Do you agree or disagree with the statement, Reduced fertility led to women playing a greater role all aspects of society. Help policy makers. Tell us why. Email addresses will not be shared, but names and comments will be shared, so use a pseudonym if you do not want your name shared. Read more in…
Tag: complexity
How fertility adjusts
I do not know how fertility adjusts to maintain stable a population. Do you? Help policy makers. Tell us. Email addresses will not be shared, but names and comments will be shared, so use a pseudonym if you do not want your name shared. Read more in Confronting Complexity by Casti, Jones, and Pennock
With abundant healthcare
Do you agree or disagree with the statement, With abundant healthcare most children will live to procreate. Help policy makers. Tell us why. Email addresses will not be shared, but names and comments will be shared, so use a pseudonym if you do not want your name shared. Read more in Confronting Complexity by Casti,…
If fertility per adult is too high
If fertility per adult is too high, then the population explodes and destroys itself. If the fertility rate is too low, then the population fades away. Do you agree or disagree with the statement, If fertility per adult is too high, then the population explodes and destroys itself. If the fertility rate is too low,…
ABUNDANCE PROJECT
A price is paid for the abundance, however. The complexity of 21st-century life increased, making many people uncomfortable with their new high-energy environment. Gradients in the distribution of abundance annoyed many more people. A populist groundswell developed around the world with the stated goal to return to simpler times.
Thought Experiments
A thought, or gedanken, experiment is the creation of a simplified, often fanciful, world for the purpose of understanding the implications of a theory. One of the first was Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which Plato postulates that people are only able to sense a part of the universe about them. The allegory explores what that means and implies. The real value of thought experiments is to generate hypotheses that can be tested in the real world.
THE (NOT ART) EXPERIMENT
At any rate, let’s get back to why we are having this conversation. We are here to use the language of art to search for a boundary between Art and (Not Art) in a real example. Surprises occur at boundaries. Surprises are the basis of humor. So … we might know when we are close to a boundary between Art and (Not Art) when we start laughing.
Mr. Trump and the Global Circus
Just what is the crazy-like-a-fox President-elect of the U.S. up to? His antics would make P.T. Barnum blush with admiration. Mr. Trump has created a spectacle of showmanship on a scale unequaled at any place and at any time in the past. His millions of voters are more Pavlovian than a 50-dog act. And his detractors are as puzzled as they are livid. Let’s step back and take a look at the history leading up to this circus. Perhaps this can provide us with some hint on what to do next, before the lions are released into the cage with us.
The Decline and Fall of Globalization
To understand what happened in the recent US Presidential election, we have to go back to the early 1980s. At that time the overall global social mood shot upward, probably as a consequence of growing international financial integration that tended to undermine the age-old paradigm of “international diversification”. As the social mood became ever more positive, feelings that “everyone is a potential friend” grew stronger and drove events toward increasing interdependence, trade, and cooperation. It’s no accident that the European Union was formed during this period, along with the World Economic Forum in Davos. This story is graphically shown in the diagram below, where we see globalization totally flat until the mid ‘80s, where it exploded until around 2008.
Complexity Gaps Lead to Inequality
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” in his essay of the same name published in 1989. In that article, Fukuyama argued that communistic social and economic principles collapsed along with the Soviet Union thus leading to a victory for liberal-democratic capitalism in their decades-long battle. What many people missed in Fukuyama’s essay was the part in which he wondered whether citizens in the West would proceed to lose moral and spiritual purpose now that the Cold War had ended the East- West ideological conflict.
Self-infanticide
Gödel did something very clever. He found a solution of Einstein’s field equations in which the world lines circled back on themselves. This means that if you were traveling along a world line you would eventually encounter yourself as a baby. Suppose you kill yourself as a baby. Would you still be alive? It would be disturbing if you were both alive and dead. Unlike quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory does not address ambiguity explicitly. The great challenge of modern physics is to unite the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. This has not yet been done.
David Smucker on Breaking the Light
Lloyd takes long, complex exposures in New York City’s streets at night with his handheld 35 mm Canon digital camera. Far from static and serene cityscapes, his photographs exuberantly embrace the energy of the city and its inhabitants. The word embrace, though, doesn’t fully cover what’s going on in these photos. These works are a dance with light. Trusting an intuitive response to the cadences of the patterns of lights illuminating the city, Lloyd moves himself and his camera in time to their unseen rhythms. Each exposure done this way is unpredictable, made in a kind of wild and blind trance. Lloyd must surrender to the power of light as it tears though the darkness. In his dance he follows the light, enabling it to reveal its secrets to him.