Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter

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.

>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

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

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

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter: this video Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization: link