Comment by zeth___ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeth___ | Hacker News Reader

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What you're talking about is the difference between an ecology and a monoculture.

The reason why we don't see monocultures in nature is because they put every single one of their members at risk of sudden death. A single pathogen can wipe them out. The exhaustion of resources required to sustain them can starve them. The build up of by products can kill them. Think of a medieval town drowning in excrement, running out of top soil and about to get hit by the plague.

An ecology on the other hand puts none of their members at risk by virtue of their existence because they are diluted. Think of a band of hunter gatherers, they might individually die at 40, be exposed to ebola and worse, but the fact they are so widely separated and so few means that they have few if any vulnerabilities that can kill the whole tribe.

The reason why we see monocultures now is because they are more efficient and our time horizons are tiny. Amazon will fail catastrophically. Billions or trillions will be lost. No one will learn anything because it's cheaper not to than to build a really resilient network.

This is a greatly simplified and probably unproductive view of both ecologies and monocultures. Certainly nature as a whole is an ecology, but you are vague in defining what a monoculture even is, or how both even apply to human culture.

To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life.

Is Amazon itself a monoculture? Is that relevant? Is enforcement of law by the state a monoculture? There's a lot of evidence to suggest that centralized information management entities are actually much more robust in the long term than a loose confederation of peers.

I think it's fair to be reminded here that centralized computing has existed in the past, and that the IBM was unsinkable.

The glib rebuttal would be that the internet was once distributed, and it was unimaginable that the content would become as centralized as it has today.

>To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life.

That there is a massive monoculture in an area that was an extreme desert until as little as 5000 years ago makes my point that a monoculture is more efficient in the short term. A human life is a terrible stick to measure geological time, one might as well measure success in the stock market using an atomic clock.

I have not defined what a monoculture is because it should be obvious by the name. Likewise for ecology.

>Is Amazon itself a monoculture? Is that relevant?

Yes. And because monocultures are prone to sudden collapses.

>Is enforcement of law by the state a monoculture?

Depends on the number of states. Depends on the diversity of laws between the states.

>There's a lot of evidence to suggest that centralized information management entities are actually much more robust in the long term than a loose confederation of peers.

The fact that we don't observe this in nature, or that the few times we do observe it is either before or after a mass extinction event should tell you that evidence has too narrow a time horizon.

I think your central claim is sort of refuted by history, and I think there's two parts to it.

1. How relevant "natural" ecology is to understanding longevity of modern culture: unclear, probably not very.

2. Monocultures by nature are less robust, even in the context of human society: well, you need only examine how quickly distributed hunter gatherers were exterminated by less distributed agrarian societies, who were in turn more swiftly replaced by more centralized industrialized societies...

My personal hypothesis: It's probably more reasonable to say that humans were the first aspect of natural ecology to get really deep into economies of scale, and by virtue of that, retained a monopoly on that incredible power relative to the rest of natural ecology.

Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything from food to atmosphere without it being subsidized by natural resources that are not renewable at the rate at which we're exhausting them, industrial civilization will collapse in all its complexity. To take a natural ecological example: just because a predator figures out a very efficient way to eat all of the available prey does not protect it from when the food is exhausted. Just because an invasive herbivore is better at stripping the landscape bare of vegetation does not protect it from the consequences of its success. Just because agricultural and industrial civilizations supplanted the hunter gatherers does not mean that they are sustainable long term. If society manages to completely replace its habitat and resource inputs with technological prowess, then it will survive. We are not even close to that point yet given our current dependencies. We depend on a finite amount of energy, sunlight stored in an efficient chemical form millions of years ago, and predictable weather in order to grow crops in the ground outdoors. Oceans with a limited regenerative capacity needed to feed the world that are being overexploited. Soil phosphate and other minerals that we already must add back artificially, also using non-renewable inputs. We are not separate or dominant over natural ecology until we are no longer dependent on it for survival, and until that point we're like college students living on loans and our parents' money and calling ourselves wealthy and independent.

This is just moving the goalpost. What you're saying is that modern humans are too good for their own good :).

Anyway, I don't understand the religion of distribution (especially in context of finite resources). Yes, distributed systems are more robust. But they pay for this by being massively less efficient than equivalent centralized ones. It's a fair tradeoff, but a tradeoff. It's like 5 people in a (single) car vs. 5 people on bicycles. Which setup is better depends on where those people want to go.

That is abterrible analogy.

What we have is either ten people walking or 10,000 people strapped in the space shuttle cargo bay. That it takes the ten people 30 years to walk from Lisbon to Singapore vs 45 minutes with the shuttle isn't the right comparison. It's that the shuttle explodes 2% of the time.

That you are forcing me to be with you on the shuttle because you don't understand the risks should be all the reasons we need for walking instead.

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