this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Often it's a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today's zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.
This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn't. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the "choice" of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. "oh no thanks. I'll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development."
Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.
The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say "the things we own end up owning us" but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.
The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans. To suggest that the complexity supporting the modern world is unwanted or unneeded is to kill 6 billion people.
Are you an advocate for authoritarianism and the death of 6 billion humans to achieve the simplicity of the past? The vast majority of goods and trade are for food and the raw materials of life produced in the largest and only areas of the planet capable of sustaining this population.
Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we've tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.
::: spoiler Logistics is complexity in action.
Supporting infrastructure is equally complex. It was the consolidation of so many industries into a global supply chain that only has a few players that makes the present cost effective. The forces at play are far greater than you realize in scope and scale. Your pitching a post civilization dystopia of death and misery. It's bearings, chemistry, metallurgy, medicine, the list goes on and on.
The future you want will exist a long time from now, but not in the way you imagine it. Biology is the ultimate technology. It is where we are headed a millennia from now. Once the age of scientific discovery is long past and science is nothing more than an engineering corpus, a complete mastery of biology will mean we can create ecosystems with all life and technology existing within elemental cycles balance. At that point, human life will likely simplify in many ways and evolve in others.
Simplification is always regressive and backwards. When complexity seems insurmountable, the solution is to refine and reform. In science, eliminate all the ridiculous names associated. It's not Maxwell's equations; they are the magnetic equations. Reform stupid conventions like using the term light speed to mean the speed of causality. We need massive educational reform at all levels accounting for the wellbeing of career educators while also modernizing to account for video recording technology. We need to make housing a fundamental unalienable human right and the exploitation of survival needs like food and housing should have massive consequences.
But no, pushing against complexity is nonsense. It shows you're naive of the use cases. I recommend you start daily watching Anton Petrov on YT or Odyssey. He covers a white paper research summary daily. You'll learn many applications of technology and this complexity. Watch Frazier Cain for more depth on present astronomy, and watch Isaac Arthur for a view of what a distant future might look like. Read Asimov's books like The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun to see a glimpse of a realistic future.
I know it's a turn of phrase but you don't know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.
You're assuming a lot given what I've said. It's not an "in effect" thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you're missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.
The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.
This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.
Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up "simplification as a regressive thing" with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It's clear you do not understand the article nor my points.