhelmed by floods of new kinds of information the models don’t contain, the system is not designed to make any response.
At the limits of Lucy’s organizational abilities, confusion reigned
Organizational rigidity is natural, and develops in any system built by accumulation. A bureaucracy may be built to be very efficient and resourceful, for example, in responding to the original scale and kinds of demands. It’s initial designs may have been highly versatile for the variety of problems it started with. It naturally becomes mired in inefficiency at some natural point of piling on ever increasing demands of new kinds.
How improving productivity always reliably made thing cheaper and easier to do, is ending. It naturally ends as any direction of progress does, if taken to its limit. Now we see our “productivities” coming into costly conflict with each other and the environment, making everything more costly and complicated, the exact opposite of what we expect.
It reverses an expectation humans have had for how to solve problems that appears to be much older than recorded history, as all of human evolution is a record of great leaps of increasing productivity, using less to get more. Becoming productive in cooperating with our environment rather than conquering it, no longer “productive”, is a very big change in thinking for us.
Musical chairs for earth as a whole - the natural limit of productivity
