Saturday, 23 March 2024
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Hello. All is well. In the fifth chapter we go through eight different archetypes. An archetype is a type of system with a flawed structure that produces unwanted outcomes.

The first is "policy resistance". This is when the goals of subsystems are misaligned (bounded rationality). Stabilizing feedback loops pull a stock in different directions causing no change but evermore cost for actors directly involved but also indirectly others. For example, the stock level of street drugs. Addicts want high stock. Law enforcement wants low stock. Suppliers want medium stock. Residents want less crime. If law enforcement reduce stock. Suppliers will raise prices. Addicts will commit more crime to afford. Suppliers will invest in supply chain. Law enforcement will have to invest to keep up. The stock of street drugs is stabilized only the efforts on each ends increase. Fighting policy resistance can be counterproductive. Better solutions is attempting to align subsystems' goals. For example if a country needs more people, banning abortion as an effort may lead to policy resistance (unsafe abortion, child abandonment). Instead it may be better to align goals by positive incentives and resolving issues that hinder people from having children.

The second is "the tragedy of the commons". This is when you have a shared renewable stock that is limited but also erodible by more use causing stock to renew less. Taking into account of bounded rationality for each user of the stock. A user directly benefits 1:1 from using it but only shares a fraction of the cost from its use. This means it incentivizes users to use the stock as much as possible but in the end with everyone acting this way will cause everyone to be worse off as the inflow of the renewable resource collapse. The book gives three solutions for this. The first is an honor system. This works if all people respects it but newcomers may not causing it to fail. The second is privatizing the stock. This is probably the best one because it makes the costs 1:1. The issue is that you can't privatize everything, for example pollution into oceans and the atmosphere. The third is regulating it. This works well in many instances, think of traffic lights and bank vault defense. The issue is if information can be reliably gathered to regulate and the regulation not being susceptible to corruption. 

The third is "drift to lower performance" or also known as eroding goals. If we have bias to negative information about the state of a stock, it will make us perceive the state to be worse. Our desired state will be influenced by this, by also being lowered. This is a gradual process as the state lowers, our standards lower. To avoid this, instead of using negative information as benchmark, use positive information as the benchmark. Specify standards to avoid falling for gradual erosion that isn't noticeable. "Can you expect any better from x?", "We're not worse off than others". "x will be x". Statements like this show how we set standards with negative bias. Set standard to when performance was best. Instead of saying "it could be worse", say "it could be better". 

The fourth is "escalation". This is when state of stock is determined by surpassing another stock. For example arms race between states, responding to violence with more violence. Escalation is not just bad, if it's for something like creating more value or being charitable, it can be positive as long as it isn't taken to an extreme to avoid unnecessary puritanism. Solutions to escalation could be mutual agreements to deescalate or not always responding back with more escalation.

The fifth is "success to the successful". This is when success is rewarded with ability to be more successful. Without any mechanisms to level the playing field such as preserving diversification in markets (e.g. antitrust laws), frustrated players may stop playing, and destroy the playing field altogether. Makes me think of statements like "fuck the system" or one I increasingly find online "eat the rich". 

The sixth is "shifting the burden to the intervenor". This is when an external intervention is introduced to a system that is intended to help but undermines the system's ability to regulate itself. This can be reliance on government subsidies, government contracts, or cheap oil. In some cases an intervenor can be good such as the eradication of smallpox by vaccination but in many cases it only obscures the root cause. Makes me think of the classic saying of teaching someone how to fish instead of giving them fish. I think this is interesting in regards to energy usage and the complexity of society. If society's complexity is built on top of a nonrenewable energy source, what happens when it runs out? Absolute collapse? A quick search says ~80% of energy use is nonrenewable at the moment. Scary.

The seventh is "rule beating". This is when rules are made in a way that makes actors follow rules by the letter and not the spirit of the rule. Like an organization using up remaining money allocated frivolously to ensure same allocation of money in next budget. This is a funny one for me because I don't know how much I've struggled with this on the Minecraft servers I managed. 

The eighth is "seeking the wrong goal". I think I would call this one "seeking goal with bad measurement" maybe. This is when we use a quantifiable measurement to determine if our goal is being achieved. For example, if the goal is national security, we may measure this by military spending. This means the real goal is military spending which doesn't have to correlate with national security, it could in fact reduce national security by overspending and underspending elsewhere. The book says GNP (~GDP) may be the worst measurement adopted for measuring welfare/prosperity. It focuses on flow instead of stock. Instead of measuring the capital stock, we measure the throughput of flows. It could be argued a system that can achieve highest capital stock with the lowest throughput is more ideal. 

I wrote about GDP in a previous writing so I found this last archetype very interesting. I think I will look more into it. The idea of measuring stock rather than flow seems almost too good to be true as in why don't we already do that, so it'd be interesting to find out what challenges there may be with this as to why it hasn't been adopted. My assumption is it'd be preferred to measure stock directly but it's easier to measure it indirectly by flow. Why is that? In any case, why would we even dare use a measurement that could make maximizing throughput the goal itself? Feels like some kind of virus spreading, eventually killing its host, humanity, in the process, haha. It's a bit funny. Is this like a virus on a higher level of evolution? A virus in social reality? :o