[M95D]

It takes homeostasis, a biological mechanism, and tries to suggest that it applies to politics and economy, too. What a strange ideea... Yes, the decisions to intervene should be taken more carefully, but I don't think that interventions "often leads to worse outcomes". In fact, where I live, indecision and lack of interventions are a very big problem.

[readthenotes1]

There is a fairly famous story in management of a guy in the 1960s who fought against building housing projects for the poor by tearing down neighborhoods and building big high rises.

The idea was to give more people a better place to live.

What the opponent said was you're going to concentrate a bunch of poor people in a building that neither we nor they will maintain, it will be far away from any jobs, and it will lead to more crime and more poverty.

I don't think it takes much to say that people are short-sighted and some are only interested in their own personal short-term gain, certainly no metaphor or analogy is needed to state the obvious.

[zamfi]

This is a very interesting story, but I feel like I'm missing something -- any chance you could dig up a reference to this for us?

Housing projects and private high rises seem like they would have similar problems...I'm not finding this easily, but confess I have no academic background in management!

[readthenotes1]

It was, if I recall correctly, discussed in the book called _The Fifth Discipline_ by Senge.

The entire book is about systems and how we typically ignore them to our disadvantage.

There is some overlap between this and Weinberg's Quality books.

And, of course, _Systematics_ explains it all clearly.

[AlbertCory]

> any chance you could dig up a reference to this for us?

you could search for Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (torn down) or Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis (torn down), for starters. Or the Cabrini–Green Homes in Chicago.

[zamfi]

Ah, thanks, yes I'm familiar with the legacies of torn-down public housing projects.

It was the private ones and the implied comparison that I was after -- but now that I'm re-reading the parent post maybe there was no comparison, just a long sentence describing public housing projects as torn-down neighborhoods with high-rises...

[HPsquared]

See also, Le Chatelier's principle.

It kind of makes sense, if a complex system has found some kind of steady state there must be some "restoring forces" at work to hold it there.

[kryogen1c]

> if a complex system has found some kind of steady state there must be some "restoring forces"

I think this is one of those things that is True with a capital T.

If you start with the premise that life is valuable, it is eventually derivable. Life tries to exist, and since existence is path-dependent making a change is likelier to be wrong than right.

[empthought]

I think you and the parent commenter are talking about the anthropic principle. It might be "derivable" but only in the particular situation in which we have found ourselves—and then it becomes less remarkable.

[kryogen1c]

> the anthropic principle

How interesting. Can't exactly run a placebo controlled double blind experiment against the full state of the universe, hm?

I've never thought about the universal preconditions that must be true for me to be thinking about them. This is shifting my whole worldview, thanks!

[empthought]

Glad to have spurred some thought... thanks for telling me!

[photochemsyn]

Complex systems can have multiple different 'steady' states (many valleys in a complex mountain range of energy minima and maxima, in that sense), so while there may be local restoring forces, climbing out of one steady state and into another is extremely common.

[karrot-kake]

> making a change is likelier to be wrong than right.

This agrees with the slightly-neutral theory of evolution. A given mutation is more likely to break something a little bit than improve that something a little bit.

[voldacar]

It is strictly true, in the sense that a stable equilibrium state is a potential well in a system's phase space.

[manmal]

Isn’t that what Adam Smith was all about? It’s not a new idea at least.