Blog Posts and Writings Tagged: Society

Humans or animals acting collectively according to custom or established rules

Blog 3. Complex Systems—including you, me, and weather

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A social fix = new regulation (nonlinear rule) = new problem?

In our society, we create new laws (e.g. Medicare) by legislation as done by congress, state legislatures, county supervisors, or town councils. We create new regulations (speed limits and plumbers’ license requirements) through agencies who get their authority from higher legislation. Each law or regulation is intended to fix a previous problem, and sure enough, each law or regulation generates at least one new problem. Continue reading →

Conservative and Liberal–Two Cultures

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CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL–TWO CULTURES IN ONE AMERICA?

 (adapted from lectures, 2007-08)

One day a friend remarked to me that he had been talking with a neighbor, when my name came up in the conversation. The second man let out an expression like, “Humph, he’s a liberal.” I found this amusing. I wondered what, exactly, did the second man mean? The media use the terms, “liberal” and “conservative,” or “left” and “right,” without ever defining them. I want to look at the meaning and implication of the terms, because the country is divided politically, socially, and religiously into two camps labeled as “liberal” and “conservative.” States are identified as either blue or red. I see a nation divided not so much by money as by different ways of life that are generated and shaped by beliefs. And if you think this polarity is entirely new, see the epilog at the end. Continue reading →

Blog 1. Change and technology

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So it’s changing.   So what?

So what?  I see the world changing, largely due to technologies that few people understand and even fewer feel empowered to control. The world has always been changing, but now the rate of change is proportional to the sum of all changes that have occurred before. That’s what we mean by the term, “exponential,” a term used so often in the media that it is accepted as meaning “large,” without the understanding that it means larger than large.  The purpose of these pages is to offer an analytical review of where we’ve come, and where we’re going, and why. The WHY is embedded in the unnoticed rules by which humans affect each other. Understanding the rules by which the individual parts affect each other—that’s the key to understanding and to controlling complex systems, about which these pages will say more. Continue reading →