1st order: healthcare surge, supply chain disruption 2nd order: economic slump, demand collapse 3rd order: large infrastructure load imbalances 4th order: large opportunistic exploits like oil war 5th order: normal accidents frequency increase 6th order: extended outage gangrene
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Trying to low-order model the system stability with a dozen or fewer moving parts. I think people smarter than me are falling into the trap of modeling things with intractably high-dimensional fidelity. It alleviates comprehension anxiety but exacerbates the control problem.
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You want global governance to focus on all the biggest system modes, while those are still controllable. Small-scale things will break all over the place as a result and people will get mad but they can adapt, sort of. But if the big modes go out of control all bets are off.
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The challenge is keeping ordinary people informed and trusting enough, for long enough, for big-mode controls to take effect since they all rely on consent of the governed. If the crowd loses patience, control fails, stability unravels.
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Civilization is dynamically stabilizable, statically unstabilizable. Like a bicycle. It needs to be moving to be balanceable.
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Systems theory at civilization scale is useless shit 99% of the time, but this one of those other 1% times. And more than stock-flow diagrams you need evocative language to make it work.
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A good turn of phrase like “flatten the curve” can stretch system controllability (aka people not rioting) from weeks to months and make the difference between restored stability and a runaway unraveling.
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