6 ms·

A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race.

A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here isn’t that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms) dominate but that dominance reprices the entry conditions and eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole thing dynamic. These axioms read like something straight out of a Batesonian case study in runaway.

foster_nyman 8mo ago
As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.
- foster_nyman 8mo ago
  Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism. [edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199
- davidgay 8mo ago
  > renewal mechanisms Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.
dredmorbius 8mo ago
Do you have any specific pointers to his work covering this? Bateson (and several associated anthropologists) are fascinating to me, though more by reputation than direct knowledge. And yes I realise that "a lot of [his] work..." suggests that this shouldn't be too hard to find ;-) ... some early exploratory search suggests Toward an Ecology of Mind, perhaps?
- foster_nyman 8mo ago
  Yes, Ecology is a good starting place; here's a PDF copy - https://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1972.-Gregory-Bateson-Steps-to-an-Ecology-of-Mind.pdf https://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/... "All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.) The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve "steady state." Such systems are "conservative" in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change. Such systems are homeostatic, i.e., the effects of small changes of input will be negated and the steady state maintained by reversible adjustment."
  - dredmorbius 8mo ago
    Interesting, and thanks for the copy. Thought I've had for a while is that there seems to be a significant difference between exogenous and endogenous selection processes. The biological equivalent would be "mating preferences", which leads to numerous otherwise paradoxical characteristics (peacock's tail, deer antlers, etc.), though those often serve a signalling function. I've long suspected that various ethno-nationalist and eugenics ideologies share a similar fault. I'm not entirely sure that these are distinct from other local-maxima stable points, though I suspect they're not. Exogenous selectors tend not to have confounded biases, one would think. Looking forward to seeing what Bateson's views are here.

foster_nyman 8mo ago

As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.

foster_nyman 8mo ago
Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism. [edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199
davidgay 8mo ago
> renewal mechanisms Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.

dredmorbius 8mo ago

Do you have any specific pointers to his work covering this? Bateson (and several associated anthropologists) are fascinating to me, though more by reputation than direct knowledge. And yes I realise that "a lot of [his] work..." suggests that this shouldn't be too hard to find ;-) ... some early exploratory search suggests Toward an Ecology of Mind, perhaps?

foster_nyman 8mo ago
Yes, Ecology is a good starting place; here's a PDF copy - https://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1972.-Gregory-Bateson-Steps-to-an-Ecology-of-Mind.pdf https://ejcj.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/... "All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.) The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve "steady state." Such systems are "conservative" in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change. Such systems are homeostatic, i.e., the effects of small changes of input will be negated and the steady state maintained by reversible adjustment."
- dredmorbius 8mo ago
  Interesting, and thanks for the copy. Thought I've had for a while is that there seems to be a significant difference between exogenous and endogenous selection processes. The biological equivalent would be "mating preferences", which leads to numerous otherwise paradoxical characteristics (peacock's tail, deer antlers, etc.), though those often serve a signalling function. I've long suspected that various ethno-nationalist and eugenics ideologies share a similar fault. I'm not entirely sure that these are distinct from other local-maxima stable points, though I suspect they're not. Exogenous selectors tend not to have confounded biases, one would think. Looking forward to seeing what Bateson's views are here.