Reddit reviews How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality
We found 1 Reddit comments about How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The assessment is interesting, and from a physical/dynamical perspective, it's very enticing. However I can't help but feel unsatisfied that still it's not clear what society should actually do in such a situation.
I also tend to agree with the wildfire analogy right at the very end and have used it myself a few times. I think the useful thing about a wildfire is its obvious ability to quickly deconstruct a massive amount of space at a molecular level, allowing new life to take its place. Nature, evolution, culture are all emergent properties of hysteresis; the past is encoded deeply into the future. When the environment/constraints of life change quicker than the hysteresis allows, societies (or avalanches) collapse. While catastrophic, these collapses can also open new space for new opportunities to blossom that otherwise would not get the chance to.
So I think the problem is that as humans, a controlled and quick deconstruction is not something we like or are good at doing. Tradition, while useful in it's wisdom, also has an interval of relevance. If the constraints of life change quicker than tradition can explain, one must change and explore the chaos and unknown. The age old dichotomy of left and right or yin and yang. Obviously it's a balance of the two, so that means we need to learn as a society when to be swift, and when to be calm.
In today's world where change seems inevitable and tradition longs for relevancy, we face the dilemma of what we keep and what we throw over board. If we don't figure it out fast enough, the probability of collapse or at least a catastrophe will continue to increase as the constraints of life overpower our ability to make the choices required to create a good future and prevent misery.
PS. The citations on the wiki article on Self-organized Criticality is an interesting place to explore the idea of criticality in nature, the human brain, and society. One of the original authors, Per Bak, wrote a whole book on this subject which I've heard is good though I have not had the chance to read yet.