Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
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Highlights
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From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows: Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
Metadata
Highlights
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In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing the same issue in ecological systems: how do they manage change, how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change-rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, these systems yield as if they were soft. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity.
- But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet.
- I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are: * Fashion/art * Commerce * Infrastructure * Governance * Culture * Nature
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We can examine the array layer by layer, working down from the fast and attention-getting to the slow and powerful. Note that as people get older, their interests tend to migrate to the slower parts of the continuum. Culture is invisible to adolescents but a matter of great concern to elders. Adolescents are obsessed with fashion while elders are bored by it.
- Note: culture war. also art/fashion as drivers of generational identity?