Here is a deep and important theory question: What determines when familiar systems and other structures decay and become less functional, versus when they remain stable or improve in functionality with time? I call this a theory question because we basically know the physics of all the familiar systems around us, so this question is in principle answerable with careful enough theory analysis.
"And yet our entire human civilization has consistently become more capable over time."
One reason why it is not clear whether this trend will continue is that human civilization has also consistently externalised costs to the natural ecological systems on which our live depends. Looks like we reached the point where this strategy of growth by externalization started to endanger the survival of our civilization.
It's only a net negative from the perspective of a "grow at all costs" philosophy. But that's not really the philosophy that we live by. In reality we are hardwired to mitigate risks to ensure our personal survival. Economic growth is a social concept, not necessarily an individual one. We have low tolerance to be the 'loser' in creative destruction and will seek to eliminate that risk even at the expense of economic growth for society.I dunno, I read Robin's Elephant in the Brain and should be honest with myself in that my actions tell me I think economic growth is kinda bad? Tyler Cowen is super against this of course and wrote a whole book essentially urging us to abandon our petty attachment to individual achievement and make sacrifices for our grandkids and their grandkids, etc.A convincing case! But an uphill battle!
A constant level of selfishness can definitely *result* in increasing problems over time, as increasingly baroque code gets increasingly buggy *and* increasingly expensive to maintain or extend, resulting in increasing drag on revenue as the cost picture gets progressively worse.
It's probably useful to look at long-lived institutions to see what they do that short-lived institutions don't.
Religions and nations can be very long-lived. Unlike nations and religions, your average companies probably doesn't outlive its founder. One pretty clear pattern is that the more closely managed the institution, the quicker is the onset of the rot. By contrast, highly dispersed institutions such as religions can persist for several thousands of years in some cases. Nations are somewhere in the middle; they're more closely managed than religions, but more dispersed than companies.
So I guess if you want to solve longevity problems, we might want to map our institutions after the same principles as we do religions.
As a matter of fact, this seems to be one thing Dune gets right. Timescales are incredibly vast, with prophecies stretching thousands of years, and the institutions that carry these long-term plans forward look religious/mystical in nature.
The question is "what rots?". Just as the Ship of Theseus retains its form despite replacement of individual planks, cities continuously retain working mechanisms (streets, garbage collection, markets, transport, property records...) over long periods despite the collapse of surrounding larger polities (revolution, merger/splits, being conquered...)..
The specifics of city mechanisms change over time (trolley tracks appear and vanish, markets change locations within the city...) but at no time does the city become non-functional, even temporarily.
In that sense cities - as a whole - don't rot in the way that larger polities do.
I think it comes down to risk management. The more successful a system is the greater the section of spacetime it comes to dominate and so more risks pass the availability test and the share of all possible threats the system has to explicitly mitigate increases. Risk management destroys growth. See fafchamps or James Scott on peasant societies. As an insurance person I'm biased but I think risk management is very very underrated.
Parasites reproduce within the host. This takes time. New parasites take time to evolve and optimize parasitic strategies. Organizations evolve strategies to counter parasites. Parasites evolve to counteract them. This process can be stable over long periods, but the process is ultimately chaotic. Integrated over time, black swan events for which the organization is not equipped become more likely. Or changes in external conditions weaken the host, and the parasites conquer it.
I don't question that political organization and social norms have changed, but contemporary Romans and Athenians regard themselves as the heirs of the corresponding ancient cities, incorporating into their identities the various changes that have taken place over time.
On the larger scale, though, analogous self identification does not persist. I doubt whether contemporary dwellers in Naples and Sicily still feel a loyalty to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which we can also say "continues to exist", because people still live there. But the identification with the cities remains strong whereas identification with the recently formed entity known as Italy has supplanted the regional association, except among monarchists and other nostalgics.
Loyalty and identification seem to be strongest at the level of cities. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has rotted away, just as the earlier Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily rotted away, but Naples and Sicily, as sources of such loyalty and identification, did not.
I suppose one could argue that that none of the ancient kingdoms and empires really rotted away, because people still live there; just the the political systems have changed. But I think what we really mean by rotting away is that those who live there have switched their loyalty to the replacement entities, albeit under duress in many cases.
The sense in which cities persist is only that the same place continues to attract people to live there. If the people aren't the same, the political org is totally new, the physical buildings have burned down or been replaced then it's only ppl choosing to settle in that spot which persists.
Ok, sometimes cities keep the trappings of a form of government from long past (eg London from before Normans) but that's more just apeing the past for nostalgia than true persistence. What's persisting isn't any real pattern or administrative mechanism but more cultural practices ...which do often persist quite awhile in larger groups as well.
But yes, it's an interesting question ..thx for bringing it up and maybe there are counterexamples and I'm wrong they don't persist in substance.
That's my take too...but the ability to destroy ourselves with nukes or bio weapons makes not creating such structures even more dangerous over the long term. The whole reason competitive systems work well is they allow exploration of a whole bunch of strategies. I don't see how we make it a thousand years, much less 10,000 without at least a minimal global government to effectively suppress use of WMDs.
"And yet our entire human civilization has consistently become more capable over time."
One reason why it is not clear whether this trend will continue is that human civilization has also consistently externalised costs to the natural ecological systems on which our live depends. Looks like we reached the point where this strategy of growth by externalization started to endanger the survival of our civilization.
Right.. the topic is underrated
It's only a net negative from the perspective of a "grow at all costs" philosophy. But that's not really the philosophy that we live by. In reality we are hardwired to mitigate risks to ensure our personal survival. Economic growth is a social concept, not necessarily an individual one. We have low tolerance to be the 'loser' in creative destruction and will seek to eliminate that risk even at the expense of economic growth for society.I dunno, I read Robin's Elephant in the Brain and should be honest with myself in that my actions tell me I think economic growth is kinda bad? Tyler Cowen is super against this of course and wrote a whole book essentially urging us to abandon our petty attachment to individual achievement and make sacrifices for our grandkids and their grandkids, etc.A convincing case! But an uphill battle!
There is no general answer; "systems," and their social contexts, are too variegated.
A constant level of selfishness can definitely *result* in increasing problems over time, as increasingly baroque code gets increasingly buggy *and* increasingly expensive to maintain or extend, resulting in increasing drag on revenue as the cost picture gets progressively worse.
It's probably useful to look at long-lived institutions to see what they do that short-lived institutions don't.
Religions and nations can be very long-lived. Unlike nations and religions, your average companies probably doesn't outlive its founder. One pretty clear pattern is that the more closely managed the institution, the quicker is the onset of the rot. By contrast, highly dispersed institutions such as religions can persist for several thousands of years in some cases. Nations are somewhere in the middle; they're more closely managed than religions, but more dispersed than companies.
So I guess if you want to solve longevity problems, we might want to map our institutions after the same principles as we do religions.
As a matter of fact, this seems to be one thing Dune gets right. Timescales are incredibly vast, with prophecies stretching thousands of years, and the institutions that carry these long-term plans forward look religious/mystical in nature.
Software rot can be understood as prioritization of local over global quality (local in time).
Software developers who start fresh think about global function and design for that.
Software maintainers prioritize short-term bug fixing and feature addition over global function and global maintainability; thus rot.
There's a mapping here - local vs global utility to selfish vs altruistic.
The question is "what rots?". Just as the Ship of Theseus retains its form despite replacement of individual planks, cities continuously retain working mechanisms (streets, garbage collection, markets, transport, property records...) over long periods despite the collapse of surrounding larger polities (revolution, merger/splits, being conquered...)..
The specifics of city mechanisms change over time (trolley tracks appear and vanish, markets change locations within the city...) but at no time does the city become non-functional, even temporarily.
In that sense cities - as a whole - don't rot in the way that larger polities do.
I think he means that the power of risk management to destroy growth is underrated—not the goodness of the power but the quantity of the power.
I think it comes down to risk management. The more successful a system is the greater the section of spacetime it comes to dominate and so more risks pass the availability test and the share of all possible threats the system has to explicitly mitigate increases. Risk management destroys growth. See fafchamps or James Scott on peasant societies. As an insurance person I'm biased but I think risk management is very very underrated.
Yes: parasites drive senescence in several ways - as I explain in my "Parasite-driven senescence" essay: http://alife.co.uk/essays/p...
Parasites reproduce within the host. This takes time. New parasites take time to evolve and optimize parasitic strategies. Organizations evolve strategies to counter parasites. Parasites evolve to counteract them. This process can be stable over long periods, but the process is ultimately chaotic. Integrated over time, black swan events for which the organization is not equipped become more likely. Or changes in external conditions weaken the host, and the parasites conquer it.
I don't question that political organization and social norms have changed, but contemporary Romans and Athenians regard themselves as the heirs of the corresponding ancient cities, incorporating into their identities the various changes that have taken place over time.
On the larger scale, though, analogous self identification does not persist. I doubt whether contemporary dwellers in Naples and Sicily still feel a loyalty to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which we can also say "continues to exist", because people still live there. But the identification with the cities remains strong whereas identification with the recently formed entity known as Italy has supplanted the regional association, except among monarchists and other nostalgics.
Loyalty and identification seem to be strongest at the level of cities. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has rotted away, just as the earlier Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily rotted away, but Naples and Sicily, as sources of such loyalty and identification, did not.
I suppose one could argue that that none of the ancient kingdoms and empires really rotted away, because people still live there; just the the political systems have changed. But I think what we really mean by rotting away is that those who live there have switched their loyalty to the replacement entities, albeit under duress in many cases.
But we want the same sort of analysis of rot to help us find the best "minimal" governance to cut those risks while avoiding new risks caused by rot.
The sense in which cities persist is only that the same place continues to attract people to live there. If the people aren't the same, the political org is totally new, the physical buildings have burned down or been replaced then it's only ppl choosing to settle in that spot which persists.
Ok, sometimes cities keep the trappings of a form of government from long past (eg London from before Normans) but that's more just apeing the past for nostalgia than true persistence. What's persisting isn't any real pattern or administrative mechanism but more cultural practices ...which do often persist quite awhile in larger groups as well.
But yes, it's an interesting question ..thx for bringing it up and maybe there are counterexamples and I'm wrong they don't persist in substance.
That's my take too...but the ability to destroy ourselves with nukes or bio weapons makes not creating such structures even more dangerous over the long term. The whole reason competitive systems work well is they allow exploration of a whole bunch of strategies. I don't see how we make it a thousand years, much less 10,000 without at least a minimal global government to effectively suppress use of WMDs.