(2023-01-30) Smith Polycrisis Complex Systems And Trust

Jason Smith on Polycrisis, complex systems and trust. Daniel Drezner mentioned complex systems in his article on “polycrisis” so that makes it relevant for me to talk about — after all, the raison d'être of information equilibrium is to provide tractable ways to take on complex systems.

So what do people mean by polycrisis?

Let’s borrow the definition from a 2022 working paper by political scientists Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon that’s been making the rounds: A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects.

These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.

Call this Definition A. This definition does create a concept that differs from independent “events” coupled with pareidolia (or as Noah Smith puts it: “the polycrisis illusion”) — where “polycrisis” means something different from “omnishambles”.

Maybe a different take? There’s another definition from two of the same authors... with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects

Call this definition B.

Def. B is more confused than Def. A

Drezner offers a “quick and dirty” definition: [Polycrisis is] the concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems

Erik Hoel had a paper written up in Quanta a few years ago that I discussed on my blog (archive copy transferred to substack). The underlying tool was “effective information” — the ability or lack thereof for a model to “decode” a set of data efficiently

Effective information and causal emergence immediately sprung to mind when I saw the various graphics being used to describe polycrisis. For example:

Another source of insight for constructing a useful definition of polycrisis is going to be dissipative structures. Dissipative structures are processes that arise in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium

However, there is a line that I’ll call the ergodic line such that above the line systems can fail to be ergodic because the mediating agents have, well, agency. Below the line, the agents are things like atoms and molecules — they will always visit every part of the available state space (ergodicity). There’s a second law of thermodynamics for these kinds of agents.

There is no second law for agents above the ergodicity line. Humans can suddenly panic and fail to explore the state space.

Our two insights for defining polycrisis here are that 1) we’re dealing with human systems above the ergodic line and 2) in the systems above the ergodic line, shocks will tend to be bad. Functioning means functioning; failure means some kind of crisis.

To jump back to a point made by both Dan Drezner and Noah Smith — that some of the purported interactions and the directions of the arrows were in fact beneficial interactions. The pandemic lockdown in China meant inflation wasn’t as bad; high oil prices encourage clean energy and can lead to growth in that sector

If we’re truly talking about an emergent property of complex systems — that complexity field — then, as per the causal emergence picture, the individual arrows and nodes on the polycrisis diagrams are not the correct degrees of freedom and several connections will appear to “go the wrong way”.

The complexity of human civilization is built on a lot of institutions that require trust as a resource — I trust you to do your bit, and you trust me to do mine, and together we will be able to live a better life.

Some technologies really help economize trust. Money, for example

As a microcosm of human civilization, we can look at the theory of the firm and transaction costs.

The main idea is that trust lowers transaction costs

Going back to Dan Drezner’s second quasi-definition of polycrisis, the complexity of modern society means individuals use systems every day without knowing how they work

However, there is a massive amount of trust underlying civilization — social trust is the emergent quantity of complex non-ergodic agents just like entropy is the emergent quantity of enormous numbers of atoms. A failure of trust — a global bunching up in the state space of opportunities — would lead to a massive number of crises that might even seem unrelated on the surface: wars, recession, institutional failure. Polycrisis.

It’s pretty ironic that David Brooks was writing about a crisis of trust in the Atlantic a couple years ago. I think he is genuinely describing something that is occurring in the US — but he is an agent of polycrisis chaos, not a messenger

To me, one of the largest degradations of trust in the US is due to the lack of elite accountability.

Peter Turchin has his “elite overproduction” hypothesis (that Noah Smith has also discussed)

Trust not just that putting work in will result in the expected outcome, but that meritocracy — the system you buy into when going to college — is a social convection cell you can rely on.

Social media is an exacerbating factor of the crisis of trust. Now that we can see what the elite think, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of them aren’t very different from you or me — they just lucked out in accidents of birth or networks

In addition, social media has allowed us to directly question the elite; not only have the elite have freaked out about this, but the answers we’ve gotten don’t inspire confidence

Erik Hoel has referred to the effect of social media as returning humans as a species to a “gossip trap” — his solution to the “sapient paradox” that modern humans were around for over a hundred thousand years before Göbekli Tepe pops up.

Some industries and political factions benefit from corroding trust in institutions such as science or government (e.g. fossil fuels in regard to global warming; conservatives in regard to social programs). This is in part why I am concerned about the near-term future of the US and the world.

Trust can evaporate in an instant even in our systems built on distrust.

The question of whether polycrisis is a useful concept will take a lot more than a few blog posts and a couple of working papers to nail down

And if we’re trying to do real synthesis, I think there’s a good case to be made that many of the current problems in the world result from a lack of transparency and elite accountability — from authoritarian governments or political parties unaccountable to their constituents in the thrall of disinformation to elite malfeasance going unpunished

Failures of pandemic responses derive from doubt peddled by politicians and grifters. Our inability to address the climate crisis comes from a lack of follow through from major players as well as disbelief that the responsibility will be shared equitably. Right wing fascist and anti-democratic forces are mobilized by an elite that doesn’t want democratic accountability.