So, an article citing the US response to Covid as evidence that society has entered a "death spiral". With no mention of climate change? Written by epidemiologists?
Ah, the second author is John Ioannidis, who during Covid was put forward an anti-lockdown position forcefully and published a series of studies which scientists considered bad. I kept an eye on the debate and think he wound-up producing dubious claims of covid having a much lower fatality than was the case.
That's not to say I think the US responded well to Covid, that's big debate. But the "death spiral" argument can't help sounding a bit aggrieved here, even if many things threaten to make things worse in this society today; climate, pollution generally, rising inequality (that rose before-and-after covid), the thread of nuclear war (MAD has worked so but doesn't seem like a good long term plan) etc.
openrisk 13 days ago [-]
The term "modeling" probably means different things in different research domains. I would expect on the one hand an effort to describe the conjectured dynamics with some detail and on the other hand a quantification and validation of the model/hypothesis with empirical (historical) data.
Admittedly both are extremely challenging tasks: human society is maybe the most complex system we know and we seem very far from adequate modeling in the above sense.
This is not to imply that the phenomena identified and discussed are not relevant factors towards a societal "crisis" but they feel more like a partial collection of hunches and analogies which may or may not be capturing the relevant societal dynamics to a meaningful degree.
There are reasons to be concerned though. Underlying the theatricality and subjectivity and collective mind games that drive political and economic behaviors there is the physical reality of the anthropocene and its no longer negligible environmental impacts.
Its not unreasonable to conjecture that as ad-hoc and capricious social arrangements hit hard external constraints there will be some unavoidable "adjustments". Whether these will unfold as an out-of-control societal collapse or just another chapter of human history remains to be seen.
We should not discount the extreme sophistication and resources available to modern societies. Eventually we may even develop a model of society, though its not clear if it will include the impact of there being a model :-)
photonthug 13 days ago [-]
> The term "modeling" probably means different things in different research domains.
Came here hoping to discuss this although, like many commenters, I skimmed and can’t be bothered to read tfa.
Aren’t we at a point with things like stochastic model checkers and process simulation so that stuff like this can be discussed pretty quantitatively?
It feels gross that so much erudite economic / sociological analysis that underpins policy decisions isn't more data driven. And I don’t mean data driven as in referencing and then interpreting history, but more like specifying assumptions about agent kinds and their distributions inside simulated worlds of possible policies.
Doing economics / decision theory any other way is starting to seem weird, because yeah historically we chased after relatively tidy and closed-form analysis, but now we can just sample the world and then simulate it.
hackerlight 13 days ago [-]
That does exist, and decision makers do use it, SDGE models for example. But it's of limited utility.
Language, rather than math, is often a superior modelling tool for domains where our understanding is inherently fuzzy due to uncertainty caused by a structural lack of data. Sociology would be an example where math is just the wrong tool for the job. If you tried to do that you'd probably be verging on crackpottery like those econophysics people.
xpe 12 days ago [-]
> Language, rather than math, is often a superior modelling tool for domains where our understanding is inherently fuzzy due to uncertainty caused by a structural lack of data.
I'll reinterpret your comment charitably: given the current state of how well mathematics is understood, it may well be more effective to use language to reach people. Once someone "checks out" the effort at persuasion has failed. Our culture's lack of mathematical and logical fluency is a weakness.
But not all language follows the patterns of rationality, which are formalized with logic and quantified with mathematics. Both have mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty that are far superior to language.
I'm not discounting the power of language as a highly-compressed form of information exchange. But when we want to communicate rationality in a compressed way with language, we very often fool ourselves.
photonthug 13 days ago [-]
> Sociology would be an example where math is just the wrong tool for the job.
really? Stronger statement than just saying the tools aren’t there yet.
I also don’t really get the alternative.. surely the phrase “modeling” has connotations of formality and predictive power for any domain, this is desirable, and a “model” should be more of a useful artifact than other subjective interpretations of history (like say an op-ed).
Anyway they do mention complex adaptive systems. But whether that means building a model with it, or just nodding vaguely towards it as generally supporting their thesis, I’m not sure
xpe 12 days ago [-]
> Anyway they do mention complex adaptive systems. But whether that means building a model with it, or just nodding vaguely towards it as generally supporting their thesis, I’m not sure
Done well, models in the complex adaptive systems world can help understand system dynamics at levels better than usual language. Making those models specific enough to make testable predictions is very important but often lacking.
doctoboggan 13 days ago [-]
The growing distrust of authority and institutions is something that really worries me. That is what keeps the fabric of society together and I am not sure what comes after the collapse of previously trusted institutions.
mlinhares 13 days ago [-]
Civil wars?
Latin America, in general, is a good example of a lack of trust in institutions. A lot of energy is spent working around them to do everything and it permeates society itself, as you can't trust anyone, you have to expect everyone is trying to scam you all the time as you have non recourse if they actually are.
jpk 13 days ago [-]
I'm not sure you completed the thought. You put forward civil war as the outcome of widespread distrust in institutions, but then gave an example of society continuing to function just with greater discomfort, inefficiency, and crime. What's the path from that, to war?
llm_trw 13 days ago [-]
A civil war doesn't mean that you have troops shooting each other in the streets of every city.
It means that there are regions where the government can't project authority.
Ukraine before the Russian invasion was a perfect example. You could walk around Kiev without a care in the world, 500km to the east you had death squads trying to suppress an honest to god soviet insurgency.
immibis 13 days ago [-]
Then aren't they just the government?
pixl97 13 days ago [-]
It depends if you consider a group not based on the rule of law a government.
immibis 13 days ago [-]
Are the current governments in the USA
and Germany governments?
lispisok 13 days ago [-]
Where does the rule of law come from?
mlinhares 13 days ago [-]
From the (almost) monopoly on violence.
13 days ago [-]
brabel 13 days ago [-]
> 500km to the east you had death squads trying to suppress an honest to god soviet insurgency.
Wasn't the Maidan Revolution in 2014 also an "insurgency" against the government right in the center of Kiev?
mlinhares 13 days ago [-]
Haiti, a considerable part of sub Saharan Africa, Burma, there’s plenty of examples of society failing and leading to civil war.
13 days ago [-]
cmrdporcupine 13 days ago [-]
The problem isn't the lack of trust in authority and institutions. It's the lack of trust of or care for community, which is the ultimate wellspring of authentic institutions.
Institutions and authority figures come and go, often deservedly. But a people without a care for their community and its well-being will be in no position to put new and better institutions in their place, or to have a quality life generally.
ok_dad 13 days ago [-]
Do the institutions and authority figures being dragged deserve it today? I think many do, and frankly I think that governments have probably been getting away with doing things not in the best interests of the citizens for far too long. I don’t like the unrest and instability, but perhaps it’s time *for authority figures to be unmasked and held to account.
llm_trw 13 days ago [-]
Time for what, millions dead in a civil war?
Just because the CDC suppressed scientists who didn't agree with it's dogma on mRNA treatments doesn't mean we should start feeding babies lead again.
roenxi 13 days ago [-]
Sorry I might be missing a story. Who is it who wants to feed babies lead, and why?
Vecr 13 days ago [-]
I think the point is that not everything is commonly disputed, even if it's a "somewhat recent" discovery like lead causing problems.
13 days ago [-]
immibis 13 days ago [-]
I'm noticing how Germany is treating Palestine supporters the same way that German coronavirus truthers fantasized about it treating them.
NegativeLatency 13 days ago [-]
Nobody “wins” a civil war
13 days ago [-]
13 days ago [-]
exoverito 13 days ago [-]
China certainly would win from America going into civil war.
It would be wise for American elites to focus on fixing the causes of unrest, but instead they use corporate media to blame the people for their distrust of the establishment.
Interestingly, the same corporate media pushed the narrative that the George Floyd riots were about police brutality. This is only true in a facile sense, the video was the catalyst. The major causes were intense psychological stress from unprecedented lockdowns, economic implosion, and incessant fear of the virus. In a form of ideological judo they redirected all the anger and angst that had been building up towards a scapegoat. A classic trick rulers use on the ruled.
13 days ago [-]
staplers 13 days ago [-]
Your own personal narrative fractures and contradicts itself a few times. Might want to proof read it.
squigz 13 days ago [-]
This does seem to be the main problem in society over the past few decades - the erosion of trust in experts, both political and scientific. That isn't to say it's undeserved distrust, but it's very worrying. I'm not sure how they'll regain that trust, either.
rayiner 13 days ago [-]
We’ve been chipping away at institutions and authority since the 1970s (e.g the Tinker case). As a kid in the 1990s, I got a heavy dose of “question authority” and “think for yourself.” I’m not sure what folks were expecting to happen, but I think this is how we got MTG and Alex Jones.
roenxi 13 days ago [-]
> ... [the crisis] seemed to be characterized by groupthink and escalation of commitment to one course of action, at the expense of other possible solutions ...
This is my favourite sentence in the whole article. I'm not sure what the solution really is, but spending 12 months in school just teaching people "how to respond to a crisis without panicking and behaving like a herd of sheep" would be of huge societal value.
We don't all have to do exactly the same thing. Different people can do different things. I've only seen crises where compromises on individual liberty were a grave mistake; but I've seen a lot of crises where by gum the authorities tried that approach anyway with the populace egging them on.
mitthrowaway2 13 days ago [-]
Indeed. Let the people who want to cooperate, cooperate; let those who want to defect, defect. Different people can choose their own solution.
Right?
pixl97 13 days ago [-]
I mean, all fun and games until my 'solution' is to exterminate you.
incomingpain 13 days ago [-]
Hard disagree. Society is clearly getting better; and we fight over bad moves faster.
Authors don't take into account multiple other viewpoints. Climate change for example, no mention at all in the article? My political opponents clearly believe climate change is a doomsday scenario for humanity.
Here in Canada we have a regressive carbon tax which is causing huge problems. It has come to the point that the premiers who ideologically should be in favour or on the same side as our Prime Minister are calling him out and demanding to stop that asap.
This is not the kind of society who is headed toward demise.
Animats 13 days ago [-]
Some of the references are interesting. "PREDICTING AND PREEMPTING THE CORPORATE HEART ATTACK" (all caps in original, paywalled) looks promising. That's the management consultant view. It's a good question, though. How can you tell in advance when an organization is in trouble? Consider Boeing and General Electric.
Accounting does not capture what's broken. It's possible to capture that info in stable production environments, which is what the Toyota Production System and Deming are all about.
It's not clear what to measure in a more dynamic situation or over longer time scales.
A less apocalyptic question is, how do you tell if a system is stuck in a state well below optimum? What are the risks associated with getting out of that state and into a higher state?
webdoodle 13 days ago [-]
Why was this article flagged? Did it hurt the feelings of the 'Elite', aka the parasites whose greed caused this death spiral?
javajosh 13 days ago [-]
THE major difference between nations is their concept and practice of "justice". Capitalism is a side-effect. Feudalism seems to be every society's first pass at justice, and then capitalism arises by erasing hard class distinctions and deregulating economic exchange. This becomes clear when you ask yourself the question, "If my nation was invaded and occupied, how would things change?"
Justice in America is badly broken, and most, if not all of our ills (including distrust in the legitimacy of institutions) is a direct result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to sue an individual or institution for harm and to get a fair result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to get arrested for something criminal and be found either guilty or innocent in a fair trial, judged by a jury of peers. Instead, all but the 1% are priced out of the justice system, and the justice system itself is slow, expensive, and fundamentally unjust. The complexity of law and its practice shelters entire ecosystems of "professionals" who's job is to game the system to obtain the desired result. The price of justice, in both time and money, is itself used as leverage. And leverage is Power. Any society that lets its justice system go, lets it rot under layers and layers of complexity, makes it inaccessible to the average person, has undermined its Purpose. Only momentum, particularly the ignorance of the masses who imagine the system to be "mostly functional", keeps it legitimate. But that ignorant goodwill is finite, and decays as more and more smart, self-interested actors take advantage of the moribund system.
What I find most astonishing is the profound lack of attention given to the justice system itself. Not just its performance in high-profile cases, but its performance in every day cases. This goes part-and-parcel with police brutality and abuse, the "Marshal Law Bubble" that surrounds every LEO in America, because the justice system has their back in an almost unbelievably complete way. The same holds true for state attorney generals and prosecutors: for every story of a person wrongfully convicted, spending 20+ years in prison, how many times have you ever heard of a prosecutor being prosecuted for their malfeasance? How many horror stories of lawsuits getting bogged down in years of pre-trial motions before the poorer of the two litigants has to give up? How many fathers have been separated from their young children for months or years at the whim of an uncaring family court?
In practice, we almost all rely on the fact that its rare to go to court. Everyone knows that to be arrested is to have your life changed, whether or not you're convicted. Everyone knows that to be sued is to lose 10's or 100's of thousands, even if you win. Is this justice? No. It's statistics. It's most people not knowing and not caring because they see the justice system as being only for those who "deserve it". But that's not what justice is supposed to be about. You should be able to sue Roku for changing their terms of service and preventing you from using your TV until you agree. It should be cheap and easy and quick. You should be able to sue Harvard for publishing false data that misled you into doing the wrong thing for your patients, or leading you to wrong conclusions in your own papers. You should be able to sue a LEO for false arrest, violation of your rights, and assault. The fact that you cannot (and in the current system, should not) do any of these things means that bad actors get away with it, constantly, and with no real prospect of correction.
Now, whether this problem is isomorphic to ants following in a circle, I don't know. Maybe. It certainly seems like no-one is thinking about it or talking about it. I know that state law boards are a very powerful (perhaps THE most powerful) lobby in America, and serious justice system reforms would undermine their business model. But the simple fact is that our justice system has already failed. The core function of government has failed. And the public is barely aware of it.
arbitrary_name 13 days ago [-]
What a hilariously American worldview: justice is only obtainable through a lawsuit, for everything by everyone.
I personally prefer the British legal tradition. Np system is perfect, and many are actively decaying, but to posit that rapid and cheap lawsuits are the only medicine for what ails our society sounds...incomplete...at best.
javajosh 13 days ago [-]
The word "lawsuit" is saddled with a lot of baggage. If you remove the baggage, and leave only the essence of "making an accusation with evidence to be decided by a disinterested 3rd party", I fail to see how you can object to them. As I lay out (in some detail) lawsuits are badly broken, and yet its the primary mechanism we get to resolve disputes in the court system. If you have an alternative, I'd like to hear it.
Rendered at 08:09:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Ah, the second author is John Ioannidis, who during Covid was put forward an anti-lockdown position forcefully and published a series of studies which scientists considered bad. I kept an eye on the debate and think he wound-up producing dubious claims of covid having a much lower fatality than was the case.
That's not to say I think the US responded well to Covid, that's big debate. But the "death spiral" argument can't help sounding a bit aggrieved here, even if many things threaten to make things worse in this society today; climate, pollution generally, rising inequality (that rose before-and-after covid), the thread of nuclear war (MAD has worked so but doesn't seem like a good long term plan) etc.
Admittedly both are extremely challenging tasks: human society is maybe the most complex system we know and we seem very far from adequate modeling in the above sense.
This is not to imply that the phenomena identified and discussed are not relevant factors towards a societal "crisis" but they feel more like a partial collection of hunches and analogies which may or may not be capturing the relevant societal dynamics to a meaningful degree.
There are reasons to be concerned though. Underlying the theatricality and subjectivity and collective mind games that drive political and economic behaviors there is the physical reality of the anthropocene and its no longer negligible environmental impacts.
Its not unreasonable to conjecture that as ad-hoc and capricious social arrangements hit hard external constraints there will be some unavoidable "adjustments". Whether these will unfold as an out-of-control societal collapse or just another chapter of human history remains to be seen.
We should not discount the extreme sophistication and resources available to modern societies. Eventually we may even develop a model of society, though its not clear if it will include the impact of there being a model :-)
Came here hoping to discuss this although, like many commenters, I skimmed and can’t be bothered to read tfa.
Aren’t we at a point with things like stochastic model checkers and process simulation so that stuff like this can be discussed pretty quantitatively?
It feels gross that so much erudite economic / sociological analysis that underpins policy decisions isn't more data driven. And I don’t mean data driven as in referencing and then interpreting history, but more like specifying assumptions about agent kinds and their distributions inside simulated worlds of possible policies.
Doing economics / decision theory any other way is starting to seem weird, because yeah historically we chased after relatively tidy and closed-form analysis, but now we can just sample the world and then simulate it.
Language, rather than math, is often a superior modelling tool for domains where our understanding is inherently fuzzy due to uncertainty caused by a structural lack of data. Sociology would be an example where math is just the wrong tool for the job. If you tried to do that you'd probably be verging on crackpottery like those econophysics people.
I'll reinterpret your comment charitably: given the current state of how well mathematics is understood, it may well be more effective to use language to reach people. Once someone "checks out" the effort at persuasion has failed. Our culture's lack of mathematical and logical fluency is a weakness.
But not all language follows the patterns of rationality, which are formalized with logic and quantified with mathematics. Both have mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty that are far superior to language.
I'm not discounting the power of language as a highly-compressed form of information exchange. But when we want to communicate rationality in a compressed way with language, we very often fool ourselves.
really? Stronger statement than just saying the tools aren’t there yet.
I also don’t really get the alternative.. surely the phrase “modeling” has connotations of formality and predictive power for any domain, this is desirable, and a “model” should be more of a useful artifact than other subjective interpretations of history (like say an op-ed).
Anyway they do mention complex adaptive systems. But whether that means building a model with it, or just nodding vaguely towards it as generally supporting their thesis, I’m not sure
Done well, models in the complex adaptive systems world can help understand system dynamics at levels better than usual language. Making those models specific enough to make testable predictions is very important but often lacking.
Latin America, in general, is a good example of a lack of trust in institutions. A lot of energy is spent working around them to do everything and it permeates society itself, as you can't trust anyone, you have to expect everyone is trying to scam you all the time as you have non recourse if they actually are.
It means that there are regions where the government can't project authority.
Ukraine before the Russian invasion was a perfect example. You could walk around Kiev without a care in the world, 500km to the east you had death squads trying to suppress an honest to god soviet insurgency.
Wasn't the Maidan Revolution in 2014 also an "insurgency" against the government right in the center of Kiev?
Institutions and authority figures come and go, often deservedly. But a people without a care for their community and its well-being will be in no position to put new and better institutions in their place, or to have a quality life generally.
Just because the CDC suppressed scientists who didn't agree with it's dogma on mRNA treatments doesn't mean we should start feeding babies lead again.
It would be wise for American elites to focus on fixing the causes of unrest, but instead they use corporate media to blame the people for their distrust of the establishment.
Interestingly, the same corporate media pushed the narrative that the George Floyd riots were about police brutality. This is only true in a facile sense, the video was the catalyst. The major causes were intense psychological stress from unprecedented lockdowns, economic implosion, and incessant fear of the virus. In a form of ideological judo they redirected all the anger and angst that had been building up towards a scapegoat. A classic trick rulers use on the ruled.
This is my favourite sentence in the whole article. I'm not sure what the solution really is, but spending 12 months in school just teaching people "how to respond to a crisis without panicking and behaving like a herd of sheep" would be of huge societal value.
We don't all have to do exactly the same thing. Different people can do different things. I've only seen crises where compromises on individual liberty were a grave mistake; but I've seen a lot of crises where by gum the authorities tried that approach anyway with the populace egging them on.
Right?
Authors don't take into account multiple other viewpoints. Climate change for example, no mention at all in the article? My political opponents clearly believe climate change is a doomsday scenario for humanity.
Here in Canada we have a regressive carbon tax which is causing huge problems. It has come to the point that the premiers who ideologically should be in favour or on the same side as our Prime Minister are calling him out and demanding to stop that asap.
This is not the kind of society who is headed toward demise.
A less apocalyptic question is, how do you tell if a system is stuck in a state well below optimum? What are the risks associated with getting out of that state and into a higher state?
Justice in America is badly broken, and most, if not all of our ills (including distrust in the legitimacy of institutions) is a direct result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to sue an individual or institution for harm and to get a fair result. It should be easy, cheap, and fast to get arrested for something criminal and be found either guilty or innocent in a fair trial, judged by a jury of peers. Instead, all but the 1% are priced out of the justice system, and the justice system itself is slow, expensive, and fundamentally unjust. The complexity of law and its practice shelters entire ecosystems of "professionals" who's job is to game the system to obtain the desired result. The price of justice, in both time and money, is itself used as leverage. And leverage is Power. Any society that lets its justice system go, lets it rot under layers and layers of complexity, makes it inaccessible to the average person, has undermined its Purpose. Only momentum, particularly the ignorance of the masses who imagine the system to be "mostly functional", keeps it legitimate. But that ignorant goodwill is finite, and decays as more and more smart, self-interested actors take advantage of the moribund system.
What I find most astonishing is the profound lack of attention given to the justice system itself. Not just its performance in high-profile cases, but its performance in every day cases. This goes part-and-parcel with police brutality and abuse, the "Marshal Law Bubble" that surrounds every LEO in America, because the justice system has their back in an almost unbelievably complete way. The same holds true for state attorney generals and prosecutors: for every story of a person wrongfully convicted, spending 20+ years in prison, how many times have you ever heard of a prosecutor being prosecuted for their malfeasance? How many horror stories of lawsuits getting bogged down in years of pre-trial motions before the poorer of the two litigants has to give up? How many fathers have been separated from their young children for months or years at the whim of an uncaring family court?
In practice, we almost all rely on the fact that its rare to go to court. Everyone knows that to be arrested is to have your life changed, whether or not you're convicted. Everyone knows that to be sued is to lose 10's or 100's of thousands, even if you win. Is this justice? No. It's statistics. It's most people not knowing and not caring because they see the justice system as being only for those who "deserve it". But that's not what justice is supposed to be about. You should be able to sue Roku for changing their terms of service and preventing you from using your TV until you agree. It should be cheap and easy and quick. You should be able to sue Harvard for publishing false data that misled you into doing the wrong thing for your patients, or leading you to wrong conclusions in your own papers. You should be able to sue a LEO for false arrest, violation of your rights, and assault. The fact that you cannot (and in the current system, should not) do any of these things means that bad actors get away with it, constantly, and with no real prospect of correction.
Now, whether this problem is isomorphic to ants following in a circle, I don't know. Maybe. It certainly seems like no-one is thinking about it or talking about it. I know that state law boards are a very powerful (perhaps THE most powerful) lobby in America, and serious justice system reforms would undermine their business model. But the simple fact is that our justice system has already failed. The core function of government has failed. And the public is barely aware of it.
I personally prefer the British legal tradition. Np system is perfect, and many are actively decaying, but to posit that rapid and cheap lawsuits are the only medicine for what ails our society sounds...incomplete...at best.