Thread by @wretchardthecat

One of the vulnerabilities cited by the BBC study on civilizational collapse is belonging to a "tightly coupled globalized system". Part of the intuition for renewed system borders is the instinctive awareness of that danger.

Anomalies, like the mutations that cause cancer, are an inevitable part of complexity. Part of the price we pay for complexity is surprise.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Ac…

Even systems composed of 'simple' actions, if expanded enough, can take on a seeming life of their own.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-orga…

One problem is there is no easy measure of complexity. It's hard to design a steam gauge indicator of this property, if is indeed a single property.

web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/not…

One of the problems with ideological comprehensive ideologies is they increase the probability of "normal accidents" because the bureaucracy cannot manage the complex systems they have undertaken to control.

The chances of AOC and Bernie Sanders being able to manage, at top level, a system as complex as the planet's climate is very near zero.

The "Red Queen Hypothesis" describes the utility of competition as a strategy to avoid biological extinction. The Green Dealers want a monopoly on policy. That's why the sooner mankind gets off world the better because what if AOC and Bernie are wrong?

The story of the coming decades may be between the Competers and the Controllers.

Kolmogorov tried to define complexity as the length of the shortest program that could describe a system. What he found was not encouraging. In most cases you can't even compute the lower bound of this metric.