On The Collapse of Complex Societies

One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.

Chaos theory of human societies?

One butterfly flapping its wings cannot lead to the destruction of the sun. Nature has built in redundancy. So do human societies. Diamond's book (Guns Germ and Steel) is a hodgepodge of deterministic gibberish.

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

The probability that a butterfly's actions could cause critical damage to a star is so low as to be totally impossible (i.e., a trllion stars could last a trillion years without it ever happnening once), but that probability is still non-zero. You familiar with the notion that the air in a room might evacuate itself under no force other than a freak concerted motion of the constituent molecules? Same principle. I find it just _slightly_ unlikely that butterfly wings could precipitate a storm that would blow half the atmosphere towards the sun at relativistic speeds, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen.

Argument by non-sequitur?

I don't recall butterflies being mentioned in "Guns, Germs, & Steel." Perhaps I missed it.

The point of the book, in case you missed it, is that the classic argument (they're savages, we're civilized) is not a scientific approach to the question of why certain achievements occurred in Eurasia rather than Africa, the Americas, or Oceania.

In fact, the arguments are not deterministic. The advantages that peoples had on a particular continent did not a priori determine their success, but does provide an explanation for why some societies could "advance" more rapidly than others.

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

If you actually study attractors in nonlinear dynamic systems, what's popularly called "chaos theory," you'll see that what you actually have are quasi-stable attractors surrounded by regions of long-term unpredictability.

If you're near an attractor, it will take a lot to dislodge you from near that attractor. A butterfly flapping its wings won't cause a hurricane, but a volcano erupting on the other side of the plant might.

But what people usually forget is that there can be multiple attractors, and if you're not that close to one attractor it may not take much to push you over the edge to another attractor.

That's what happened at Easter Island. Cutting down the first tree caused no harm. Saving the last tree wouldn't have prevented the massive population crash. The details would have been changed in each case, but in a century you would still have ended up with a heavily forested island or a stripped one.

But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead. What's the consequences of cutting down a single tree? What if it's used to shore up the ground in the forest it came from?

What does that mean to us today? That we need to be careful since we're clearly in a chaotic realm and we can't predict the long term consequences of our actions. Some of this is due to natural variability (e.g., did you realize that it's been an unusually long time since a massive volcanic eruption, and that alone has driven global warming to a large extent?), some of it is due to human neglect (overfishing, agricultural monoculturism). Some of our problems are due to prior solutions - our artificial fertilizers prevented global starvation in the late 19th century but has now spread throughout the entire biosphere, resulting in plant growth and algae blooms even far from human activities.

N.B., that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change policies that will push us back to a desirable attractor. It means that there's no "final answer"... and that the consequences if we fail can be disasterous. It's not like we haven't had clear warnings (Easter Island, the Irish potato famine, smallpox ripping through the new world or syphillis (IIRC) through the old one.)

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?

Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future. Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

Diamond's supposedly "most surprising" revelation is the most obvious one: tragedy of commons. This is old hat.

Diamond does say it is the most surprising reason why groups fail in decision making but he does not finf it surprising because it's a new reason to him. The other three reasons for failure are roughly 1) they didn't anticipate a problem that hadn't yet occurred, 2)they didn't recognize a problem as a problem when it arrived, and 3)they failed to fix the problem after they recognized it.

Diamond says that surprisingly the commonest failure is to not actually do anything to fix a problem after it has been recognized. He uses the tragedy of the commons as an example.

he gives only passing mention to perhaps the biggest problem of all: uncertainty

How can you say this. That's the whole point of his first factor. The first item on my road map is that groups may do disastrous things because they didn't anticipate a problem before it arrived.

Based on the following lie

reconsider Diamond's arguments: it is assumed implicitly that "we" have identified the problems and the main barrier to fixing them is bending individual will to society's best interest

I assume that you aren't at all a McCarthyist but a Randite, which is immeasurably worse. Two of the problem identified by the author explicitly deal with failure to identify the problem and one with failure to solve a problem because of technical shortcomings. And the discussion on the failure to actually do something about identified problems is not actually friendly to the concept of rationality. The tragedy of the commons arises from purely rational actions of individuals. That's one of the problems of rationalism. But you can't attack rationalism can you so you bring the term 'collective rationality' into the discussion as merely a pretext to escalate the rhetoric to "communism". Diamond uses no such term or anything like it in the article which is about failure of group decision making at a societal level.

You know there is nothing in that article that is new. It is all application of standard judgement and decision making theory to problems at a societal level. He could have just as easily spoken about the Bay of Pigs.

Only someone who believes that problems are only allowed to be solved at an individual level because problem solving at a collective level is coercion, could read that article the way you have. For you there is no tragedy of the commons because there would be no commons, someone would own it and be allowed to do with it what they will.

I give it 45 more seconds......

Slashdot: On The Collapse of Complex Web Servers

Article Text (just in case)

WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?: JARED DIAMOND

Education is supposed to be about teachers imparting knowledge to students. As every teacher knows, though, if you have a good group of students, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their supposed teachers and challenging their assumptions. That's an experience that I've been through in the last couple of months, when for the first time in my academic career I gave a course to undergraduates, highly motivated UCLA undergraduates, on collapses of societies. Why is it that some societies in the past have collapsed while others have not? I was discussing famous collapses such as those of the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatan, Easter Island society in the Pacific, Angkor Wat in southeast Asia, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Fertile Crescent societies, and Harappan Indus Valley societies. These are all societies that we've realized, from archaeological discoveries in the last 20 years, hammered away at their own environments and destroyed themselves in part by undermining the environmental resources on which they depended.

For example, the Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether -- if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now -- people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.

This question, why societies make disastrous decisions and destroy themselves, is one that not only surprised my UCLA undergraduates, but also astonishes professional historians studying collapses of past societies. The most cited book on the subject of the collapse of societies is by the historian, Joseph Tainter. It's entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter, in discussing ancient collapses, rejected the possibility that those collapses might be due to environmental management because it seemed so unlikely to him. Here's what Joseph Tainter said: "As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken towards a resolution. With their administrative structure and their capacity to allocate labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best. It is curious that they would collapse when faced with precisely those conditions that they are equipped to circumvent." Joseph Tainter concluded that the collapses of all these ancient societies couldn't possibly be due to environmental mismanagement, because they would never make these bad mistakes. Yet it's now clear that they did make these bad mistakes.

My UCLA undergraduates, and Joseph Tainter as well, ha

Jared Diamond

I go to UCLA and had the unique opportunity to study Guns, Germs, and Steel among other books with Jeffery Miller, pre-eminent microbiologist. A highlight was a guest discussion with Jared. The depth and breadth of his knowledge is amazing, and he is, in my professors words "a national treasure."

Damn...

The adage popular then was that students who got A's did the technical work, while people who managed only C's wound up running things.

That this adage may no longer hold true seems like progress.

After all those years of hard work, getting ready to rule the world, they switch the rules of the game just as I leave!

Stupid decisions?

Like guarding the Oil Ministry while letting the National Museum, Library, and more fall to looters? [nytimes.com] If that isn't dumbass, not to mention tragic in its disregard for the whole world's cultural heritage, I don't know what is.

Re:Stupid decisions?

Wrong: the National Museum drew scholars from all around the world, and in a free society, would be a major tourist attraction. All that money coming in feeds people.

Studies have shown, for example, that New York's art museums contribute far more to New York's economy than all its sports teams combined.

Hmmmmm.....

First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives.
-- My girlfriend and I will be together forever.
Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem.
-- She is not interested in other guys, we are simply growing closer.
Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
-- Her dating other guys is simply a cry for more attention.
Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so.
-- I will win her back with chocolates and poetry.

Re:Hmmmmm.....

First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives.
-- My girlfriend and I will be together forever.

If you were trying to make an example that other Slashdotters would understand through their own experience... you failed. :)

Societies don't make decisions.

Individuals do.

Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.

Re:Societies don't make decisions.

Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.

That's more true now than it has been for most of our history. On some level that's always true, but I doubt keeping Saddam in power was truly the will of the Iraqi people.

A lot of factors, not least of which is governmental power being vested in a few or even one person, bend the decisions the "society" would make if it was in some hypothetical "pure" state. (I personally interpret Arrow's Theorum to imply that there is no such thing as one clear "voice of the society" no matter how you slice it. YMMV, but it's not an unreasonable corrolary.)

But even now it's not completely true. The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.

The aggregations of decisions we make as individuals has an impact, but in the final analysis if Jack T. Ass, owner of a large logging interest, decides to clear cut a county in Montana and does it before the law (i.e., "the rest of us") even notices, then the environmental damage has occurred, regardless of how the rest of the individuals feel about it.

Re:Societies don't make decisions.

Groups have emergent properties that you can't predict by looking at individuals.

A mob doesn't act like an individual multiplied by a thousand. Any single person who acted like one one-thousandth of a mob would be institutionalized.

One generality about large organizations is that they're inflexible. They're like computer programs -- they may perform well or poorly at the problem they're designed for, but give them unexpected input or a novel situation and they crash.

William Livingston wrote an interesting book about this in 1988, called "Have Fun At Work". He points out that when you toss a complex problem at a system that doesn't know how to deal with it, some predictable malfunctions happen. One is that the real problem becomes taboo for discussion. Another is that all proposed actions make the problem worse. Want examples? Consider the "War on Drugs", or your workplace.

The cure he proposes is to implement tightly coupled feedback cycles. For example, one software company bills its business units for the tech support calls that come in about the software they produce.

I'd also suggest keeping organizations small enough that it's tolerable for them to die. One of the advantages of real capitalism would be that when (not if) a company fails to adapt to change, it ceases to exist. An extreme version of this point of view was Jefferson's idea that there should be a revolution every twenty years.

All it took in high school....

was telling one girl that another had sex with her football star boyfriend...

It's simple

People are basically selfish assholes. As time goes on, they think more and more about themselves and less about how their actions impact others. As society gets more complex and has more technology, this is amplified - now instead of being an asshole in my own little area, I can be a much bigger asshole and affect more people. ("Gee...I don't see a problem with speakers that'll rattle a whole city block.")

Raises stress, causes more tension and then boom.

At least that's my take...think I may be a bit too cynical :)

It depends on your viewpoint

The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead.

But for the 10% of slacker, cannibalistic, sun worshipping Easter Islanders this was a golden age.

Fisheries.

Fisheries are being depleted around the planet. In each case that the problem is identified ahead of time, the local fishing industry mobilizes to prevent restrictions on their own fishing. They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.

Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.

I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.

Collapses

Jared Diamond was the speaker at my graduation & I've heard a few of his talks at UCLA. He pointed out that the factor that caused the collapse of both the Easter Island civilization and (probably) the Mayan civilization is now thought to be the same: Logging. Both civilizations overlogged the surrounding forest ecosystems which sustained them, resulting ultimately in a collapse of agriculture. Diamond wondered what might have been going through the mind of the Easter Islander who felled the last tree on the island. He guessed that it might just have been thoughts that would resonate today: "Hey, keeping my job is more important than preserving the environment".

Re:Collapses

It's a good thing that modern loggin companies plant new trees when after they cut them down. Too bad a lot of enviro-wackos forget that part.

They plant commercially viable species, and harvest them at the optimum ROI age (15-30 years). A healthy forest has a variety of species at various stages of maturity. A commercial plantation is no more a forest than a swimming pool is a wetland.

Re:Collapses

Ever seen the "tree farms" that result when "modern loggin(g) companies" clear cut and replant ? They don't look anything like a natural forest. The clear cut not only kills the large profitable trees, it also kills many smaller flora that are part of the forest ecosystem. Replant small trees and they quickly take over, resulting a new forest with very little diversity but very fast tree growth.

Forest companies at first thought this looked great - the faster tree growth, the sooner we can come back to that piece of land. Unfortunately, and this is supported by studies done by the BC dept. of forestry (which they tried to cover up), the rapid growth of the replanted trees results in much lower density wood than that found in "old-growth" (ie natural) forests. As a result the wood is worth very little to the foresters who planted it and they don't want to log it. Forestry companies continue to push for more "old-growth" forests to be opened up to logging because that's where the best quality wood is, all the replanting that's been done has yet to produce a lumber supply that adequately replaces what has been lost. We may not be as bad as Easter Island, but we're nowhere near sustainability.

Individual's property rights

It's my opinion that the absence of individual property rights is the exact reason all of these disasters occur.

The essay presents one example of the civilization that wiped out all of the trees it depended on. If that civilization allowed for the ownership of pieces of land, the individuals with a little more foresight could conserve the trees on their plots of land. On the other hand, if every tree belongs to the person who cut it down, then even if the majority of the society is conscious of the problem, the nearsighted minority is still able to cut down the last tree.

The problem with any kind of "public" resource is that it doesn't belong to everyone -- it belongs to noone. Noone cares enough about it to protect or conserve it. Everyone just wants to grab as big a piece as possible.

Re:Individual's property rights

The problem with any kind of "public" resource is that it doesn't belong to everyone -- it belongs to noone. Noone cares enough about it to protect or conserve it. Everyone just wants to grab as big a piece as possible.

What an... interesting view of things.

So, I presume that you'd like to argue that Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, etc. should be privatized - because obviously them being National Parks (which are de facto public property managed by the National Park Service) means that nobody cares about them.

Frankly, when it comes to individuals they generally act in the most self improving way possible. If I owned a few hundred acres of trees I may be tempted to sell the rights to log them to someone for a few million. After all, they're my trees, and I can do what I want with them.

On the otherhand, there's some very large swaths of land near my house that won't ever be logged... they're part of the Chatahoochee National Park system. While other greenspace all around is being cut down to put in new subdivisions, this land (which was either purchased by the Federal government, or by local interest groups and then donated to the government) isn't going to sprout McMansions anytime soon.

I'm not a fan of big government, but claiming that individual rights would solve everything is a load of crap. I can choose to pollute my bit of land afterall, and then say that I was within my rights to do so since it was my land. Funny thing though, eco systems don't respect legal borders.

2 Key Elements

An intriguing essay and one that most of us ought to ponder as we sit in the here and now, as groups, making decisions, watching things happen, recogizing or ignoring problems.

One thing is that many members of a group don't like to confront problems or issues. Frankly, it's too damn uncomfortable for many people to come face problems whose evident solution may well demand of them that they endure change or discomfort. We're creatures of habit and we don't like change (shoot, some people won't make a change for the better even if you lead them to water), even if events suggest that change might be in our better long-term interest.

Second, groups are composed of individuals with greater and lesser abilities to influence group decision making. For example, decisions by one typical homeless person are less likely to impact the group's overall decisions than are decisions by a large stockholder of Exxon-Mobil, just to take an illustrative example. It turns out that decision makers at EXOM may well perceive threats and benefits differently than the average homeless person, and even differently than an average cross-section of individuals in the group we call society.

From an environmental perspective, beneficiaries of extractive industries don't necessarily feel a balanced level of pain for their actions: some of the consequences won't be felt for a lifetime. (Same deferred consequence problems applies to political decisions in general).

Easter Island's environmental demise probably wasn't accelerated due a few powerful individuals benefitting out of proportion to the changes made to their environment.

But it's certain in our modern industrialized society that some points of view are going to be affected because some individuals will perceive current benefits to outweigh possible long-term adverse consequences. Those individuals have more influence than an average person. They may even be right sometimes in their views. But it's important to know the frame of mind where those views are born.

I don't know

I believe the opposite. If societies acted as a group, probably very few stupid decisions would be made. But societies don't act as groups. The members of societies act as individuals.

It comes down to greed and human nature. Most people are extremely selfish and hypocritical, and this is be basis of most "stupid" decisions.

We, as a species, are polluting our planet. Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one. A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.

As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.

Re:I don't know

Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one.
Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford.

A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
Western countries are barely cranking out children at a break-even rate. Only countries where cheap labor is beneficial have a high birth rate.

As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Many groups can easily see the problems of other groups, and want to do something about it. When they do, it's called "war". :-)