slomo wrote:Wombaticus Rex wrote:slomo wrote:As for Tainter, which numbers do you not trust? He does not get quantitative until Chapter 4. The data he presents mostly demonstrate that, past a certain point, there are marginal returns on investments in most or all areas that support complexity. The data are cherry-picked for sure, but do you disagree that investments in agriculture and in R&D yield decreasing marginal benefits?
It's not that I distrust the objectivity of the people reporting the numbers so much as metric value and actual meaning of the numbers themselves, and especially the means of collection. We reach for data when we talk about complex systems because it's so hard to fathom what's going on. Most of the data humans collect is noise-level number soup. That's all. I don't see anything nefarious or flawed beyond that.
The corporate model is flawed and the investment money is being spent by herd bureaucrats...I don't think there's any water to a "mathematical" argument that the consequences of the misbehavior of a powerful minority is therefore the only outcome for those activities. History is full of examples where decades of fruitless wandering struck "exponential benefit" gold.
We still have a LOT to learn. We've also got a flawed dominant paradigm in the drivers seat EXCLUSIVELY for the past Century. That distorts all of our numbers, and also all of our concepts and language.
Basically, give that same $10 billion to a different cast of characters and watch Good Things Come to Life.
Which is currently a fantasy of the highest order.
