r/K Selection Theory

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djolds1
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by djolds1 »

MSimon wrote:
Without that defense, there is only anarchy.
People self organize in the wake of great storms (at least they do on the East Coast).
Self-organization of neighbors in response to immediate crisis is not the same thing as a complex market mechanism. And immediate crisis always brings out the looters and other jackals as well.
MSimon wrote:I don't see electricity going away. Maybe islanded for a while. But totally going away? Not very likely.
That is the promise of stuxnet. Think it through. Software designed to destroy hardware, not software designed to scramble databases. Heavy capital hardware destroyed can take years to replace. And if the heavy capital hardware destroyed requires heavy capital hardware of similar type to construct, yet much of the heavy capital hardware of similar type has also been destroyed, the problem of replacing the losses snowballs exponentially. Rebuilding will take many years, and the death and chaos during that interregnum will be vast.

Over-rev the power turbines at Hoover Dam and 85%+ of all other power plants to destruction, just as was done to the Iranian centrifuges at Natanz via stuxnet. 10,000 tonne capital power turbines are not replaced overnight. They are not replaced next year either, and that is in present circumstances when all infrastructure is intact. But in a situation where a large plurality of other power sources have been damaged to destruction, so that power available to industrial purposes is limited, and surviving industrial and power generating plant may even need to be physically moved to make optimal use of surviving capacity before that surviving capacity can even be utilized in the first place?

This is the promise of stuxnet. Think it through.

Worse, the largest industrial step-down transformers are now single-sourced from one firm in Germany, on back order for years in advance. Isn't economic efficiency a wonderful thing? Who needs multiple & distributed production sources when the darn things last forever? Stuxnet or semtex that plant and its tooling, and...

The fire can die. The fire can die very easily. Electricity generation and distribution is the point source failure of the modern world in waiting.
MSimon wrote:I think you can make good people in good times. But as evidenced here - even people aware of the question do not address it.
The K-selected still exist in times favoring the r-selected, yes. But in times favoring r-selected populations, the r-selected dominate.
Diogenes wrote:And it is my opinion that when we lose the light, shallow pampered people will revert to barbarism and destruction in their rage stroke of despair. I think the analogy I made with "Nightfall" is pretty good.

If they collapse the economy, many people who are now only fed by government will likely die. Of those who don't, it will most likely be the most vicious who will survive. There will also likely be an attempt by government to confiscate the stores of hoarders and collectivize the farms in the manner of the Soviets, but I do not think a populace we have built on plenty will likely be feed-able by coerced and bureaucrat ran farming collectives.
We will see a return to serfdom, much as in the aftermath of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Some will die to marauders, many will pledge themselves to the banners of the strong and semi-reliable, or be forced to submit themselves to such banners. There is nothing new in the pattern. The Big Man becomes Baron.
Vae Victis

Diogenes
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by Diogenes »

MSimon wrote:
I think you can make good people in good times. But as evidenced here - even people aware of the question do not address it.


I think you can too, but can you do it at a level sufficient for sustainability? A system can sustain losses, but how much loss can the system sustain?


As with the argument I made about religion, if you have ten percent of the populace that needs to believe in a religion in order to behave civilly, then the consequences of eliminating it will be far greater than what it would first appear.


I think many good people can be made during good times, but I don't think it can be done so at a level necessary to sustain a society at an optimal point. I think the bad people created in such an environment will eventually increase to sufficient numbers so as to overwhelm the good.


You know, like what we are seeing now.


Even if you could produce a stable system that made sufficient quantities of good people in good times, such a system would seem "stagnant" and unchanging. There are those components of our population that cannot abide a system which does not "change." They will find a non-changing system intolerable and will work to force it to change, and if they are successful, they will push it off optimal, and we will simply start the decline again.


You know, like what we are seeing now.


"Liberals" cannot abide stability. They have a psychologically driven need to "change" things. As a result, no system can be optimized because they will not leave it alone if it should ever reach that point. They will try to "change" it.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

djolds1
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Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by djolds1 »

Diogenes wrote:I think many good people can be made during good times, but I don't think it can be done so at a level necessary to sustain a society at an optimal point. I think the bad people created in such an environment will eventually increase to sufficient numbers so as to overwhelm the good.

You know, like what we are seeing now.

Even if you could produce a stable system that made sufficient quantities of good people in good times, such a system would seem "stagnant" and unchanging. There are those components of our population that cannot abide a system which does not "change." They will find a non-changing system intolerable and will work to force it to change, and if they are successful, they will push it off optimal, and we will simply start the decline again.

You know, like what we are seeing now.
The population cycle is inexorable.

Society begins. Life in society is nasty, brutish and short. A K-selected imperial ethnos predominates. The K-selected build societal institutions, they push back external challengers, they build wealth. Eventually wealth is widespread. Those of the K-selected who wish to live the Aristotelian "good life" finally have the leisure to do so. This drive to live "the good life" is always and everywhere an urban phenomenon, within the great world-cities, and has been so for all the millennia of human civilization. The elite of the Left's clerisy of today are of this type - they remain K-selected, they have few children and invest lavishly in the education of those children, they act ruthlessly to ensure their continued predominance and the predominance of their children. But with wealth comes the opportunity for "liberality" in Machiavelli's meaning of the term. Generous benefits are granted, resources are widely and cheaply available. Is this not what the K-selected struggled for centuries to make possible? The r-selected among the imperial ethnos now have an opportunity to expand. The sparkling heights of imperial society at its maximum of wealth and glory encourages immigration, which only enriches imperial society at first. Population expands to the bounds of the empire and its resources. The dynamism of the immigrants keeps society a going concern, for a time. Then the mouse utopia dynamics set in. Society begins to degrade. First the members of the imperial ethnos cannot be troubled to reproduce themselves, amidst their wallowing in the hedonism their wealth makes possible, then the immigrant ethnoi join in the not-bothering. Nor can the members of society be troubled to continue to produce the wealth that makes their hedonism possible. "The beautiful ones" emerge. Society's stock of hard-built wealth slowly wastes away. Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.

This guy captures the population cycle well, tho he has unnecessary IQ obsessions:
http://www.v-weiss.de/cycle.html

General dynamics:
http://www.isegoria.net/2010/04/bureauc ... odynamics/
http://www.isegoria.net/2014/07/summary ... f-empires/
Vae Victis

MSimon
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by MSimon »

As with the argument I made about religion, if you have ten percent of the populace that needs to believe in a religion in order to behave civilly, then the consequences of eliminating it will be far greater than what it would first appear.
Well I would start in the current case. We have turned the police into looters. Asset forfeiture is a line item in some police budgets and the "moral" guardians of civilization don't seem to notice. Well the vast majority any way. And the wider population hasn't a clue and even of those who have a clue little is said.

And who champions this crap? The proportion of the population claiming morality and religion. You worry about the loss of religion? It is of no use. Worse. It has become an excuse for evil. I will say no more because I feel a rant coming on. So I will spare you.

I think a different way of addressing morality is required. Or maybe a new religion. A different God or Gods. Or no God.

Or take the reviled thug culture. Its cause is so glaringly obvious. We actually saw its rise once before. And yet connecting the dots is impossible. Generally.

None the less I think a reset is coming and it will come without collapse. And for a generation or three we will remember. Until we again forget.

So how would I address all this and make us as moral as we can be under prosperity? Limited government. Very limited. Extremely limited. This was seen some time ago.

Alice More: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

We have cut down man's laws in the name of God. In the name of morality we have given up our protections from government.

So no. I don't think religion can help. At least our current ones. Because they all have a spark of evil at their core. And that evil is the desire to stamp out ALL evil no matter the cost. The longing for utopia.

Let us not forget that Stalin trained for the priesthood. And ISIS does its mass murders in the name of morality and the utopia to come if only we all practice the correct religion. Same as it ever was.

Now watch as the ball revolves
And the nighttime falls.
Again the hunt begins,
Again the bloodwind calls.
By and by, the morning sun will rise,
But the darkness never goes
From some men's eyes.
It strolls the sidewalks and it rolls the streets,
Staking turf, dividing up meat.
Nightmare spook, piece of heat,
It's you and me.
You and me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9tlJdHA5Os
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Diogenes
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by Diogenes »

djolds1 wrote: "The beautiful ones" emerge. Society's stock of hard-built wealth slowly wastes away. Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.


I have to say that you seem to possess the clearest understanding of the concepts i've been contemplating for a long while. While many of us have been nibbling around the edges of these ideas, you seem to have already made a meal of them.


Yes, part of what we are seeing now are the "glitterati" wrecking societal underpinnings. They are pretty, but they are mostly shallow of mind and devoid of deep thought. Thus do pretty fools steer us off cliffs.


Image
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

MSimon
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by MSimon »

Yes, part of what we are seeing now are the "glitterati" wrecking societal underpinnings. They are pretty, but they are mostly shallow of mind and devoid of deep thought. Thus do pretty fools steer us off cliffs.
It is the hubris of Power and Control. An affliction not limited to the glitterati. In fact it is general. And that is the cause of the decline more than any one act or idea of a particular group.

The glitterati could have little effect if they were unable to pass laws and have enforcers to enforce them. It is in fact the passing of laws that is our problem. The moral crusades.

Well I'm on a crusade myself. It is to unpass laws. Or in English - rescind them.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Diogenes
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Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by Diogenes »

And this seems relevant to the point of this thread.



Mega Rich Overwhelmingly Donated to Democrats in 2014


Image

Democrats also enjoyed a 3-to-1 cash advantage when it came to the 183 groups stroking checks of $100,000 or more. The liberal National Education Association (NEA) topped the list of big money donors at $22 million. The top ten list contained zero Republican-leaning groups.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... s-in-2014/
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

djolds1
Posts: 1296
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:03 am

Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by djolds1 »

Diogenes wrote:
djolds1 wrote: "The beautiful ones" emerge. Society's stock of hard-built wealth slowly wastes away. Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.
I have to say that you seem to possess the clearest understanding of the concepts i've been contemplating for a long while. While many of us have been nibbling around the edges of these ideas, you seem to have already made a meal of them.
Metahistory (cyclical history theories - Spengler, Toynbee, Polybius' Kyklos, Turchin's Cliodynamics) has been a fascination of mine for going on 15 years. Entropy is the nature of the universe, and so everything runs down to ruin (or more accurately, bloats to collapse) eventually. I was also lucky enough to discover and be able to interact with an inspired mind on the topic - the now-late John J. Reilly.

Everything in the universe tries to reproduce, survive and expand. At first, just as with Tainter's complexification, these imperatives drive success and glory. Early organization allows for economies of scale, the marshaling of mass resources, mass movement of individuals to unified ends, etc. But eventually the logistic s-curve of development turns over from exponential growth to diminishing returns. And then the engines of glory become the engines of inevitable self-destruction. Ten additional units of organization no longer yield 100 additional units of output; now they yield 0.1 additional units of output. The 80-20 dynamics of the Pareto Principle suck; that first 80% of efficacy is so cheap and sweet, but trying for that last 20% is more and more a suicidal endeavor with every additional step down the path. And the damned logistic curve shows up everywhere - from the Cambrian explosion of phyla and species to the development of aeronautic power systems. It is a law of nature.

But having achieved the 80% with method X, we are loathe to abandon method X.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"This works. We KNOW it works. Go do it better!"

Also Santayana's definition of fanaticism - to redouble one's efforts while losing sight of one's goal. But oh so hard to recognize. Who wants to transition to stasis, when our children deserve BETTER and we KNOW that renewed growth is just around the corner, if only we push a little harder?
Diogenes wrote:Yes, part of what we are seeing now are the "glitterati" wrecking societal underpinnings. They are pretty, but they are mostly shallow of mind and devoid of deep thought. Thus do pretty fools steer us off cliffs.
They're human, we're human, and they're the ones who have managed to succeed brilliantly within the modern r-adapted social structure. Why should they not think they have succeeded because of their own intrinsic genius, and that that genius will keep the state of affairs they prefer operating ad infinitum? After all, this time is different. Think back 17 years. There will be no dot-com bust. The digital economy is brand new and immune to those old, outdated forces. Because this time is different.

Not.

Humans predictably tell ourselves the same lies, over and over again. We know we must learn from history to avoid repeating it, but we never do learn. Nietzsche called this the eternal return. We do get warning of the toxicity of the lies we tell ourselves, but not from the uber-rationalist secular creeds that are born among the intelligentsias of the r-selected ages; Mediterranean Stoicism and Chinese Legalism back when, atheist humanism, economic determinism (communist and libertarian branches) and therapeutic culture today. The warnings are encoded in the teachings and rites of the great faiths.
Vae Victis

williatw
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by williatw »

djolds1 wrote:
williatw wrote:
MSimon wrote:We have no examples of a high tech society collapsing. We have a LOT of examples of societies run by paper going down.

I am not saying it can't happen but some times qualitative differences change circumstances. We shall see.

I can see a banking collapse. The steel mills, computers, and roadways will not disappear.
I find your words comforting....but I wonder how many people in 1929 thought they lived in a "high tech society"? After all the western world of 1929 was the most industrialized technological & wealthiest society in history at the time, just like us. As for the present day barring nuclear war or something how about some kind of killer computer virus that causes computer systems to crash all over the world? Could we even pump gas at our local gas station if the computers stopped working? Or buy groceries if the system wouldn't accept or record a buy/sell? Or the suppliers of said grocery stores ability to properly order, bill, inventory and ship more food if the computer systems crashed for an extended period of time?
The vulnerability is not the computers, nor the eminently digitally editable numbers we call bank accounts. The vulnerability is the electricity. Dies the fire, and everything dies. Freezers shut down and meat goes bad, pumps do not function to pump fuel into car gas tanks, batteries in the ipads do not recharge after the current charge runs down, pharmaceutical synthesis plants do not function and the only stocks of meds remaining are what is on the shelves. Mount a stuxnet attack on the power plants, burn out the turbines and the high end step-down transformers, and we are back in the iron age for decades.
You maybe right but I would assume/hope that the authorities know about the vulnerability of specifically our power plants &/or electric power grid and have hopefully taken some steps to at least "harden" the former (power plants) against attacks cyber or direct. Much harder to protect the entire internet...would think that would be a softer target, a series of "killer" viruses infecting computers and servers all over the country & beyond. The resulting disruption that might last only days or weeks while much less severe than what you are talking about would probably be tougher to defend against & easier to accomplish; the lower hanging fruit so to speak.

williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by williatw »

djolds1 wrote: The population cycle is inexorable.

Society begins. Life in society is nasty, brutish and short. A K-selected imperial ethnos predominates. The K-selected build societal institutions, they push back external challengers, they build wealth. Eventually wealth is widespread. Those of the K-selected who wish to live the Aristotelian "good life" finally have the leisure to do so. This drive to live "the good life" is always and everywhere an urban phenomenon, within the great world-cities, and has been so for all the millennia of human civilization. The elite of the Left's clerisy of today are of this type - they remain K-selected, they have few children and invest lavishly in the education of those children, they act ruthlessly to ensure their continued predominance and the predominance of their children. But with wealth comes the opportunity for "liberality" in Machiavelli's meaning of the term. Generous benefits are granted, resources are widely and cheaply available. Is this not what the K-selected struggled for centuries to make possible? The r-selected among the imperial ethnos now have an opportunity to expand. The sparkling heights of imperial society at its maximum of wealth and glory encourages immigration, which only enriches imperial society at first. Population expands to the bounds of the empire and its resources. The dynamism of the immigrants keeps society a going concern, for a time. Then the mouse utopia dynamics set in. Society begins to degrade. First the members of the imperial ethnos cannot be troubled to reproduce themselves, amidst their wallowing in the hedonism their wealth makes possible, then the immigrant ethnoi join in the not-bothering. Nor can the members of society be troubled to continue to produce the wealth that makes their hedonism possible. "The beautiful ones" emerge. Society's stock of hard-built wealth slowly wastes away. Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.
Two things might head that off or at least blunt it:

However, Tainter is not entirely apocalyptic: "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124). Thus, barring continual conquest of your neighbors (which is always subject to diminishing returns), innovation that increases productivity is – in the long run – the only way out of the dismal science dilemma of declining marginal returns on added investments in complexity.

And, in his final chapters, Tainter discusses why modern societies may not be able to choose to collapse: because surrounding them are other complex societies which will in some way absorb a collapsed region or prevent a general collapse; the Mayan and Chaocan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire - but the Eastern Roman Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian/Sassanid Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler smaller entities.
His paper Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996) focuses on the energy cost of problem solving, and the energy-complexity relation in manmade systems.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

Admittedly this is from Wikipedia not the original source you are probably basing on. I can think of a few themes along the lines of delay: 1) 3-D Printer manufacturing making the cost of finished goods eventually much cheaper and spreading the means of production further and wider. 2) The fracking boom that might last long enough for one of our fusion startups (or possibly even photovoltaics eventually) including possibly polywell to come into its own. 3) The explosion of computing power; seems to me there is at least one wild card that might be able to handle for a very long time the increase in complexity of society; AI (either "true" AI or just some kind of exponential extension of what we already have). 4) The general decline in birth rates even among the poor and just possibly increases in longevity caused by SENS or related; this would extend the life/productivity of those slow breeding affluent high IQ types.

And of course technological/industrial society itself is very widespread; if we in the West did collapse sure China (or India) would happily swoop in and claim the easy pickings from cheap land (like their doing in Detroit right now) to patents (gaining controlling interest to greatly undervalued--post collapse companies likes say Lockheed or GE & therefore their patents) to factory equipment to Aerospace/military hardware to ex-pat American scientists/engineers willing to relocate to India/China, because unlike the western Roman empire we do have "complex society" neighbors who only be too willing to absorb/replace us.

djolds1
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by djolds1 »

williatw wrote:
djolds1 wrote:The vulnerability is not the computers, nor the eminently digitally editable numbers we call bank accounts. The vulnerability is the electricity. Dies the fire, and everything dies. Freezers shut down and meat goes bad, pumps do not function to pump fuel into car gas tanks, batteries in the ipads do not recharge after the current charge runs down, pharmaceutical synthesis plants do not function and the only stocks of meds remaining are what is on the shelves. Mount a stuxnet attack on the power plants, burn out the turbines and the high end step-down transformers, and we are back in the iron age for decades.
You maybe right but I would assume/hope that the authorities know about the vulnerability of specifically our power plants &/or electric power grid and have hopefully taken some steps to at least "harden" the former (power plants) against attacks cyber or direct. Much harder to protect the entire internet...would think that would be a softer target, a series of "killer" viruses infecting computers and servers all over the country & beyond. The resulting disruption that might last only days or weeks while much less severe than what you are talking about would probably be tougher to defend against & easier to accomplish; the lower hanging fruit so to speak.
American authorities knew all about WTC and airline security vulnerabilities before 911; Tom Clancy wrote a freaking book on the subject, albeit with a more popular target building and target population. But nothing was done.

Western electrical infrastructure is vast and old. There are few to no ways to retrofit security onto so many legacy systems of such vintage, and forcing "unjustified" major expenses and "digital efficiency limitations" on the utilities will only create massive resistance. Even when such retrofits have been offered, accepting them puts the retrofitted facility on the national critical infrastructure list, and so makes the retrofitted plant liable to random Federal audits and inspections. Offered pro-security retrofits have been REFUSED by some utilities for just this reason.

Nothing will be done until an attack. If we are lucky the attack will be relatively minor. But if it is too minor, we will ignore the implications, just as we did after the first attack on the towers in '93.
williatw wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Eventually and inevitably, the society falls into a Tainterian collapse. Population collapses as per the behavioral sink of mouse utopia, wealth is spent to nothing. The society collapses into smaller, mutually squabbling factions and neoethnoi. Life in society is once again nasty, brutish and short. Welcome back, K-selected. Rinse, repeat, do it all over again.
Two things might head that off or at least blunt it:
Plus side, human collapses are not as genocidal as the ends for mouse utopias, so we are different. We see either feudal dark ages, or feudal interregnums in the aftermath of collapses. Feudal interregnums are illustrated most clearly by China, India and Ancient Egypt. The Empire collapses into feudalism; the problems of excess debt and administrative structure are wiped clean. Eventually a feudal baron claws his way to the imperial throne. The empire reboots, but from a new low-cost level. Imperial culture is relatively unchanged from before the collapse, so these societies are essentially static. The other option is a feudal dark age. These act as cultural pressure cookers to create new ethnic groups and a new civilizational spirit. Unlike the static renewed empires, these new civilizations and their protonations of neoethnoi have fresh possibilities once they emerge from their formative periods. I suspect the difference is the integration of disparate immigrant and old line ethnic groups into neoethnoi in the dark ages, vs continuity of the old imperial ethnoi in the feudal interregni.

However, Tainter is not entirely apocalyptic: "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124). Thus, barring continual conquest of your neighbors (which is always subject to diminishing returns), innovation that increases productivity is – in the long run – the only way out of the dismal science dilemma of declining marginal returns on added investments in complexity.

And, in his final chapters, Tainter discusses why modern societies may not be able to choose to collapse: because surrounding them are other complex societies which will in some way absorb a collapsed region or prevent a general collapse; the Mayan and Chaocan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire - but the Eastern Roman Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian/Sassanid Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler smaller entities.
His paper Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996) focuses on the energy cost of problem solving, and the energy-complexity relation in manmade systems.
More productivity and more resources only heighten the pressures of the mouse utopia. The entire r-selection syndrome is predicated on the easy availability of vast resources. As to other (relatively) advanced societies absorbing and incorporating the collapsing and collapsed, this is nothing new. The barbarian incursions into the Western Roman Empire did precisely that, the barbarians being the absorbers of the collapsed Romans. And the Byzantines did not stave off their collapse forever. It was long, painful, and eventually final.
williatw wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

Admittedly this is from Wikipedia not the original source you are probably basing on. I can think of a few themes along the lines of delay: 1) 3-D Printer manufacturing making the cost of finished goods eventually much cheaper and spreading the means of production further and wider. 2) The fracking boom that might last long enough for one of our fusion startups (or possibly even photovoltaics eventually) including possibly polywell to come into its own. 3) The explosion of computing power; seems to me there is at least one wild card that might be able to handle for a very long time the increase in complexity of society; AI (either "true" AI or just some kind of exponential extension of what we already have). 4) The general decline in birth rates even among the poor and just possibly increases in longevity caused by SENS or related; this would extend the life/productivity of those slow breeding affluent high IQ types.
Again, all this expands resources and only heightens the pressures creating mouse utopia social situations. r-selection is not an artifact of privation, it is a consequence of too much prosperity. More toys and ambrosia for the lotus eaters do not alleviate the situation, they worsen it. And the evidence is fairly good that r-selection does NOT heighten the general IQ. :|
williatw wrote:And of course technological/industrial society itself is very widespread; if we in the West did collapse sure China (or India) would happily swoop in and claim the easy pickings from cheap land (like their doing in Detroit right now) to patents (gaining controlling interest to greatly undervalued--post collapse companies likes say Lockheed or GE & therefore their patents) to factory equipment to Aerospace/military hardware to ex-pat American scientists/engineers willing to relocate to India/China, because unlike the western Roman empire we do have "complex society" neighbors who only be too willing to absorb/replace us.
I anticipate a collapse of the political order and a simplification of administrative procedures via autocratic diktat first. The rule of a Caesar is always only "for the duration of the emergency," an emergency that never ends. But so long as the emergency continues, all red tape may be cut at the Caesar's whim to "address the problems confronting us."

As to economic functions, industrial, financial and service cartels with state sponsorship are not especially creative, but they can endure at sufficient if not impressive levels of economic efficiency for a good long time. The Byzantine Empire ran its economy on state-client craftguilds of similar type. IOW, I expect the West's next collapse to be one of Republic into Empire, not a general economic collapse into medieval chaos. The economy will be finessed back to moderately efficient function. Expenses will be defrayed by looting vulnerable border areas and demanding taxes (tribute) from the client states. Between 'Tribune of the World' and 'Tribute of the World' lies but a single letter.

As to general technology levels... technics once gained are rarely totally lost. There may be some retrogression in SOTA, but the iron age was not repealed in Western Europe during the medieval period, even if no one was building ships of the extravagance and technical refinement seen in the Nemi ships for a millennium. If modern industrial civilization were to collapse, I doubt the SOTA goes much farther down than 1920s era crystal radios and light prop aircraft. Civilization can rebuild from such a floor, given some time. If we think Afghans are trouble now, just think of the headaches the Chinese would have with screaming Baptists hiding out in the highlands of Appalachia and Mormons in the Rockies. Not worth the aggravation for a regime that thinks of itself as the Axis Mundi; Middle Kingdom is no boast.

And China is in the same r-selection trap the West is. With Dengism, they chose to pursue prosperity. r-selection syndromes are the cost of economic success.
Vae Victis

MSimon
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by MSimon »

Entropy is the nature of the universe, and so everything runs down.
Restricting the number of allowed states is the very definition of entropy and government. That is why I would do as much as possible to limit government. Not a very popular idea these days.

The cry is maximum restrictions (mine, not yours) are the best way to organize. We thus have two Progressive parties. Because progressives believe in the value of multiplied restriction.

A careless rigidity will be our downfall. Chesterton alluded to it.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. — G.K. Chesterton

What passes for eternal truth these days? Eighty year old Progressive initiatives.

We used to know that minimum restriction was the way to organize that was the most resilient.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson

We have lost our way in the name of Power and Control. We can FORCE people into the correct state. For a while. And then you can't.

http://classicalvalues.com/2014/12/they ... ed-orders/

The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised … Lao Tzu
The rule of a Caesar is always only "for the duration of the emergency," an emergency that never ends. But so long as the emergency continues, all red tape may be cut at the Caesar's whim to "address the problems confronting us."
Well that is the problem isn't it? Red tape. Restriction. The only people I know in favor of cutting it are the libertarians and they are universally despised by the left and the right.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

djolds1
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by djolds1 »

MSimon wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Entropy is the nature of the universe, and so everything runs down.
Restricting the number of allowed states is the very definition of entropy and government. That is why I would do as much as possible to limit government. Not a very popular idea these days.

The cry is maximum restrictions (mine, not yours) are the best way to organize. We thus have two Progressive parties. Because progressives believe in the value of multiplied restriction.

A careless rigidity will be our downfall. Chesterton alluded to it.
Careless rigidity is the downfall of all societies. That is the root of a Tainterian collapse. And it always comes to collapse, because no matter how much humans may see the need to prune back the rigidity, we never do. Entrenched interests will fight for the privileges the rigidities provide. Simple social inertia works against it. Everything works against it.
Vae Victis

MSimon
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by MSimon »

djolds1 wrote:
MSimon wrote:
djolds1 wrote:Entropy is the nature of the universe, and so everything runs down.
Restricting the number of allowed states is the very definition of entropy and government. That is why I would do as much as possible to limit government. Not a very popular idea these days.

The cry is maximum restrictions (mine, not yours) are the best way to organize. We thus have two Progressive parties. Because progressives believe in the value of multiplied restriction.

A careless rigidity will be our downfall. Chesterton alluded to it.
Careless rigidity is the downfall of all societies. That is the root of a Tainterian collapse. And it always comes to collapse, because no matter how much humans may see the need to prune back the rigidity, we never do. Entrenched interests will fight for the privileges the rigidities provide. Simple social inertia works against it. Everything works against it.
We may get a new lease on life with the end of Prohibition. About 60 years more. But that gives us 60 years to teach entropy. I should do a blog post. Probably 20 of them.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

MSimon
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Re: r/K Selection Theory

Post by MSimon »

We do have some advantages in the US. The entropics on the right are dying off and the old religions are losing their hold.

A new birth of freedom is a distinct possibility. I have been fanning that flame since 1988.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

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