If not optimization, then what?

[nancylebov]

stoutfellow just recommended The Collapse of Complex Societies, a book with the premise that complex societies collapse because they have to add complexity to respond to new challenges, but returns to additional complexity keep getting smaller. I wonder if part of the reason is that old complexity generally [1] doesn't go away, even when the challenge it was added to address is gone.

And that amazon link led me to The Health of Nations, which seems to say that corporations and governments are both sociopathic, and we need some other way of organizing ourselves which is respectful of actual live people.

Anyway, I'm so used to the idea that what you do on the large scale if you have knowledge and power is that you try to optimize something that I'm mulling what an advanced non-optimizing society would look like. And I'm reminded of a bit from Gregory Bateson that ecologies don't try to maximize any single factor, but people make the mistake of believing that more money is always better.

Anyway, I'm not sure what a non-optimizing society would look like, though possibly some anarchists have ideas on the subject.

I considered calling this post "Null-O", but I don't think enough of my readers know of William Tenn's excellent "Null-P", a story about non-Platonic government-- that is, government based on finding the most average leader rather than the best. Now that I think about it, it's a story of the failure of optimization.....

[1] The end of segregation would count as eliminating a chunk of complexity, I think.

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's true that societies always increase complexity. Certainly capabilities need to be added to meet new challenges (and being able to do that requires a degree of complexity!) but I think society does discard capabilities, and their associated complexities, too. A good deal of formal class/rank/status distinction has disappeared in most western societies for instance. Being 'noble' no longer exempts one from taxes for example and so the complexities associated with maintaining noble status have disappeared. The same thing applies to distinctions of freeness and unfreeness, special status for clergy.

What does worry me more is globalization (from this perspective). If all economies, markets, societies tend to a single homogenous model then the necessary complexity to deal with a changing environment, including different models competing for "most fit" diminishes.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Good point about status-related complexity getting shed.

It still wouldn't surprise me if there's generally a net increase in complexity until something breaks.

[avram]

I'm not convinced that the abolishment of formal class distinctions is a reduction in complexity. In a society with formal class distinctions and low class mobility, life is pretty simple: You're born into a class, your family educates you as to what your expected to do as a member of that class, and you stay in that class for the rest of your life.

In our society, people still strive to display status, but there are few (if any) formal rules, and little keeping the lower classes from spoofing the class markers of the higher classes, so the markers are constantly changing.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

In a society with formal class distinctions and low class mobility

But that's not what happened in societies with formal hierarchy. Economic mobility (up and down) existed and a great deal and time and effort was expended on such things as perpetuating one's legal status as 'noble' even though one didn't have he means to support a 'noble' lifestyle and, conversely, by the upwardly mobile on gaining the appropriate patents.

[zenlizard]

I'm not convinced that less technologically developed societies are also less complex. Therefore, I don't buy into the premise that there is any such phenomenon as a law of diminishing returns, as is implied by this "complexity"

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I can believe, I think, that all societies are about equally socially and emotionally complex for individuals, but I also think large economic and governmental organizations add a layer of complexity.