Natural systems

The trouble with understanding natural cause & effect…

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The real trouble with understanding your own accumulative effects on the world is that the human theory of cause and effect, like pool balls bouncing around transmitting effects from elsewhere, isn’t the way nature accumulates effects. Bouncing balls is not the glue nature uses, you might say.

The effects of pressures and forces are real and all, but they nearly all dissipate as they bounce around, rather than accumulate. So…our usual idea of “cause and effect” simply does not apply. That’s a key reason for why good intentions often don’t have their intended effect…

the human theory of effects isn’t the way nature accumulates effects Continue reading The trouble with understanding natural cause & effect… →

Natural Economy, Natural systems

Does increasing resource supply accelerate depletion?

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I think the answer is, well, yes of course… Most people seem to
intuitively confuse increasing their access to resources with increasing the
supply when increasing their access to resources actually decreases the earth’s
supply.

This is another way to understand the various mysterious efforts
to reduce the impacts of growth by streamlining and accelerating growth, which
of course multiplies its impacts. It basically means we are not being
self-critical and asking the hard questions. The easiest data to display the
effect with is the world energy/GDP balance:

Continue reading Does increasing resource supply accelerate depletion? →

Natural Economy, Natural systems

Noticing change, through the fixed world illusion

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From Jim Maendel on a Linkedin Foresight group

Phil,
[I was] just looking for smart people to join our group. After checking out your site, I believe you may be overqualified. Your stuff is brilliant. I found this portion on the market pundits fascinating, from The Bump on a Curve Notepad:

“Well, I’ve been wondering for a long time why the flows of change are so hard for people to see, and do think there’s some kind of “fixed world illusion” to contend with. There’s a list of reasons why we don’t update our information regularly and so miss the flows of change because of that.

It’s a little speculative, but another detail caught my attention recently, that even when repeated changes in “normal” are quite dramatic, people often only have to “sleep on it” to readjust and see even very short lived situations as if they were permanent and a brand new permanent “normal”.

Nearly every pundit and media source from 2007 to the present has radically changed their stories about the economic collapse nearly every week… for example.  They always seeming very comfortable with the “ever present” finality of their quickly changing stories. It’s like there’s a “reset button” that they all keep using, in their sleep, that completely hides the facts of accelerating change. Continue reading Noticing change, through the fixed world illusion →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Green products or blue, doesn’t matter if they multiply…

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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… How we are all “buying better products” is making waves in nature that are indeed simply too big.  But we are regularly taking the wrong message from that and not aware of how we’re making them bigger.

Is there is something wrong with making waves in nature?

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. Continue reading Green products or blue, doesn’t matter if they multiply… →

Mail & Comment

Any chance what’s been right all along still is??

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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.

 

 

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Campaign finance law, and an even more ‘dastardly’ plan…

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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.  ;-)

 

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems

Who’s Changing our Natural Laws!!?

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A reply to Bill Dixon on Global Foresight regarding Soddy and the need for changing assumptions in economics.

++++

I do agree with you generally, but it seems that the specific forms that things take come from how they individually develop *within* the possibilities allowed by “the laws of nature” as limits on their individuality.

Economies and ecologies are obvious examples of things that develop individualistically

So, though I don’t expect the system of the universe to alter it’s more general laws any time soon, :-)  like maybe… upset the conservation laws for example.   I see those “fixed laws” as sound explanatory principles, that still offer very diverse possibilities for individual developments within them.

Economies and ecologies are obvious examples of things that develop individualistically.  They develop their own consistent “local laws of nature”, or as others call them “emergent properties”, serving as laws of the system developing them.

Continue reading Who’s Changing our Natural Laws!!? →

Mail & Comment, Natural systems

Predictably exploratory maybe?? But is that “irrational”?

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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.

There’s a great way to actually trace a lot of these phenomena as they happen

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

 

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Searching the causes of the collapse

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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 we are neglecting discussion of the entire spectrum of physical causes of the collapse.Despite the rather long list of direct physical causes we are all discussing ONLY the cultural causes. That’s crazy.

we are neglecting discussion of the entire spectrum of physical causes of the collapse

It looks like a matter of preferring to only talk about familiar subjects. It keeps those subjects unfamiliar, of course, amounts to disguised hand wringing to avoid learning, causing the calamities we then fail to see because of it. Continue reading Searching the causes of the collapse →

For teachers, Natural Economy, What to do

Real Solutions for “our change of life” crisis

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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. Continue reading Real Solutions for “our change of life” crisis →

New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context