{"id":766,"date":"2006-09-13T00:00:02","date_gmt":"2006-09-13T04:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=766"},"modified":"2006-09-13T00:00:02","modified_gmt":"2006-09-13T04:00:02","slug":"good-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/good-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Good ideas . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Eric & all,<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Thanks for asking. Let me just attempt to describe the ship and the wave idea. You know any great graphic designer types? It could be a good poster, and could make good money too!<\/span>The idea of turning the ship of mankind into the wave of calamities coming at us, is so we don\u2019t get blindsided and capsize. It would be a matter of doing one thing right, even though we get everything else wrong. It\u2019s also about the common idea that you can\u2019t learn from habitual mistakes until you watch as you make them.<\/span>If you make a big mistake 10 times without seeing how it happens, it could happen to you 100 times. But when you see it as it\u2019s happening, once or twice, then you don\u2019t do it again. My best realistic hope for us is that we become aware enough of the genuine hidden errors of our ways to be watching as the earth\u2019s bounty crashes down around us\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The specific wave I\u2019m talking about is the wave, or more accurately, the wall, of complicated decision making that is rapidly approaching us as the unexpected consequences of exponential growth multiply and go out of control and our capacity for making competent decisions fails us. There\u2019s a profound synergy of confusion and missteps developing as the destructive limit to growth. It\u2019s not just huge over-consumption, species and ecological collapse, growing helpless populations and global warming. We also have ballooning imaginary finances, a new perpetual state war and extreme government dysfunction just when it\u2019s most needed. There are also many of our \u2019solutions\u2019, like promoting growth with conservation, that simply make things much worse. Then there\u2019s, just, plain, speed. Growth is inherently a continuous acceleration of radical changes. Everyone is beginning to feel the swell of disorder, but its also swelling almost majestically, as if it were normal. Well, it is. It\u2019s what necessarily happens to growth that doesn\u2019t have other limits. If we\u2019re alerted to watching it, i.e. turn the big ship and face the swell head on, we\u2019ll have a chance of weathering it, blaming the wave instead of other things, learning from it as it crashes down on us. It could well be a profound tragedy to watch too, of course.<\/p>\n

Living systems are a juggling act, amazingly entertaining and resourceful, but if the balls multiply and the juggler gets confused, chaos ensues and all the balls fall down. After systemic collapse you can\u2019t simply flip a switch and restart a complex system. It has to regrow, and our not having the resources to do that any more could slow us down quite a bit further. The wall of complexity we\u2019re heading into could collapse this whole seemingly vital and thriving world of ours the way Katrina collapsed New Orleans, or worse. We can hope a system shock comes early and is less than severe, giving us more evidence, and time for real insight to grow and spread.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Maybe we could work some of that into the Apology to our Grand Children\u2026 I also don\u2019t want to focus exclusively on the \u2019sword of Damocles\u2019 that we are clearly walking into. There\u2019s also that \u2018next bigger fish\u2019 of mine. The growth of complex systems in nature is quite frequently for the purpose of giving birth to entirely new things. The possibilities seem very small that our amazing continuous 600 year growth process will have that happy end, but they\u2019re definitely there.<\/p>\n

My apology is that I haven\u2019t written the book, having spent my time struggling to find any language I could speak in. In the mid 70\u2019s I stumbled across this whole can of worms, in the guise of trying to understand what \u2018approximation\u2019 in science was leaving out. Approximation leaves out ALL the messy bits. That includes ALL the natural processes which connect things, and ALL the natural processes that are out of control, which for me was a real feast of discovery once I figured out how to spot them. It\u2019s a long story.<\/p>\n

Is any of this suggestive?<\/p>\n

Phil Henshaw<\/p>\n

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<\/p>\n

> Hi Phil,<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026.clip<\/p>\n

> I am still most intrigued with your big approach to turning
\n> the ship
\n> into the waves. We need to brainstorm about how we could
\n> accomplish
\n> this, even in slight ways.<\/p>\n

> Eric R. Pianka
\n> The University of Texas at Austin<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric & all, Thanks for asking. Let me just attempt to describe the ship and the wave idea. You know any great graphic designer types? It could be a good poster, and could make good money too!The idea of turning the ship of mankind into the wave of calamities coming at us, is so we … Continue reading Good ideas . . .<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}