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Comment by luis_cho | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know Jay Forester is one of the persons responsible for world3, and the limits to growth report 50 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

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Wow, this takes me back to 8th grade science fair in probably 1982 or 1983. I was casting about for a science project, and came across an article in Creative Computing magazine about this model, and the Limits of Growth and the Club of Rome, and I was like, "yeah, I'll make a population simulation on my Ti/994a in Extended BASIC and that'll be my science project." And so I did. I remember my model predicted population to fluctuate in a kind of sine wave pattern with some major crash in the early 2000's. I remember explaining the concept of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to the judges, and suspecting that my program was suffering a bit from GIGO. And I won in my category and went on to the state level science fair in Jackson, Mississippi, where I did win some scholarship from the Army (well, I'm not built for the army) but got beat out (justifiably) by this kid who had built a TRS-80 controlled robot. I remember being very impressed by his robot, of course, but maybe even moreso by the fact that all the silver finish was worn off his keyboard from where he'd been typing so much. It was also on that trip, during a visit to the university that I saw WordStar for the first time, and I was impressed by the automatic line breaking moving words to the next line, and I also saw some implementation of Lunar Lander on a vector graphics display for the first time.

Ugo Bardi (the author) is also a member of the Club of Rome, which goes a long way towards explaining why the article is written the way it is.

I confess I haven't read the article yet but it gave me the feeling of being related to limits to growth.

It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.

At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.

I'll be honest, I find most of the stuff from that group to be a bit vapid and typically doesn't reflect deep familiarity with the background literature. As an example, the author offhandedly proposes a just-so story about why Rome collapsed. If we go to our trusty 210 reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire [1] (compiled by a historian frustrated that everyone and their pet had different, often contradictory explanations), we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3? Similarly, there are entire fields of studies about how complex systems evolve created since Forrester's work, yet the headline here is all about how complex systems aren't resilient (which flies in the face of most observation and literature).

[1] https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...

we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3?

Most causes in the list are just idiotic, so it doesn't matter. There are a few that are more convincing than "sexuality" TBH.

Anyway, yes, the article and everything around it is just weak, malthusianism all over again. The first wtf for me was the "every civilization has fallen, why not ours". Exactly, why not? Don't they see any difference? And did all previous civilization fall for the same reasons?

Maybe they fell because "complexity"... come on.

> we see that "depletion of mineral resources" is #53. So why #53 as opposed to #191, or #67, or #3?

I think the list is on alphabetic order.

Regardless of the reasons above the real problem is that we are putting all the eggs on one basket. When we listen to Elon Musk saying we need to be an interplanetary society we think "the guy is right", but we have difficulties on accepting that having a single global economy is dangerous.

Resilience is the new buzz word but anti-fragility is what we should strive for. Nassin Tabel give Switzerland as an example. Again you see the pattern, instead of one big and fragile system you have 26 cantons with some degree of independence.

Some additional criticisms and information of the Club of Rome maybe found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics

TLDR of the criticism is their reasoning is amateurish and do not reflect reality, reflect professional norms, etc.

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