Chapter
3 Response: Resilience, Self-Organization, and Hierarchy
When
I went running yesterday, I thought about how my body has to be resilient to
the food I eat and the water I drink in order for me to be able to run. Eating
and drinking too soon before running, like I did yesterday, causes my stomach
muscles to cramp up. But the act of eating and drinking isn’t what you would
call a normal “disturbance” to a system because food and water are some of my
most basic needs. I don’t know if a term has been coined for this type of
disturbance, it probably has, but I guess you could call this a “basic needs
disturbance.” Maybe resilience to a basic needs disturbance should be called
“basic needs resilience.” I can think of
lots of examples of basic needs resilience. Can your vehicle overcome the added
weight of its fuel? Can you wake up in the morning after sleeping? Can you wake
up in the morning after a night of fulfilling your need to have social
interaction? For how many years can your knees be resilient to the impact of
the rest of your body on top of them so that they can keep carrying you to get
your basic needs? Basic-needs resilience
seems like an important category of resilience because it deals with
disturbances that are necessary to the system.
It
seems to me that perhaps the greatest tool for self-organizing of all time is
the internet; a network that connects every device that can connect to it.
People from every corner of existence can connect, share ideas, and organize. I
can go on the internet and find a group of people who share my ideas about
anything. I can self-organize with these people, and share two-way
communication with them instantly. It works so well because every device on the
internet doesn’t have to connect to every other device – it just has to connect
to the server that makes the connections. This means that the internet is
organized into sub-systems, where every device connected to the internet is a
sub-system. This makes the system resilient, because even if my computer
crashes while connected to the internet, the rest of the internet is unaffected.
So the internet lets us freely self-organize with resilience.
Hierarchy
affects the internet as well. The server that runs a website is at a higher
level than the laptop or phone that accesses it. Information in a university is
organized into a hierarchy, too: professors, student teachers, and students. The
hierarchies in the internet and in a university are different because in a
university, the hierarchy’s levels have progressively more knowledge; in the
internet, the hierarchy’s levels have more connectivity. It seems like it can
be hard to tell if some systems even have a hierarchy, and not just
separate-but-equal sub-systems. Does the internet really have a hierarchy, or
just separate sub-systems? The servers are nothing without people with devices
who access them. A market can’t function without shoppers and sellers; they
rely on each other. I suppose there are usually sub-systems in a hierarchy. There
are different levels of buyers and sellers, like the luxury market and the
middle-class market. There are infinite levels of sub-systems and hierarchies
everywhere you look.
Chapter
4 Response: System History, Nonlinearities, Limits, and Law of the Minimum
“When a systems thinker encounters a
problem, the first thing he or she does is look for data, time graphs, the
history of the system. That’s because long term behavior provides clues to the
underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding no just
what is happening, but why” –p88. This brings up an important idea that I’ve
often thought about that has to do with why people are reluctant to understand
the importance of global climate change. When I see that most people seem to
not care at all that the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, I
wonder, “what could have happened in their lives to make this seem
insignificant?” And then it dawned on me: my dad told me about what it was like
to live in the cold war. Every day the world could end. You might not make it
to your next birthday, and you would only have a few hours’ notice that the end
was neigh. In contrast, the news that the earth is going to warm up by about
ten degrees isn’t very scary. The social history lends itself to understanding
our collective social consciousness.
If the collective consciousness were
a linear system, the news that we need change to avert disaster would result in
that change. But because the collective consciousness is nonlinear, input does
not equal output. Proven science does not lead to changed opinions. Humans are
not robots; we use feeling and intuition to make our decisions. The fact that
animal populations cycle in a nonlinear fashion is another way to explain human’s
outsized impact on the earth. All species are programmed to make the most of
circumstances that let them multiply. But since humans have overcome the
limiting factors that would usually stop the population from growing, we are
running into the limit of our global system: space. Space for our bodies, space
for our waste, and space for growing food. We are approaching this limit, and
other limits, with nonlinear speed. It’s my goal, and I think the goal of most
environmentalists, to avert the nonlinear decline in our population if we reach
our limits too abruptly.
I like the idea of the Law of the
Minimum, which says that a system needs a certain amount of all of its necessary
inputs, no matter how much excess it has of a certain input. No matter how many
jobs an economy has available, it won’t function without a healthy workforce.
No matter how much oil there is, an oil-based economy can’t function if the
wastes from it are too harmful, or there is inadequate infrastructure to deal
with the waste. No matter how much people try to recycle, recycling won’t
happen if there isn’t a facility to do it.
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