Not sure how many will be able to read this but it's a useful recap of how true societal #resiliency accepts systems failures as normal and hence can better accommodate bad days.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/05/12/opinion-spain-portugal-blackout-power-outage/
Down the rabbit hole!
Seminal paper, free to read.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235741761_Self-Organized_Criticality
I feel like that was half of a good introduction to the ideas. Mostly I’m unhappy about the claim that (all?) ecosystems are evolving “toward” near-criticality. It rather ignores the evolutionary rewards for resilience and robustness — which could be useful examples!
A very chewy concept and yet another begging for days being longer, 36 hours at least.
Thinking of it in the frame of evolution, is species diversity the built-in resilience, the workaround that is an inevitable outcome of the pressure imposed by inherent instability?
One of the great fundamental questions, yesno? I remember wonderful arguments about whether diversity and resilience were related, and whether it needed to be species or trait diversity…
36 hours and two of me, that would be about right.
Come to think of it (redundantly in all probability), telecomm networks and power grids neatly analogize to natural systems under constant selection pressure.
One difference is that in the case of our technological systems we -technically- have the capacity for actual intelligent design. But the result does not reflect that.
The *whole* system isn’t amenable to intentional design, though, because it includes agents with competing or even exclusive goals, yesno?
I'd have to say yes.
Doug Bostrom
clew