Insufficient data

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html

54 24 16 years ago

slmbrhrt• 16 years ago

I've learned that there are two types of people in the world: those that can extrapolate information from incomplete data,

scott_s• 16 years ago

I think this process is at the root of humor. At least, some kinds of humor.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

If the world were less populated it would be cheaper to automate jobs currently done with low-skilled labor. It is notoriously hard to predict the effects of a single change on an economy, there's too many moving parts.

kevinpet• 16 years ago

He lost me when he mentioned dislike of big government in close proximity to wishing to simplify society without even hinting how they are connected. Or am I supposed to assume that it's impossible for complicated systems to exist without being run by the government?

jbooth3• 16 years ago

Moving complexity around isn't eliminating it.

Social Security is vastly simpler than the various schemes proposed to privatize it, for example.

brg2• 16 years ago

Incorrect solutions are nearly always less complex than their counterparts.

wmf• 16 years ago

In a comment he mentions that government needs to manage externalities, but this is still a somewhat tenuous connection in my mind. What is the relationship between complexity of civilization and the complexity of the resulting externalities? One might guess that more of one creates more of the other, but I have no evidence.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

The connection I drew is of people who have a strong ideological worldview that simple mechanisms would solve things, if only everyone agreed; two examples are the "free market will solve everything" right and the "going back to nature will solve everything" left.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

If you think proponents of the "free market" think it's simple, you don't understand them. Or it. It's precisely because it's so complex that managing it is prone to error.

I don't actually understand why the same people (in general) will assert ecologies are extremely complex and we shouldn't meddle without being very careful to understand the effects, and at the same time think that the market is manageable from the top down without unintended consequences on the same order as the intended ones.

glymor3• 16 years ago

He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from greenpeace it's not a correct characterization.

Generally trying to pare down the size of the state, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary simply to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually the tax burden would reach unity.

The political side of this is very transparently Scottish left wing. "... among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending" the phrase "masochistic addiction" is a current Labour talking point. The actual cuts amount to 2.2% of GDP by 2014-15 added to the the 4.1% Labour had already set.

jbooth3• 16 years ago

Is there any reason that your comment is more substantive than flipping the political ideology by 180 degrees?

He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from the conservative groups it's not a correct characterization. Generally trying to pare down human resource extraction, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually we'll run out of stuff to extract.

glymor3• 16 years ago

It's a shame his politics are so polarizing and that he doesn't really develop conclusions as the juxtaposition of society's complexity and how humans manage complexity is interesting and does have political ramifications.

Humans seem to manage complexity by creating categorizations/abstractions until it's reduced to a workable amount. This can lead to a kind of fractal experience where zooming into any area presents the same seeming level of complexity as the whole did.

If you haven't made that particular zoom it's tempting to assume it's as simple as the assumption makes it look. "It's just" or "it should be easy to" are phrases that computer programmers are fairly familiar with and aren't overly fond of.

The political side would seem to be that if there's a lot of embedded complexity in pretty much anything then trying to change something, replace it with something cleaner or clearer, is going to be far harder than it would seem. Without trying to make the same mistake Stross did, President Obama and the disappointing gap between rhetoric and reality would seem to be a current example.

jerf• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, could you unpack your point a bit more? I'm not even sure where he made an argument in that post, let alone "defeated a straw man". It's mostly just musings.

Are you perhaps misinterpreting his post as a question of how far the state can be pared down (given your second paragraph)? Because that's not the question; the issue of government size is nearly tangential and just parenthetically touched on. The question is the minimum size a society can be at our scale of sophistication. One could then speculate about how "governmenty" that society would be but that's really a separate question.

This is really an engineering question, not a political one. Since we're asking about the minimum, we're pretty much assuming that the component people have the optimal organization and the exact details of that organization don't matter to the answer much.

glymor3• 16 years ago

"Conservative politicians in the US...

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.

Let's take a look at the superficial structures around us..."

He presents a characterization, says these ideas are delusional because, then leads on to his observations. It's not unreasonable to think he was making argument.

The straw man he creates is equating anyone who wants to reduce state expenditure as wanting or believing in an over-simplified world.

That said, the characterization was insulting to anyone on the right, and about half seem to have taken it as their main takeaway and about half seem to have passed it straight by. So that might be why.

arethuza• 16 years ago

And while I am generally a fan of Charlie's writing and his novels I have to strongly disagree with him as characterizing the announced cuts as "masochistic".

The public sector was completely out of control - with some fantastically good services but also a lot of people doing very little and getting paid far too much. This has been embarrassingly bad in Scotland - where Charlie and I both live.

nhnifong• 16 years ago

How many people does it take to maintain out current level of technological civilization? Well I think the size and grandeur of a civilization depends on how abundant the resources are (mostly). An then on how efficiently we extract and use those resources. Improving efficiency is a problem of controlling a complex network of causality, which requires... I'm guessing... a even more complex network to model it. I would say "how densely connected would our civilization have to be.." A large number of people can tackle the control problem better than a small number of people, and people with telecommunications devices can tackle it even better. However, I think that our current level of technological development requires a lot of overhead, because it takes so many engineer to make all those telecommunications devices work, but the payoff is that we can educate ourselves on how to do just about anything, better than we could by hard trial and error, and the occasional face-to-face conversation.

isnoteasy• 16 years ago

As history demonstrate the number of people is not an indicator of technology progress. Ancient china is a counter-example. The biggest enemy of technology is the idea that technology lead people to catastrophe, that is the end of progress. Many people think that we are in a fast car looking through the rear mirror so nothing good is to come.

3pt14159• 16 years ago

Although I didn't like the slant "silly Libertarian, politics is for grownups" I like the thought he put into how the economy is shifting. One thing that should be noted is that even though 10,000 engineers might be somehow involved in the creation of, say, an iPhone; proportionally 9000 of them may have only "spent" a relative fraction of a second on just the iPhone. For example, the engineers in charge of designing a common capacitor that is manufactured in the billions are not working a fully person-year on the iPhone. It's like saying that my tumblr blog needed 100k engineers and programmers to create. 2000 for the linux run server, 9000 to create web standards, 7000 to create network protocols, etc. It just gets silly - work overlaps.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

It's true that they're not working full-time, but I think it's somewhat indicative of how the knowledge and supply chains are spread out. If you were to try to recreate a modern computing infrastructure on a desert island, you'd have to assemble a lot of those people, from the people who know how to smelt ore, to the people who can figure out how to build capacitors, etc.

A wild card that I'm not sure has been tested is how much you could get away with recreating solely from published materials. Given some smart people with a university-library-quality set of books (and let's say a good index), how many of them and how long do you need to go from stone-age to iPhone?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

All of them. It isn't just that it takes twenty years to train a software engineer, 30 years for a doctor or a lawyer.

It is also the tools we need (I don't even dare think about the complex physics that has to be mastered to make the microprocessors that enable me to encode bits that can be sent halfway around the world so you can see this comment), the tool required to built those tools, the food we eat (easy to make perhaps, but it needs to be brought and sold, transported, stored and finally sold to us consumers), etc.

The interconnections in this world are truly mind wrecking.

joshuacc• 16 years ago

Interestingly, Edmund Burke (the founder of post-enlightenment conservatism) had a similar line of thought. The basic idea is that cultural institutions and their impacts are much more complex than we think they are, so radical changes are ill-advised.

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