Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter
Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter on HackerTube: recommended by 5 Hacker News commenters across 5 separate months, 2015–2023.
Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.
What HN commenters said
10 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
seltzered_May 2020Strongly recommends
The best way to think about this is the classic Buckminster Fuller quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Spend some time watching Tainter's speech on complexity and collapse: ▶ this video . Particularly the adult conversations we need to have at the end of the talk. Also try Kate Raworth's explanation of the 'three horizons' framework: [link]
in “Demand Nothing Less Than a Visionary Future” · View on HN
myshpaJul 2023Recommends
> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [link] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [link] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [link] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter ▶ this video Revealing the Naked Emperor – Paris, 2° & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [link]
in “How, Mathematically, We’re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet” · View on HN
monday_Nov 2017Recommends
The author's position seems to be that the very notion of civilizational collapse is flawed because people often come up with reductionist, poorly supported ways of explaining it. The unspoken implication here is that whoever brings up a threat of collapse in a political argument hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Stephen Bannon referencing Gibbons work comes to mind, and, come think of it, that's probably what prompted the author to write this piece. Denying a historical phenomenon for political gain is as bad as selectively citing a two century old book to justify xenophobia. It is revealing that the author mentions Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies", and then dismisses it's meticulous definition of collapse as "jargon". Before coming up with this definition Tainter spent a whole chapter describing many, many examples of social collapse including the ones mentioned in the article. The definition arises from these examples and absolutely covers the collapse of Rome, Bronze Age and others. As for how we define and study the social collapse without arbitrarily designating some cultures as superior to others - a good example would be collapse of ecosystems. In this case you can have a sensible definition of complexity and energy intake and the collapse would be a sharp decline in both. There is a whole framework for similar studies in social collapse - see this talk. ▶ this video
in “Theories of civilisational ‘collapse’ grow less convincing when scrutinised” · View on HN
jontasDec 2016Recommends
This video [1] has a great explanation and exploration of why innovation seems to be slowing down. He uses data coming from the patent system over a period of 100 years. The video touches on much of what is in this study and does a great job of explaining it. [1] ▶ this video
in “Are ideas getting harder to find? [pdf]” · View on HN
faizshahApr 2015Recommends
This is incorrect, societies have collapsed regularly throughout history. A collapse doesn't have to be a total destruction of the society, it's most often a fast transition to a lower level of social complexity. One of my favorite books (and a book referenced by the link above) is "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph A Tainter, he gives a great study on the nature of collapse with lots of examples (note, some of the examples are a little dated and dubious like the Ik). He also gave a few presentations on this: ▶ this video
in “Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf]” · View on HN
brakmicAug 2022Cites it
Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter: ▶ this video Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization: [link]
in “The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)” · View on HN
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dredmorbiusMay 2021Cites it
Meandering down this diversion a bit... First, yes, I generally agree with you. What I've noticed listening to a lot of lectures over the past few years are typically breaks at roughly: 90s, 5m, 10m, that 20--30m spot, 45--60m, 90m, and very occasionally a longer session, though I'd argue that 2h is about the maximum which can be sustained in a single session. The shortest are just teasers, often commercial broadcast. They're not informative but more advisory , and really only advertisements for some additional content, which is the medium's strength.[1] A 4--10m segment is a brief introduction to a topic, beginning with about the span of a noncommercial broadcast, and including the typical length of a quick YouTube video. You can actually cover quite a bit of the basics of a topic, or mesh together a number of topics into once related thread. At 20m you're hitting one of the natural spans of human focus and the point at which attention starts to wander without some form of internal break or diversion. Longer presentations are often a fusion of 2--3 15--20 minute segments. I note that many well-structured podcasts aim for about this mark ("History of Philosophy" by Peter Adamson comes to mind.) If you're aiming to fill a 30 minute timeslot, 20--25m allows a bit of additional padding on either side for other filler as well. Lecture presentations tend to run variously about 20, 30, 45, 50, or a full 60 minutes. Typically there's a Q&A session, and in an academic context, an int
in “James Bond Unmasked (1968)” · View on HN
mythrwyMar 2017Cites it
Except local elites have less real power. Corruption or "real motives" of a global elite aside, I look at it as the difference between monolithic code bases and well designed separation of concerns. One is less prone to catastrophic failure and easier to repair when failure does occur. Joseph Tainter I think hits the troubles with centralization right on the head. ▶ this video
in “David Rockefeller has died” · View on HN
MichaelMoser123Jan 2016Cites it
>Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged along too. [23] And as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase My question is: significantly more wealth seems to be generated by big corporations by means of financial 'instruments' rather than by value creation; is that correct? Also this lecture [1] says that scientific and technological breatkhroughs are much harder to achieve these days - because all the shallow fruit is already taken and it costs more to digg deep. Now doesn't that make value creation harder for the coming decades? (for example the PC revolution was based on breakthroughs in physics/semiconductors/electronics - these will be harder and harder to achieve) So it is hard to tell which one will dominate for the near future: value extraction by means of financial trickery (my guess is that this makes society more hierarchical, and the top of the hierarchy will try to enforce equal standing for the lower ranks) or the possibility of real value creation (this one would create a chance for a wider audience) ? [1] Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter ▶ this video
in “The Refragmentation” · View on HN
LitostDec 2015Cites it
Much as i don't want to cause any further depression in an already quite depressing thread, but if you follow Joseph Tainters work on The Collapse of Complex Societies. ▶ this video a) Complexity has killed off pretty much every major society prior to ours. b) People's innate desire to problem solve increases complexity. c) Cheap energy has enabled this process. So there's an argument, an unlimited source of free energy would actually be a major problem because 1) It would enable more complexity, which is already pretty unmanagable. 2) You've still the problem of out of control resource usage.
in “99% of Costa Rica's electricity came from renewable energy in 2015” · View on HN