Sunday, 24 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. In the sixth chapter we go through twelve different leverage points, the things in the system we can influence, from least effective to most effective. The first is numbers. These are the constant flow rates we can play with, the parameters of the system. They are low leverage as they don't affect the system's structure, though we tend to argue a lot about them in public discourse. The second is buffers. This is the ratio between stock and flow. Think of the difference between a lake and a river. The latter tends to be more volatile, causing floods. Buffers can stabilize, but they're still low leverage because the possible buffer size is usually hard to change in physical systems. Think of a dam. You don't just rebuild that to allow greater buffer nor may it be possible in practice. Keep in mind bigger is not better when working with constraints was just example I used. The third is stock-and-flow structures. This is basically the plumbing. Road planning. Also low leverage as when it's been built, it's slow and costly to rebuild. Best is usually to learn how to best utilize it once it's built. Even in software this is true… The fourth is delays. Still rather low leverage as many delays you can't do much about. Building infrastructure takes times, that's why it's hard to avoid energy overcapacity and under capacity. Response time is more changeable. Too short, you may overreact, and too long, you might just blow the whole thing up. Central planning is usually pretty bad at appropriate response time. The fifth is balancing feedback loops. Now we're getting to the more juicy parts. First, a balancing feedback loops needs to contain a monitor, signal, and response mechanism. A system usually have multiple different for resilience. You can sweat to cool off, but you don't always sweat, I think. We may forget why we have these emergency responses when we don't use them. What could possibly go wrong if we remove them to save costs. In markets, price stabilization can be obscured by subsidies, taxes, false advertising, anticompetitive conduct. In democracy, feedback between people and government can be obscured by secrecy or bias by self-interests. The sixth is reinforcing feedback loops. This loop is more powerful. Reducing its self multiplying power can be useful to prevent things going crazy or collapse. For example technology advances and markets do not move as fast as economic and population growth. It may be a good idea to slow down this growth to allow technology and markets to catch up to allow for long-term sustainable growth. The seventh is information flows. This is like the story about the electric meter in houses. Because it was placed in a visible place, electricity usage was reduced by 30%. An example of how relying on bad information flow is fishing and market price. Thinking price can be used to prevent overfishing doesn't work as when scarcity increases, prices increase, allowing higher costs to catch the last fish. The eight is rules. Now we're getting to the real stuff. We're bound by the physical laws, that are absolute. The social laws are not. This is rules from lawmakers, rules in organizations, rules in markets, to social norms. Ability to control rules is high leverage, hence why lobbying is common. Those that set the rules for making rules have even more leverage. In the USA, the supreme court by interpretation of laws and the constitution. The ninth is self-organization. This is the beauty of evolution. The ability to change the structure itself, add and remove parts. It's our technological advancements, the social movements and revolutions throughout history. Destruction of biodiversity and culture is a big blow to this process, significantly diminishing a system's resilience. Unfortunately, we kinda tend to act as cancers, weakening the system's ability to self-organize. I think giving importance to spotting aggressive cancers (includes checking ourselves) and thinking of how to deal with it could be good idea. Don't be scared of diversity or losing control. We're only here because of the great diversity that allowed it. Would be a shame to ruin that because we're so silly to think we know what's absolute right and must have full control. Are you sure you're not just a cancer? Tolerating diversity is not the same as tolerating cancers. If you can't distinguish the two, it may be a sign your fear has turned you into a cancer. Something to thonk about. Definitely something that needs more thinking for myself. What exactly is meant by tolerating? When is something a cancer, do they come in different forms and sizes? What behavior is cancerous, is some more aggressive? There's a lot of nuance to this I'm missing here and easiness to get misled in one's thinking, like categorical thinking of either one embraces everything or rejects everything. The tenth is goals. These are the all mighty, bigger goals of systems. We may say the goal of a company is to make profits. But isn't that just the rule? What's it really accomplishing by doing that? Growth is the goal. This is interesting to think about in terms of the size corporations have reached today, having increasingly more leverage over the institutions / states meant to regulate them. The regulations meant to level the playing field to encourage diversity / self-organization in markets. What happens when the cancer reaches a size where it can set the goal for a system. All leverage points below this become less and less useful as long as they're under system where a subsystem can force its misaligned goal. The eleventh is paradigms. This is the all encompassing social reality a person or society has adopted. Our beliefs, Ideas of what money is. While this is hard to change, social reality is fully abstract, not limited by physical reality itself. I guess this is true to some level but the wiring manifests itself in physical reality, but influencing this one is obviously very powerful, but I think it can be easy to underestimate the difficulty. The twelfth is transcending paradigms. I think this is less of a leverage point in a system but then again I guess you could say it is. This is about not attaching to a certain paradigm but understanding our knowledge is limited, and it's better to be open to use what can serve us best for the purpose we set. I think one have to understand purpose will also be a belief. It's tricky how to formulate this in a good way. I guess one way of seeing it is that the paradigm you're attached to may not be the best way to solve the purpose/goal we share. But this really makes me curious what this attachment to paradigms is and what levels of attachment there are. It's truly fascinating. I think some answers to this lie in how the brain constructs concepts. From my subjective experience (so take it with a grain of salt), I seem to have some complete mismatch of how to go about making sense of things with most people around me, which is why I prefer reading books and just writing this. As in, I feel I'm much less attached (not absolute) to ideas or perhaps my brain is unable to some extent? Throughout my whole life it just seemed like people around me didn't ask or question things. When talking with others, they seemed to misinterpret what I said or have a whole other way of valuing how to make sense, or have strong convictions that my brain couldn't compute, like am I insane or is this person a broken disc? Especially confusing me when talking with people smarter than me. I'm not particularly intelligent, and intelligence can be hard to define, but I'm referring to IQ and being able to learn things quickly. Just want to make clear that's not what I'm interested with about this or why. The why may be that I lack ability to learn things in a more intuitive way. One of my frustrations throughout life, which was egotistical of course, was how people assumed what I was thinking or what my desires was, as in how little they think of one. Feeling offended and thinking to myself no… I'm not that involved in whatever fantasy your life may revolve around. I don't see it this way more, it was more as how I felt growing up, though I still recognize some frustration still remains in me, showing itself for brief moments, but it's gradually fading away. The greatest conflict was thinking people valued the same way of making sense, giving too much importance to what people say (especially authority) even if they confused me. Some people seem to be very deceptive, and I'm bad at picking that up, making me trust all people less. Obviously this is me saying this, so I may be perceiving things incorrectly in various ways, so don't take it as what I think as fact more as what I perceived as a human, growing up, still trying to make sense of it.