to contacts in sciences interested in the “physical world” problem….
In the list below, it would help me a lot to know where you were stopped; was it at a, b, c, d or e? I’m thinking it might make it easier if I explain less, rather than more, to get a response to my main question.
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I observed an effect of how both ecology and economy adopt the physics model, of representing the living things they talk about with formulas.
a) What about the problem that if life only followed rules it would be quite lifeless.
The physics model represents living things as machines, is the problem.
b) By directing our attention to “controlling variables” and “numerical relationships” do we lose sight of the liveliness of things operating beyond the rules somehow, that is much more important to us? Continue reading Something easier to comment on?→
On the LCA list Simon asked: Are there any tangible examples of where something meaningful was created (not necessarily materially produced) by humans undertaking a “whole systems accounting” approach? I had offered the obscure example of one of my proud little examples, a whole system account of money exchange in a 1985 paper for SGSR proving that learning lags would be a limit for economic growth, and later the following. P.S.
Simon,
Perhaps better examples of “whole systems accounting” would be the more common ways that the whole systems are accounted for. One is energy budgets the way the physicists do it, like for the climate models.
They divide up a pie they already know the total of
They don’t just add up the totals. They divide up a pie they already know the total of, measuring the system from both inside and out. That forces them into doing what is needed to explain the difference. Continue reading Examples of “whole systems accounting”→
On the CCG list RML had posted a good article on how public engagement is critical to solving climate crisis. It overlooks the special problem we have, that science still tries to describe uncontrolled systems with control theory…
RML,
Well, one of the major barriers to using science to communicate the choices available to people is that scientific models, confusingly, represent the parts of economic systems as having no individual choices…
Responding on LinkedIn Global Foresight thread… on changes in the economic rules.
The idea that economic change develops from local innovation, like biological evolution, is also a general rule for all other environmental processes. Change is distributed and developmental in general, and *does not actually follow formulas*.
The traditional natural science paradigm has tried to always explain things with formulas, as was so successful with mechanics and planetary motion. For complex systems with evolving parts like economics, it just doesn’t make sense.
So, the new rule is looking for new rules, not for the permanent ones, for where change is developing and the old rules won’t apply.
It’s a big subject obviously, but the kind of systems physics that truly informs economics is not that of Stephen Wolfram or any of the other old school systems theorists. They all try to fix their inability to find general rules for nature by making smaller and smaller rules ones. Continue reading More devolution than evolution→
Responding to: 4/26/09 “Again, I find myself agreeing with you.”
BB
Brian,
You started this thread by saying you thought long term forces such as “natural cycles” would overwhelm any local developmental processes. What I had said was fairly directly that all long term forces were the accumulation of local developmental processes.
There actually seems to be excellent evidence of that, as good as the evidence for evolution. True, I can’t get it published because the tyranny of “natural law” as a philosophy of science is only frayed at the edges rather than torn in the middle, but I can lead anyone to enough of it to make it quite hard to erase.
It’s certainly made hard to speak clearly about these things,
The big shift in thinking about our impacts you suggest looks to me to have some interesting features. What seems hard for me, though, is finding an inviting way to lead people into thinking about the problems their solutions will later create.
Finding “solutions” usually results in there no longer seeming to be a problem (!) so we solidify our emotional connections to it and take the issue “off our to-do list”. Once you arrive at a “solution” revisiting it is itself a problem, but that’s just when nature begins her own continuous revisiting of it. Continue reading Ending “fix it and forget it”?→
On a Global Foresight thread Tom Abeles asked if scientific models, based on a reliable “bandwidth” for natural systems, might somehow have predictive properties. He noted:
The problem we have is exemplified by the poem, “The Theory that Jack built” which was published in an insightful set of “nonsense” poems called The Space Child’s Mother Goose: This is the theory that Jack built; this is the flaw, this is the constant covering the flaw; this is the “x” justifying the constant. . . und so weiter.
Tom,
That’s a great insight and question. Part of the paradox seems to be in the word “like”. It is exactly models made “like” the ones for deterministic systems that don’t work well at all to imitate accumulatively self-organizing systems.
For new “unlike” models to still be useful, I think we need to no longer use models only as something we build to independently represent nature. I think we also need to use models for the opposite,
Many feel frustration about the failure of our “guardians” to act on the needs of our environments. They display, our own frozen helplessness when facing obvious threats. That’s great as just the kind of observation that is the stimulus for new kinds of thinking. “Changing Normal” for a planet stuck in the past, you might say.
In acknowledging Steve’s frustration with the crime of silence by our guardians was reserving the possibility that “masters of the universe” responsible might not be “the usual suspects”. It could also refer to anyone who thinks of their being a “master of their own fate”.
Frank then offered a nice way to prompt his students,
“Hmmm, each year for the past 20 or so, in orientation week, i greet my new crop of students with: “i am a green but the wilderness i am interested in is not in East Gippsland (Oregon?) but behind the eyes looking at me across this room. If i can make you wilder, i.e. LESS predictable to me, by the time you leave this room, i have done my job.” Continue reading Turning takers into healers….→
re: Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy NY Times Op-Ed, Sun 4/12, mentioned by Tom in a LinkedIn “Global Foresight” conversation.
Tom,
Thanks for mentioning the Times Op-Ed, It’s just great some mention of Soddy and the “physical world problem” finally appeared in the Times. As I find so often, I agree with his analysis of the problem, about 110%, but that I find is as far as it goes!
You might be interested to know that J.M. Keynes and Kenneth Boulding also came to very similar end conclusions. Each used their own language for it, but each at least would agree firmly that 1) economies are physical systems, and 2) at natural limits something would need to be done about excess savings of financial capital.
Post to LinkedIn’s Global Foresight discussion 4/11/09
Tom,
I guess the problem is that we’ve been steering the development of the earth as if expanding our vehicle with our windows painted over with out of date explanations, having a party and not watching the earth’s responses as we crashed into things. Our blind procedures, then, have not been doing what we intended them to do.
