[lopatin]

I know that the point of this book is stated to be "that there's a clearly visible coarse-grained order that drives biological and social life."

I'm sorry, I'm probably dumb, but I'm not getting the "point" of the book based on this summary.

All the examples shown seem to say: See there are macro trends happening, some of them are exponential. And here are some correlations that prove they have an affect on the real world, seee?

Can someone explain what I'm missing?

Edit: I guess maybe the point is we need to pick up the pace of innovation as a society?

[0xbadcafebee]

Read on and you find that the end result of picking up the pace is infinite growth in finite time, which is impossible, which means we will instead have a phase transition. Which is an obscure way of saying "a cataclysmic change". If we keep up the pace of innovation, something is going to change very severely, and we have no idea what or how.

I think about it in terms of weapons. Over time we increasingly advanced the innovation of weapons. In an extremely short amount of time we peaked at nuclear weapons, which, if they were actually used regularly, would reach a phase transition: virtually all life on the planet destroyed, with a small collection of humanity transitioning to underground bunkers and underground warfare. And then some new life would emerge on the planet and take over, like a radioactive slime mold or something. So far we have simply decided not to trigger this change, but all someone has to do right now is push a big red button.

So the infinitely increasing innovation leads to a cataclysmic phase transition. I think the point is that there's lots of these things that are moving towards phase transition.

[dbaboci]

From my perspective the point of the book is to shed light on some of these macro trends that are not typically intuitive. So we expect walking speed to be random, but it is driven by the population of a city. So a lot of decisions in business or urban planning for example could learn a lot by knowing these macro trends (West has been one of the first to explore how these trends relate to scaling)

[zarkov99]

I only skimmed the book but I got the impression that it was a commentary on how scaling "laws" pervade all classes of complex systems, systems as different as a city and the human vascular system, and how understanding these led to insights across domains. I believe there is a good sam harris podcast with the author.