On May 10, 2010, at 7:05 PM, Steve Witham wrote:
If people are setting up fragile systems, there's something more than mere speed going on. Ways of buffering shocks are also an old problem.
One thing to look at if people aren't cautious enough is whether caution is being punished by regulation, or carelessness rewarded.
We are actively removing the mechanisms for dealing with buffering and shocks in modern systems. Supply chain optimization reduces inventories. Outsourcing ties organizations more closely together. "Right Sizing" (whatever that is) optimizes for the narrow environmental niche we find ourselves in at the current moment, at the very high cost of eliminating flexibility and the ability to adapt to change or brief shocks in the system. We need to think of economic and social mechanisms to reduce the complexity of the world, and to decompose it into nearly independent modules (see "The Sciences of the Artificial," Herb Simon). States were an early example of this decomposition idea -- the modules were locally defined. Today, the notion of geographic modularity is probably toast. What replaces it?