You know I like to go on about modelling. I'm in a bit of a funny mood today (you know, middle-aged woman, hormones and, well, not been sleeping too well and noticing a mood of general weirdness - not the first time it's happened, so I know it can get bad.) I thought I'd rather get a few things off my chest before, well, I do something I've done before which is to totally embarrass myself posting something totally off-the-wall. At least you'll have my thoughts as coherent as I can get them.
The thing that really irks me about a lot of models I see out there is that they miss stuff. They don't take into account things that, logically, would completely alter the results. Maybe it's because when I was young I read "The Limits to Growth" and "Foundation", and I was totally expecting Foundation to happen in real life. Like, where's my Hari Seldon, dammit? I don't say I was expecting anything terribly sophisticated, not for the little people, anyway, but what I really find hard to get is how can there be such a failure across the board. After "The Limits to Growth", fierce attacks on the book and then pretty much nothing. What???
For the last few days I've had "Girl" of the Beatles going around in my head. And suddenly I realised that it describes feedback loops. I've spent my entire life thinking about how feedback loops explain things. I even noticed once that one of those famous Chinese books described pretty clearly how a negative feedback loop works (if you want to make something smaller, make it bigger, something along those lines). It's funny that I just noticed that about a song I've heard lots of times, but I for the last few years I've been noticing things about stuff I've seen lots of times before, so by now I'm used to the idea that, well, I get to see things when it's the time for me to see them, or something like that. And then I thought some more, and I thought I can guess, very roughly, how Beatlemania must have worked. First, there were feedback loops of some sort, between the Beatles and the audience. Then, there must have been some sort of game that probably was some sort of pyramid sort of scheme, that only worked well if the girls got more girls involved, and in all probability some sort of keeping other girls in the dark about how to get to the next level. The song may be describing the pyramid scheme, with different levels, as well as feedback loops. Overall, it was probably all good fun for everyone involved. The specific details don't really matter. It may be something the Beatles learned in Germany, that was a pretty weird place just after WWII.
This is a pretty long-winded way of introducing the idea that pyramids, or networks, and feedbacks often go together and interact dynamically. A very, very common sort of situation, so common that deserves to be thought of as a universal law, is that a network starts with a few hubs and a few links, then if there are enough resources, gets bigger in hubs and links, then it becomes more hierarchical because it's more efficient, but then, as it runs out of resources, some of the nodes go but the main hubs remain (it becomes more unequal) until the system breaks down, the main hubs go, and it becomes more equal again. That in itself is a negative feedback loop. The network can be a commercial network, a supply-chain network, a food chain, just about any sort of network.
Then, networks can be nested within other networks, feedbacks can run through the links in the network, and to make things even more confusing, a network and its dual (interchanging links and nodes) can operate very similarly and be hard to distinguish.
So if you are thinking about how information runs through a network, it can be very difficult to be sure about what exactly is going on, most especially if you are part of said network, and we are talking about trying to figure out what's happening with a few billion people on planet Earth, and many of them keep secrets or are devious bastards. Which is why lots of us don't even try, and those of us that do it as a pastime can't be expected to get it very right. You can naively think that the world is roughly as it looks to you, which is how I used to think. That is, till I realised that I was clearly missing something, and I couldn't figure out what.
One thing I was clearly missing is that I had no idea at all about how terribly, terribly weird things can get. For example, how the F is a signal getting through? That is a very, very non-trivial question. For an easy example, let's take blushing. When I was a child, I never blushed. Then as a teen, I spent a couple of years with a gang of girls that blushed and somehow I picked that up. Which is very weird, because blushing is not something you can ever do on purpose, so how come that you can learn it? But for sure you can. Then, I stopped hanging around those girls and I stopped blushing.
Now, if you think about all the signals you constantly get on movies, it's quite possible that people are being subconsciously trained in all sorts of ways. And to make it even worse, it may or may not be deliberate on the part of Hollywood. So it's a lot easier to just hope you haven't got your idea of the world too badly wrong than trying to work out what's happening in the info-sphere. Except that the info-sphere seems to be going badly wrong in all sorts of ways, and the real world seems to be going badly wrong in all sorts of ways at the same time, and just to make it that little bit harder, those damn feedback loops have got into your life close and personal and you can't be sure about lots of things any more. And don't even get me started with the entire Internet going weird and when you go to one of the old forums you used to love, well, let's say that at least some of the people still look human enough. Mind you, I'm almost certain that there are AIs that pass completely for human these days.
You know, I spent some time researching what Nazi Germany was like, and I thought that sure, being a Jew must have been awful, but being an average German must have sucked really badly anyway, and they never talk much about that. And these days I think that maybe they don't say much because, well, they really don't know very well. Clearly the German info-sphere was falling to pieces, that's how you can have something like the Holocaust. So figuring out what was going on has to be hard. And our info-sphere is falling to pieces, too. People being all for catching a potentially deadly virus is not a healthy sign, to say it very mildly. And people in Ukraine not realising that they were about to be invaded when the Russians were threatening repeatedly doesn't look good to me, either. And Europe certainly looked like they made the package of sanctions at the last minute and didn't think them very carefully.
So I guess in those circumstances it's hardly surprising that there are so many models that are wrong. I guess people literally don't see the limitations of the models.
Which brings us back to the initial question: Where's my Hari Seldon? Things looked so promising at one point.
Well, there's always money. If there is something rich people can be relied on, is on being self-interested bastards and determined to hear what they want to hear. Including whatever economic theories they love because they say they should do exactly what they wanted to do anyway. But then, that isn't exactly new. The ancient Romans already had plenty to say on the subject of money. And the ancient Romans were already managing their info-sphere, that's what all those ancient gods were doing.
Oh, yeah, that's another info-sphere that must have collapsed and collapsed rather spectacularly. What must it take to abandon all your gods and go for a completely new-fangled one? Christianity is spectacular in the same way you could say that the sinking of Atlantis, if it refers to a real event, was spectacular. So those things can happen, apparently.
And we live in a world that is orders of magnitude more complex than the Roman Empire, and giving all the signs of having all the capacity to fall, and even fall at relatively short notice. (I mean, how resilient is the Internet, really? I work in electronics, I know these things are awfully complex.) And here I am, chatting in a place potentially full of bots managed by who-knows-who, when the info-sphere might be as helpfully friendly as Nazi Germany's. After Chris Martenson was forced, in some way or another, to go anti-vax.
And I'm still insane enough to attempt to figure out what happens next, and wanting to rail off a list of variables that I reckon would deserve to go in a proper model of the world, or more exactly be considered as variables that potentially affect the issue if you are doing a model of a bit of the world.
And I haven't even started on my favorite rant on how people also don't do modelling right because they use models to forecast what will happen, when they are much more robust to forecast what can't happen.
So that's where Hari Seldon went, then? To Hollywood, of all places? I mean, I can imagine how that could work, even if nobody meant it that way. Hollywood's job as info-sphere managers is to de-bias people, presumably, so that they don't get into the sort of tangles that happen when the info-sphere doesn't get managed. But who decides what's signal and what's noise and how to de-bias? I mean, that's clearly one way it can all go horribly wrong.
And once you know it has all gone horribly wrong, that doesn't mean that your ideas on how to fix it are right, either. You could be pushing with all your energy in exactly the wrong direction. That's how positive feedback goes.
Well, you can't exactly blame me for not wanting to deal with that mess and much preferring to try to work out what's going to happen next in the real world and ignore that whole problem and just cross my fingers and hope it's all going to be all right on the info-sphere side of things.
Something tells me I'm far from the only person reacting like that. Probably that's how people got into this mess in the first place.
Damn.
And shouldn't I be prepping instead of wasting my valuable time on philosophical questions? Girl, are you dreaming or what? Do you really take seriously all the stuff you just said?
Well, there's all the weird stuff that's happened, synchronicities and such. Which is like giving as supporting evidence that the world has gone crazy that you yourself are pretty bonkers. Sounds about right.
Well, here's to hoping I haven't somehow inadvertently given the bots the keys to how to organise a better Holocaust, how to destroy modern civilization in a way that makes the fall of Rome look tame, or, on a more practical level, how to kill me accidentally with a feedback loop that went out of hand. Because of course, it's fair to assume that all sorts of things are on unstoppable auto-pilot. You don't get to this point if people have a lot of control over stuff, do you?
Oh, well. At least I got my favorite rant off my chest.