Re:The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion
by api on Monday June 01, 2015 @02:25PM
(#9640944)
"without any inherent explanation."
This is what complex systems do. Simple linear causal reasoning just breaks down... there are too many feedback loops, chaotic functions, etc. Things will look completely normal and then wham, the system will suddenly and without apparent warning undergo a radical shift.
Look at how economic bubbles pop. You'll have a roaring, humming economy collapse within hours or days and nobody knows why. The postmortem generally takes years. Sometimes the reasons seem 'obvious' but that is only in hindsight. Nobody ever succeeds in calling the top of a bubble -- despite the huge financial reward of doing so -- except by sheer luck.
LTG was an attempt to apply complex systems modeling at the global scale to answer questions about the long term viability of our current civilization. So far it seems to be tracking reality in some ways, but as you correctly state we do not know whether this is spurious correlation or actual evidence for the validity of the model. We also know -- see the work of folks like Ilya Prigogine -- that it is actually impossible to predict the future of systems like this with certainty. There are strict limits on prediction in complex systems.
So we don't know. LTG is scary, but for all we know it won't come to pass.
But we'll know soon. We get to find out in the next 25 years if all the work we've done to build a better future over the past 500 years is a total mirage and all our children are all doomed to starvation, warfare, and misery. Fun times.
This is what complex systems do. Simple linear causal reasoning just breaks down... there are too many feedback loops, chaotic functions, etc. Things will look completely normal and then wham, the system will suddenly and without apparent warning undergo a radical shift.
Look at how economic bubbles pop. You'll have a roaring, humming economy collapse within hours or days and nobody knows why. The postmortem generally takes years. Sometimes the reasons seem 'obvious' but that is only in hindsight. Nobody ever succeeds in calling the top of a bubble -- despite the huge financial reward of doing so -- except by sheer luck.
LTG was an attempt to apply complex systems modeling at the global scale to answer questions about the long term viability of our current civilization. So far it seems to be tracking reality in some ways, but as you correctly state we do not know whether this is spurious correlation or actual evidence for the validity of the model. We also know -- see the work of folks like Ilya Prigogine -- that it is actually impossible to predict the future of systems like this with certainty. There are strict limits on prediction in complex systems.
So we don't know. LTG is scary, but for all we know it won't come to pass.
But we'll know soon. We get to find out in the next 25 years if all the work we've done to build a better future over the past 500 years is a total mirage and all our children are all doomed to starvation, warfare, and misery. Fun times.