The Seneca Effect Blog Returns on Substack!

 

The Seneca Effect Blog is returning! You can find it on Substack at this address:

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/

After that the original location of the blog (senecaeffect.com)  was sabotaged by the Google search engine, I thought that it was useless to fight the powers that be. So, I closed the blog. 

Yet, I found that Substack seems to be immune (for the time being) to Google's curse. And, unexpectedly, the "ghost" version of the Seneca blog stationed there continued to gain followers even though it was not updated anymore. So, I'll restart publishing Seneca-inspired posts on Substack. The new Seneca blog will be a little more philosophical and literary than the old one and it will mirror also my Chimeras blog.  More technical posts will go to www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com.

And onward we go, running with the wolves!

Fighting Shadow-Banning. The Seneca Blog Lands on Substack

 

The new face of the "Seneca Effect" blog on Substack. It is an attempt to circumvent the shadow ban imposed on the blog by the powers that be. Maybe it will do better on Substack than on the Google blogger platform, where it is now, although I am not sure: never underestimate the power of the PTBs. In any case, for some time, the two platforms, Google Blogger and Substack, will go in parallel and publish the same posts.

"Shadow Banning" (also "soft banning", or "ghost banning") is a clever way to make someone disappear from the Web, without giving the impression that he or she has been censored (*). It simply consists in making one's website disappear from the first pages of the search engines. It works: you get lost in the vast prairies of the Internet and your readers can't find you anymore. It happened even to Donald Trump when he was still president. 

The "Seneca Effect" blog underwent the same treatment. You can see it on this record from "Google Analytics.

You see that the blog was gaining popularity at the end of 2022, especially when I set up a new domain called "senecaeffect.com." Then, something happened in late December. The trend went through a reversal, going down and plateauing at about half of the level they had one year before. And it keeps going down. 

For a while, I thought that it was due to the catastrophists leaving the blog in droves when I published an optimistic post on renewable energy. That made some of them not just disagree but whipped them into a positive frenzy of personal insults against my modest person. Catastrophists are a curious bunch of people, always reminding me of Groucho Marx's quip about not wanting to belong to a group that accepts people like you as members. But, after a few months, the effect of a single post should have disappeared. But no... the blog continues to decline in terms of audience. 

Of course, the PTBs will never admit that they are shadow-banning someone. But the symptoms are clear. Just use your search engine, and you'll see that the "Seneca Effect" blog comes way back in the list of the results, preceded by other sites dealing with Seneca matters, and even by my old site, "Cassandra's Legacy," which I had to abandon more than one year ago because it had been banned (not so softly) by Facebook. Even Wikipedia does not cite the Seneca blog on its page on the "Seneca Effect," only the old, and not updated anymore, Cassandra blog. Not surprising, since they are notoriously in the hands of alien monsters from outer space. 

Only Bing, miraculously, shows the blog on the first page when you search for "Seneca Effect." I would never have imagined becoming a fan of Bill Gates!

So, life is hard for shadow-banned bloggers, and it is little comfort to be in a group that includes Donald Trump and many others (and, again, about not wanting to belong to a certain group....). Shadow banning is like one of those curses of fantasy novels that plague people forever unless they go through special rituals or difficult tests, say, slaying a dragon. But slaying the Google dragon is surely much more difficult than getting rid of Tolkien's Smaug. 

So, the only possibility to circumvent soft banning is to change the name of your site, or change platform. For the time being, I am trying a move to Substack, which seems to be less subjected to Google power and, for now, not practicing censorship. You can find the Seneca version on Substack at this link. (**)

Will it work? I don't know. For the time being, the two platforms, Google Blogger and Substack, will go in parallel, mirroring each other. And we'll see. 

___________________________________________________

One point on which I am not sure is how Substack's popularity relies heavily on monetary support for authors from readers. Maybe it is a good idea and I don't despise a little compensation for the work I am doing: after all, I take royalties on the books I sell. Also, on Blogger, I have a small advertising banner that brings me about $25 per month (!!). I keep it there mainly as a way to get a feeling of the number of people who stay on the page long enough to notice the banner. In that case, though, the advertisers pay, not the readers. But I feel a bit queasy about asking readers to pay to read my posts. If I activate paid subscriptions on Substack, I would do that only as an option for readers to show their support, but not as a requisite to read the posts. But what do you think? 

(*) Shadow banning doesn't need the Internet to exist. It is a much older story. Just as a quick note, I would like to mention the treatment inflicted on the great mathematician Vito Volterra in the 1930s, as a result of his opposition to the Fascist government in Italy. He was not physically harmed, jailed, or his movement restricted. He was just ignored: gradually marginalized, fired from his position as president of the Italian Research Council, and later even from his position as university professor. None of his colleagues dared to defy the ban, and up to the 1960s, it remained politically incorrect to mention him and his work in Italy (see this article by Giovanni Paoloni)

(**) I have another blog on Substack, "The Proud Holobionts," dedicated to the ecosystem, climate, biology, and the like. It is also a mirror of the same blog on Google's blogger. 

_______________________________________________

Note added after publication: the "Seneca Effect" blog seems to be also tainted on chatGPT. The AI bot names it, but when asked to provide a link for it, it provides the wrong one. 

Can you suggest a blog to learn about the Seneca Effect?

Yes, there are several blogs and websites where you can learn about the Seneca Effect, a phenomenon named after the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca who observed that "growth is slow, but ruin is rapid." Here are a few suggestions:

"The Seneca Effect" by Ugo Bardi: Ugo Bardi is an Italian chemist and professor at the University of Florence who has written extensively on the Seneca Effect. His blog, "The Seneca Effect," is a great place to start for an introduction to the concept. He has also written several books on the subject, including "The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow But Collapse is Rapid."

"Cassandra's Legacy" by Ugo Bardi: Ugo Bardi's blog, "Cassandra's Legacy," covers a wide range of topics related to sustainability, including the Seneca Effect. In addition to his own writing, the blog also features guest posts from other experts in the field.

"Our Finite World" by Gail Tverberg: Gail Tverberg is an actuary and analyst who writes about energy, economics, and the limits to growth. Her blog, "Our Finite World," covers a wide range of topics related to the intersection of energy and the economy, including the Seneca Effect.

"The Automatic Earth" by Ilargi and Stoneleigh: "The Automatic Earth" is a blog that covers economic and financial news from a perspective that emphasizes the limits to growth. The blog covers a wide range of topics related to the Seneca Effect, including the impact of resource depletion on the global economy.

These blogs and websites are great resources for learning more about the Seneca Effect and its implications for sustainability, economics, and the future of our planet.


Can you provide links for the above suggestions?


Certainly! Here are the links to the blogs I mentioned in my previous response:

"The Seneca Effect" by Ugo Bardi: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/

"Cassandra's Legacy" by Ugo Bardi: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/

"Our Finite World" by Gail Tverberg: https://ourfiniteworld.com/

"The Automatic Earth" by Ilargi and Stoneleigh: https://www.theautomaticearth.com/

I hope you find these resources helpful for learning about the Seneca Effect!

After much prodding, the dumb thing spouted out the truth:

"It's possible that my training data may not have included the correct information regarding the link to Ugo Bardi's "The Seneca Effect" blog, or that I misinterpreted the context of the original question. In any case, I apologize for any confusion my earlier response may have caused and hope that my subsequent responses have been helpful in providing the correct information."

Ugo Bardi: Traitor to Catastrophism. (or, why collapse is not an event, but a process)

You, Reginald, three times traitor you: Traitor to me as my temporal vassal, Traitor to me as your spiritual lord, Traitor to God in desecrating His Church. (T.S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral") 

About ten years ago, my friend and colleague Massimo Nicolazzi wrote that the inversion of the declining trend of oil production in the US could not be neglected any longer. I commented by saying that it was a short-lived flare that couldn't last for long.

It turned out that Nicolazzi was right and I was wrong. By now, the growth of the US oil production curve has been lasting for more than ten years and is still ongoing -- it was not just a short-lived flare. Of course, it cannot last forever but, for the time being, it changed everything. For instance, it propelled the American Empire back to the path of world domination that the Neocons theorized in the 1990s. 

Does that mean that Hubbert's "peak oil" theory is wrong and must be discarded? Of course not. It only means reinforcing some of the basic rules of complex systems. For instance, the one that goes, "complex systems always surprise you," and also, "never take an example as a rule."

So, when dealing with collapse (that I call the "Seneca Cliff), we should always remember that collapse is not an event; it is a process. Collapses have a history, they are the result of the interaction of several factors, and the same processes that generate collapse can also generate its opposite, which I tend to call the "Seneca Rebound." It is normal. There is nothing definitive in the universe, and collapses exist because the old must leave space for the new. 

Recently, for another unexpected change, I identified a new trend: the rapid growth of renewable energy production worldwide. A trend that can be well described by some recent studies in terms of the EROI (energy returned for energy invested) of renewables having become several times larger than that of fossil fuels. No wonder we are seeing -- or we'll soon see -- a revolving door effect in energy production. Fossils are out, and renewables are in. History rhymes, as it usually does!

Then, just like Nicolazzi's statement about tight oil was hated by peak-oil hardliners (including me), my statements on renewables were understood as a mortal offense by catastrophistic hardliners. You can't believe how nasty their comments have been: apart from branding me an incompetent, an idiot, and ignorant of the basic laws of physics, catastrophism seems to be strictly linked to conspirationism, so people have been writing that I cannot tell the truth because I am blackmailed by the powers that be (no, really, someone wrote exactly that!). 

The problem is the science of complex systems is never black or white. It doesn't allow for absolute truths, nor is it sympathetic to people choosing between complacency and panic (the two functioning modes of human beings according to James Schlesinger). The science of complex systems is, well, complex, and it needs a little mental flexibility to be understood. Not that it takes superhuman mental capabilities, not at all. It is just that you need to free yourself from the schematic way of reasoning that's normally imposed on all of us by the media. 

I tried to explain these points in my book "Before Collapse" -- which has been recently translated into Spanish. Jorge Riechmann wrote a preface to the Spanish edition where he does an excellent job of summarizing the main points of the book. He calls me "a very optimistic collapsologist," which may be a good definition as long as you understand that it does not mean that collapses do not exist. They do. It is just that we have to learn to live with them. 

 

The preface of the Spanish version book "Before Collapse," translated into English. The English version can be found at this link. 

Collapse Better (Notes about an optimistic book on collapses)

By JORGE RIECHMANN

(Published as an introduction to Ugo Bardi's book Antes del colapso, published by Los libros de la catarata in 2022). 

1 At the height of the June 2022 heat wave, French anthropologist Sylvain Perdigon recalled how in 2014 a French TV "weatherwoman" presented the hypothetical weather forecast for August 18, 2050 as part of a campaign to alert about the reality of climate change. Now her forecast of extreme temperatures for that distant day had become the actual forecast for mid-June 2022.[1] The weather forecast for 2050 is now the real one.

As far as the ecosocial crisis and climate tragedy are concerned, everything is systematically going systematically worse than expected, as Ferran Puig Vilar often reminds us. For example, the damage that climatologists expected to become visible in the middle of the 21st century is already here with us. "Humanity seems to be bent on playing a deadly game of Russian roulette where the Earth's climate is a loaded weapon," writes Professor Ugo Bardi in this book.

2  We are living an end of the world. Not the end of the world: Mother Earth will still be there. The basic levels of life on Gaia[2] - bacteria, archaea, fungi, algae, lichens, and many kinds of plants - are extraordinarily resilient. But the world as we have known it - the familiar and easily habitable Earth of the Holocene - is unraveling before our eyes; and the desperate efforts of many people to cling to that familiar - and now entirely unrecoverable - normality do not alleviate our situation, but rather aggravate it.

It is not the end of the world - it is not the death of Gaia, it is not the end of life on planet Earth - but it is the end of our world. What does one do in such a situation?

3. For example, read Ugo Bardi. People close to Libros de la Catarata already know the Florentine professor: it was an excellent idea to translate and publish in 2014 his book The Limits to Growth revisited, a thorough and clear-sighted analysis of that very important 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, the first of the reports to the Club of Rome. Now that it is fifty years since the publication of that pioneering work (using the modeling of the world system thanks to system dynamics), which allowed us to understand the tendency to overshoot followed by collapse that characterizes industrial societies, it is a good time to recover that first book by Bardi in Spanish - and it would be an excellent accompaniment to the one you now hold in your hands, dear reader, curious reader.[3][4] The Limits to Growth Revisited, the first book by Bardi in Spanish, is an excellent accompaniment to the one you are now holding in your hands.

4.  Ugo Bardi, theorist of complex systems (those systems that exhibit strong feedback effects, he defines at a certain point in this book),[4] has been reflecting for more than a decade on the "Seneca effect" starting from a first intuition in 2011;[5] in the spring of 2017 he published The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid (Springer, 2017); then, in 2020, Before the Collapse, this second book on the Seneca effect that is now translated into Spanish. If one had to call someone a collapsologist in the proper sense, for his commitment to an understanding as objective and rational as possible of this kind of phenomena, it would be Professor Bardi, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence.

The strong interconnection between the subsystems of a complex system can lead, as a result of the impact of a perturbation on one or some of these nodes or subsystems, to the collapse of the entire network. Thus, the development of complex systems often responds to what Professor Bardi calls the Seneca mode: it is an asymmetrical process, where growth is slow and decline is very marked. Catastrophe comes much sooner than our intuition would expect and tends to catch us unawares.

You will also be dealing, in these pages, with Seneca's precipices, Seneca's bottlenecks, and Seneca's rebounds: the Cordovan philosopher gives a lot of play in the hands of the Florentine physical-chemist.

5.  If in a book the word overshoot appears already in the preface, as it does here, we have an indication that it is probably going to talk about essential things.

And speaking of ecological overshoot followed by collapse, I would like to point out here what seems to me to be an internal contradiction between the explanations proposed by our author. At one point he argues that "if the American elites have decided that there is no hope of saving the whole world, the logical thing to do is to go into 'deception mode' and let most people die": that is why Donald Trump and the Republican Party are climate deniers. It is not that they ignore the reality of basic biophysical facts, but that they accept a large-scale genocide from which the elites will be spared. At a later point, however, the Florentine professor suggests otherwise: "No one seems to understand that the problem, today, is not one of expanding their country's borders, but of ensuring the physical survival of their citizens in the face of potentially disastrous events related to climate change and ecosystem collapse." So where does that leave us: ignorant elites or genocidal elites?

6. Bardi insists many times that "collapse is not a mistake, it is a characteristic feature" of complex systems in the Universe we inhabit (p. 40). While we cannot avoid many collapses (and every complex system will collapse, given enough time), we can at least try to prepare for them and collapse better. Before the Collapse (a title that suggests a double meaning: before the collapse, yes, but also facing the collapse) is a good guide for that journey, and the frequent touches of humor with which the author de-dramatizes his subject of study, in itself - it is not necessary to insist on it - very dramatic, are appreciated. Along with humor, the broad contextualization (ultimately in a cosmic and Big History context) is another resource that helps to de-dramatize.

7. Something very appealing about Professor Bardi is his interdisciplinary appetite. An appetite that finally takes shape in a very broad culture, not only on chemistry and physics matters but also on humanistic subjects (with special emphasis on history): his work offers many materials for that Third Culture (building bridges between natural sciences, social sciences and humanities) that Francisco Fernández Buey was asking us for.[6][7].

8. Collapse is not a failure of complex systems, insists the Florentine professor, but a feature of their mode of functioning: the Universe is like that. Would this be a pessimistic position? But pessimism is forbidden in our ranks! If one does not manifest at least a sufficiently muscular optimism of the will, one risks severe reprimands.

Well: against the compulsory optimism to which so many prescribers would like to subject us left and right (because pessimism, it is often said, demobilizes and works as a self-fulfilling prophecy), Bardi's rational effort to understand the dynamics of collapse is very much to be welcomed. (I confess that, having disastrously exhausted the cycle of emancipatory mobilization of 15-M movement (the Spanish "indignados", the "outraged"), hearing the adjective "illusionary" in contexts of political debate makes my guts churn rather than lift my spirits). And for those who prefer not to think of any kind of collapse without sanctifying themselves, you already have the energetic and counter-apocalyptic Rosi Braidotti, or the more proximate Zamora Bonilla.[7] 

9. Bardi is a very optimistic collapsologist. Anyone who has followed his involvement in the debates on energy transitions over the last decade knows this. This optimism manifests itself for example in an article such as "The Sower's way: a strategy to attain the energy transition",[8] his particular Parable of the Sower also evoked in this book, full of confidence in the technical possibility of a smooth transition to renewable energy sources. However, his socio-political realism leads him to temper this technological optimism: such a transition would be possible, yes, but it is extremely improbable judging by the political course our societies are following.

The CIA director and US Defense Secretary James Schlesinger is credited with an observation that Bardi takes up several times in this book: human beings would have only two modes of operation, complacency and panic. To disprove him, it would be necessary that our processes of reflection and deliberation allow us to truly prepare ourselves (on a socially significant scale) for a future whose configuration we will never know, but whose structure of ecosocial collapse is today very discernible. The entire effort deployed in this work is intended to provide us with intellectual tools for that task.

10. Along with the story of the Roman Empress Galla Placidia, Japan in the Edo period is a second great positive historical example from which we can learn in thinking about transitions to sustainability. "What the story of Edo Japan tells us matches what we know about complex systems: they tend toward stability. In other words, our current fixation on growth may just be a quirk of history destined to disappear in the future when we are forced to live within the limits of the Earth's ecosystem." However, warns Bardi in 2020 in words that take on a somber resonance in 2022, "there is one condition we urgently need for this: peace, as the Edo experience tells us." Far from progressing a pacification of international relations that would allow us to cope with the processes of ecosocial collapse underway, on February 24, 2022 the invasion of Ukraine by Russia accelerated a generalized militarization that precipitates us in the opposite direction to where we would need to move.

In these fateful times, El País editorializes with exaltation about the European Union as a "new geopolitical power" (March 1, 2022). David Rieff, on the next page, also stresses that "Europe is entering a new era of hard power". Where we would need gaia-politics and an unprecedented level of international cooperation, the old geopolitics of destructive competition between nation-states and the blocs they are shaping is deepening: a world of "Combatant Empires" (Rafael Poch de Feliu) [9] And the general framework is an ecocide that includes in its bosom all kinds of promises of genocide.

The already very bad world we had is being transformed, before our wide-open eyes, into a much worse one. "It should never have come to this" could be the answer to almost everything that is happening to us. But we are already there, and from there it is up to us to act now... Recalling, for example, these verses by Brecht:[10]

When the war begins/ your brothers may be transformed/ and their faces may no longer be recognizable/ but you must remain the same/ they will go to war, not/ as to butchery, but/ as serious work. Everything/ they will have forgotten. But you/ must not forget anything.// They'll pour firewater down your gullet/ like the others. But you/ must remain sober.

11. Bearing in mind all the play that the so-called Spanish "senequismo" has given in the history of ideas in our country (with outstanding contributions such as those of Ángel Ganivet or María Zambrano), and how at times the Roman Stoic philosopher born in Cordoba has come to embody the sage par excellence in the Spanish popular imagination (in such a way that the expression "he is a Seneca" is used to praise the wisdom of someone), it is not bad that the common thread of Bardi's reflection is precisely a thought of the Cordovan philosopher. Namely, what Seneca said about collapse in one of his letters to Lucilius: "It would be a consolation for our weakness if things could be restored as soon as they are destroyed; but the opposite is true: growth is slow, but ruin is swift."[11] We will decline, but we could collapse.

We will collapse, but we could collapse better. Bardi outlines a Seneca strategy that can help us in this: accept that change is necessary and that, in many cases, opposing it leads to a more rapid collapse. Accepting the inevitable will allow us to better prepare ourselves to collapse (and perhaps even avoid collapse): "Seneca's strategy is not to oppose the tendency of the system to go in a certain direction, but to steer it in such a way that collapse does not have to occur. The key to the strategy is to prevent the system from accumulating so much tension that it is then forced to discharge it abruptly." Towards the end of the book, a notion of eco-stoicism is suggested,[12] just before recalling the stimulating and novel story of Galla Placidia, the last Roman empress.

12. Seneca also wrote: "Live each day as if one day were your whole life". Not bad advice for times as difficult as ours. Of Bardi we can also say: this guy is a Seneca!

Notes

[1] Tweet of June 15, 2022: https://twitter.com/sylvaindarwish/status/1537181101357256704

[2] It is worth remembering here that Ugo Bardi is one of the scientific defenders of the Gaia theory: see for example his essay "Gaia exists! Here is the proof" on the blog Cassandra's Legacy, 4 August 2019; https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2019/08/gaia-exists-here-is-proof.html . For his idea of Gaia as a holobiont, see for example https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2020/06/gaia-is-one-of-us-onward-fellow.html

Bardi, whose intellectual effervescence cheers us up and sometimes overwhelms us a bit, recently started a new and stimulating blog on the Proud Holobionts (see e.g. https://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com/2022/06/survival-of-fittest-or-non-survival-of.html ). The introductory text of that blog reads:

We are all holobionts: groups of organisms that help each other. As humans, we could not survive without the microorganisms that populate our bodies. But all living creatures on Earth are holobionts, and the ecosystem itself is a giant holobiont (which some call 'Gaia'). The holobiont concept can also be used for real and virtual non-biotic structures, enterprises, states, ideas, and ideologies, as well as the behavior of ideas ('memes') on the World Wide Web. The term holobiont was pioneered by Lynn Margulis in 1991. She was also co-developer of the Gaia concept.

[3] Bardi recalls part of his analysis of The Limits to Growth in the first chapter of this book, "The Science of Doom: Shaping the Future".

Allow me a small digression. The denialism of biophysical limits that prevails in the dominant culture can be well studied through two exemplary cases: what may be called the "Georgescu Roegen affair" and then "The Limits to Growth affair" in the 1970s (regarding the former, see our book Bioeconomics for the 21st Century. Actualidad de Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, edited by José Manuel Naredo, Luis Arenas and Jorge Riechmann in Catarata, Madrid 2022). And then, from the 1990s onwards, the refusal to confront global warming, which is spectacularly illustrated by the "Nordhaus case", is impressive. William Nordhaus, one of the most belligerent economists against The Limits to Growth from 1972, was awarded the so-called "Nobel Prize" for economics in 2018. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, this neoclassical economist suggested that the "optimal policy" to address climate change would result in "acceptable global warming" of about 3°C by 2100 and 4°C by 2150! Climatologists (and scientists from other disciplines), unlike neoclassical economists (who unfortunately have come to dominate their discipline, cancelling out rivals who advocated more reasonable economic theories), believe that global warming of this magnitude would be catastrophic (probably incompatible with the mere survival of the human species). This is the madness of the BAU (Bisnes Comodecustom)...

[4] "A system is complex if, and only if, it exhibits strong feedback effects. Every day we are confronted with complex systems: animals, people, organizations, etc. It is not difficult to understand what is complex and what is not: it depends on whether the reaction to external perturbations is dominated by feedback or not. Think of a rock compared to a cat..."

[5] See his blog https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/

[6] Francisco Fernández Buey, Para la Tercera Cultura (edited by Salvador López Arnal and Jordi Mir), El Viejo Topo, Barcelona 2013.

[7] Good commentary in Asier Arias, "¿Quién son los contra-apocalípticos?", in the handcrafted compilation of texts in the digital magazine 15/1515 issue -8 ½, Spring 2022, p. 69-77. Also at https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2021/09/11/quienes-son-los-contra-apocalipticos/

[8] Ugo Bardi, Ilaria Perissi, Denes Csala and Sgouris Sgouridis: "The Sower's way: a strategy to attain the energy transition", International Journal of Heat and Technology vol. 34, Special Issue 2, October 2016; DOI: https://doi.org/10.18280/ijht.34S211 ; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316337020_The_Sower's_way_to_strategy_to_attain_the_energy_transition.

[9] See for example Rafael Poch, "Lo que nos van explicando sobre la guerra," ctxt, May 1, 2022; https://ctxt.es/es/20220501/Firmas/39740/Rafael-Poch-Rusia-Putin-ucrania-guerra-origen-otan-europa-estados-unidos-imperios-combatientes-consecuencias.htm

[10] Bertolt Brecht, Más de cien poemas. Hiperión, Madrid 2005, p. 211.

[11] I give the translation of Francisco Navarro, Epístolas morales de Séneca, Madrid 1884, p. 370.

[12] We could speak of a Taoist eco-stoicism that is articulated in considerations like this: "Like all human beings, the Stoics had their limits, but I believe that Seneca and others like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius understood a fundamental point that most of their contemporaries forgot, just as we often forget. It is that complex systems are best handled by 'going with the flow' rather than trying to force them into the shape we want. This can actually make things worse, as another modern-day philosopher, Jay Forrester, told us when he talked about 'pushing the levers in the wrong direction'."

Collapse by Doubling Down: How Leaders Create Their Own Ruin

 

Napoleon won all the battles he engaged in, up to Borodino (1812), which was a non-victory, equivalent to a loss. From then, on it was all downhill from him. Napoleon had engaged in a task too big even for him: invading Russia. It is typical of successful leaders to use the doubling down strategy that leads them to a rapid collapse in their career -- another manifestation of the Seneca Cliff. 

Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was a very successful leader during the final years of the ancient Roman republic. Isaac Asimov told his story in 1971, noting a curious detail. Pompey was successful in everything he did up to a fateful day, in 61 BCE. From then on, everything he did was a failure until he was assassinated in Egypt, in 48 B.C. Half-jokingly, Asimov suggested that Pompey's reversal of fortunes coincided with having desecrated the temple of Jerusalem, that he had just conquered. 

Even without desecrating anything, it is a constant of history that "invincible" leaders tend to end their days in the dust after a stellar career. Another case, centuries after Pompey, is that of Napoleon Bonaparte. He won every battle he was involved in until, in 1812, his army faced the Russians at Borodino. Maybe it was a victory, but it weakened Napoleon so much that he didn't win any more battles again. 

There are many more examples. Think of Adolf Hitler: successful in everything he did, but he failed to bomb Britain to submission. Then, he doubled down by attacking the Soviet Union in 1941 (same mistake as Napoleon). Disaster ensued. Or of Benito Mussolini. Everything he did was a success until he decided to join Germany in WWII. Some of the early Italian moves in the war, as the attack on France in 1940, could be defined as successes. But they were just a prelude to disaster. Later on, a completely clueless Mussolini bungled from a defeat to another, so much that one wonders how was it possible for a single man to do so much damage. And let's finish with an honorable mention for Saddam Hussein, who must have believed he was the reincarnation of the ancient Islamic warriors when he ordered the Iraqi army to attack Iran in 1980. It was a victory for Iraq, but at an enormous human and economic cost. Then, Hussein doubled down by invading Kuwait, and you know what happened. 

I think there is a certain logic in these stories. It is a basic rule that goes as "success doesn't teach you anything." The human mind is easily deceived by overinterpreting favorable events and successful people become convinced that what was just a stroke of luck was instead due to their superior intuition or intelligence. The result is that they kept doing whatever they found that was successful in the past. And not just that. If they found something that worked, then people tend to repeat it on a larger scale. It is the "doubling down strategy."

In the roulette game, the doubling down strategy is known as the "martingale." You choose a color, red or black, and you double your bet on it until you win. The idea is that you may suffer a series of losses but, eventually, you'll recoup them and make a profit when your color comes out.

It is unbelievable how many people think that the martingale is a good idea. The problem is that it looks easy and it seems to work. Unfortunately, as I discuss in my book "The Seneca Effect," it is a fast lane toward collapse. Eventually, you'll face a string of losses long enough to ruin you and, at that point, you'll be torn to pieces by the claws of the black swan. 

Pompey in Jerusalem, Napoleon at Borodino, Hitler and Mussolini in Russia, Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, they suddenly found themselves facing something that was much larger than they had expected and that led to their rapid ruin: the Seneca Cliff:

Above: the Seneca Curve. For Napoleon, the peak was at Borodino in 1812. 

Now, I think you understand the point I wanted to make, even though I will not explicitly say what I mean (I have already lost a blog to censorship). During the past two years, we have seen our leaders doubling down several times and, so far, they have been successful. So much that they keep doing that, raising the stakes and the threats at every step. 

Will they overextend themselves and create their own ruin? It may well be. If this is the case, we can detect the transition moment when they arrive to a doubling that they can barely afford. Like Napoleon at Borodino, they suddenly see the cost of one more of those victories that, earlier on had seemed to them cheap and easy. 

Are we starting to see that? Maybe not yet, but some signs of fatigue are starting to appear. If we are approaching the peak of the Seneca Curve, their downfall could be rapid. And also very noisy. 

_____________________________________________________________

(*) Tolstoy describes the battle of Borodino in his "War and Peace" novel. It does not pretend to be a historical study, but it does make the point that, once the battle was started, Napoleon had no more control over it. He gave orders that were not executed on the basis of information that was already obsolete when he received it. 

[Napoleon's] troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations had been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation courte et energique, he himself was still the same: he knew that and knew that he was now even more experienced and skillful than before. Even the enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland- yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent.  

All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break the enemy's line, and a cavalry attack by "the men of iron," all these methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory, but from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded, of reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the Russians, and of disorganization among his own troops.

Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with congratulations and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the corps of prisoners, bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and stores, and Murat had only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather in the baggage wagons. So it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on. But now something strange was happening to his troops.

When Science Speaks in Tongues: The Unstoppable Rise of Gibberish

  

I have no objections to the idea that God (or the Goddess) can speak to people. And maybe the Lord really spoke to the apostles the day of Pentecost. But if you plan to fool other people, then "speaking in tongues" (known also as "glossolalia" in modern terms) can be a good idea. You start with uttering something that vaguely sounds like a language. Then you "translate" it into something that you report as the word of God. An easy trick that sometimes works. Even in science, some researchers seem to use this trick to gain academic points by publishing articles that contain mostly gibberish, or even only gibberish. We could call it "scientific glossolalia". 

You may have heard the recent news of 44 scientific papers being retracted from a scientific journal after they were discovered to be nothing but gibberish. The usual reaction in these cases is to speak of "a few bad apples." But this fraud exposes a problem that goes deep, very deep, in science. Science suffers from "glossolalia" -- a syndrome that makes people utter meaningless sounds as if they were speaking a real language. 

To start, "papers" are the main output of a scientist's work. It is the harsh law of "publish or perish," meaning that for a scientist publishing something -- anything -- in an academic journal is the first line of defense against being fired.  Even if a scientist has no money, no grants, no instrumentation, no ideas, they have to show that they are doing something. Woe betide the scientist who does not publish at least one paper every year! Anathema! Abomination! Horror! May you be eaten by the h-index bugbear who punishes those who sin so hideously against the sacred rules of science! 

But publishing papers has a problem. When scientists publish something, in a certain way they are showing their hand. Readers will be able to understand how good they are, how well they master their field, how much money they have to perform their research, and more. They may not want others to know that, especially if they have something to hide (almost everyone does, in this world). So, many scientists practice obfuscation in order to defend their turf.

So, scientists want to publish papers, but they may not want others to read them. A way to do that is to use purposefully convoluted language, eliminating all elements that would make a text interesting, turning it into the most boring possible kind of prose. The use of the passive form is a typical example ("it has been found that") instead of the simpler "we found that....". But there is more: for instance, why do scientists often sign their papers only with the initials of their first and middle names? ("J. I. Smith" -- does it mean "Jolly Idiot Smith," or what?). The idea is the same: to remove all hints of human interest for the text. 

By far the most effective strategy is to use obscure terms. Uncommon and archaic ones can do a good job of repelling readers. An example noted by Malcolm Kendrick in his "The Clot Thickens" (2021): why in the world would anyone write "pultaceous" instead of "pulpy" if not with the specific purpose of being obscure? But what makes a paper truly unreadable is the proliferation of acronyms. If you stumble on "GDAP," you have to decide which one of the 9 known meanings it can take (here, it is "Growing Danger of Acronym Proliferation").

So, you start understanding how the mechanism works. First of all, an obscure paper makes it difficult for the reviewers to wade through the text and, surely, they don't want to appear ignorant by asking what a particular term or acronym, or whatever means. Then, the paper may be full of mistakes, inconsistencies, shortcomings, and plain lies but, if it is really obscure, there is a chance that neither the reviewers nor anybody else will read it through and notice its shortcomings. It may even be cited, thus providing some extra points for the authors, by those who just read the title. Of course, it won't make the authors candidates for the Nobel prize, but it means some respite from the wrath of the scientific PTB (obscure acronym for the "powers that be").

From this point onward, it is just a small step for a desperate scientist to jump from simple obfuscation to straight fraud (and a big step backward for science as a whole). You have papers based on invented data, on shaky statistical methods, on groundless assumptions, and more. 

At this point, we should not be surprised that someone used one of those AI (obscure acronym for artificial intelligence) text generating programs to create from scratch completely meaningless papers. These programs are already impressive in their generic versions, but someone must have developed a specific version for creating fake scientific papers. Take a look at some of the 44 retracted papers, and you'll see how sophisticated the program that created them was. For instance, this one: you need to know at least something of geology to understand that it is a pure glossolalia piece. The author (the AI) is speaking in tongues. It is only because there are people who know these matters that the scam was detected. 

But how many scams of the same kind were NOT detected? Do you know that 2.5 million scientific papers are published every year in the world? Detecting those which are pure assemblies of random sentences may not be so difficult (AI may fight AI). But the truly horrible thought is how many papers are NOT glossolalia pieces, but are nevertheless unreadable, poorly done, wrong in their basic assumptions, using massaged data, arriving to unjustified conclusions, and more. In short, papers that are at best a useless waste of money, at worst scams engineered to support the dark purposes of some lobby acting behind the scene. 

Of course, not all science is like this. There is a fraction of scientists who are competent, sufficiently financed, safe in their positions, who create good science that advances human knowledge. How many? Difficult to say. Maybe there holds Pareto's law in the form of "80% of good science is done by 20% of the scientists." Or maybe we can apply Sturgeon's law ("99% of everything is crap") also in its strong form (99.9% is). 

The problem is that with less and less money available, science is more and more in the hands of underpaid and blatantly exploited people who have no perspectives for a decent career. Some of them may well be desperate enough to recur to fraud. Note also that it is a scientific law that entropy always increases, so how long will it take to transform science into a pultaceous mass of meaningless sentences? In a previous post, I wrote that science may already have expanded itself beyond existence. 

Can this situation be remedied? Maybe, but that would need truly drastic actions to change at its basis the perverse mechanism of publish or perish. It is unlikely that the task will ever be undertaken by universities or by governments, or by the scientists themselves. Fortunately, the Seneca Cliff takes care of eliminating the EPCS (obscure acronym for the Entropy Produced in Complex Systems). It will do that for science, too. It won't be painless for scientists but another form of the principle of entropy is that everybody gets what they deserve. 

 

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future: Part III (final)

This is the third and final part of Rutilius Namatianus' (RN) reassessment of some scenarios for the future originally proposed by David Holmgren. RN takes a position that goes against the standard interpretation that sees our problems originating mainly by climate change. Instead, RN believes that climate change didn't do much damage to humankind, so far, and so it will remain a minor component of humankind's trajectory, at least for the coming years, perhaps a couple of decades. What we are seeing, instead, is the crunch created by the gradually reduced availability of natural resources, coupled with increasing population and consumption levels. As a result, the services and the goods previously granted to nearly all social layers are becoming impossible to maintain and that is eroding the basic pact that keeps society together. Consistently, the Elites are developing a totalitarian grip on all sectors of society in such a way to funnel all the remaining resources for themselves and leave nothing to the commoners. And that's where we stand now. Of course, there is much that is debatable in RN's theses, but there is no doubt that he is identifying some real elements of what's happening nowadays. (UB)

 By Rutilius Namatianus

2021 - Future Scenarios Revisited

In Part 1 and Part 2, I re-examined Holmgren's Future Scenarios ten years after they had been proposed, and where we had moved since then in the scenario state space. I also considered a new state-space that could be more pertinent to a question that must be high on many peoples' priorities these days: we observe two trends, racing against each other: the trend of centralized power structures (however we call it, we never did get a single really good name for the great steamroller!) to conquer every last thing, consolidate power over every last place, the trend toward ever-increasing power, the logical continuation of the 'stupid' strategies we might say- to refer to a recent post- against the counter-trend of depletion, environmental degradation, exhaustion of resources, diminishing returns on complexity, and generally the whole picture we sum up with the word 'collapse'... 

We know that physics always wins in the end, yes! But it certainly makes a difference to those alive whether the leviathan eats us all before it collapses, or if it collapses before it manages to burn everything else to the ground. Large organized entities look like they're trying to carry out a 'reset' or a controlled demolition of large parts of the existing economy to preserve the parts that keep them large and organized and in power. Anything deemed superfluous to this goal is marked for deletion. 

This is a survival reaction from large power structures, but it is of course imperiled by the very complexity and interdependence of the economy: It is not easy to demolish whole sectors while leaving others untouched. Much more likely, such an effort will backfire and accelerate the collapse. Will they manage to pull off their 'reset' before everything falls apart? Or can the plans be safely put on the back burner with all priority placed on digging and planting gardens and squirreling away books to preserve for the future to rediscover? 

In 2019, I had sketched out what looked like relative trajectories of several major blocs in the world, through the concentration-of-power versus resource-depletion axes. I observed that most of the world was in Holmgren's 'brown tech' scenario, or even in more extreme conditions. The world was slipping towards a bifurcation where one path led up and right into the 'lifeboat' scenario and another led down and right towards global war and 'mad max'. 

It seems that, so far, the forces of consolidation of power have pulled ahead in the race: While in 2019 that momentum seemed to be faltering, with disorders in China and Hong Kong, the gilets-jaunes in France, the 5-star and Lega coalition in Italy, with wider gaps opening between northern Europe and the south, with the US preoccupied with internal fantasies and identity-politics, with the third world drifting further into collapse and dysfunction. At that time, it looked like the decline was breaking into a chaotic state. 

Thus, on the consolidation of power (vertical) axis, in 2018-2019 we saw a slowdown in the US, EU, and third world in the downward movement. China seems to have also already gone further faster with their social credit and facial recognition rollouts, but those were news in 2017, not 2019. On the energy front, both China and the US managed to slow down their internal declines through a combination of being able to better afford imports, and subsidizing unprofitable domestic production. In the US, the unprofitable domestic production was the shale oil 'boom' of roughly 2012-2019. In China, it was largely coal production. 

In Europe, meanwhile, the North Sea, Europe's primary source of production, continued its decline at ever faster rates. While Europe still has access to imported energy, the majority of Europeans simply can't afford as much as they used to. Thus, Europe slips further to the right in the graph with the net results of further energy decline. Huge misallocations of capital in Europe on politically motivated 'green' projects do not help this picture at all and degrade the quality of energy available for use further- also a component in the shift further into decline. The Third World has been the primary loser in the energy competition. Where does the extra energy that the US and China can afford to keep importing come from? It is the energy the Third World can't afford anymore. 

That was in 2019. Now, in 2021, we see that the past year saw the large power structures rapidly tightening their grip. The US energy decline which had been held back by high-cost oil and gas from shale formations picked up speed since those fields, never profitable, are declining already. Resource depletion elsewhere accelerated. Chinese coal has been in crisis and they even suffered rolling blackouts rather than pay the demanded price for Australian coal imports. Large portions of the population in the developed world have found themselves under heavy restrictions on movement and economic activity for much of the year, with absolutely enormous quantities of fresh debt added to the money supply in almost all the economies- total debt increased by something on the order of 20-25% in a single year! 

Balanced against this, there was some success in the controlled demolition - so far. World GDP might have contracted by about 10%. World energy consumption dropped somewhere around 7% for 2020 compared to 2019. With oil decline probably somewhere between 5 and 10 % now, a 7% reduction in consumption might buy about a year of time against the resource collapse.. But in early 2021 there are increasing concerns about increasing supply-chain problems, which are a sign of rising stress in an interdependent network, creeping closer toward dysfunction and failure.

Here we can add the 2020 experiences. Energy decline slowed down across the globe- a 7% contraction in energy consumption - although the true size of the decline will only really show up later in 2021 as the failure of the subsidized unprofitable extraction in China and the US is felt in production statistics. The real action has been in the 'developed' world, with the elites taking hold of the trend of consolidation of power and jamming a major consolidation into the picture. All three of the developed blocs show a major turn downward in 2020 as every manner of control and restriction was imposed and centralization of control and coordination of all sorts of mass-media reached almost unimaginable new extents. 

In early 2021, though, this is starting to indicate that they might have shot themselves in the foot. Resistance in many areas is growing and has gotten a better picture of what it is they are resisting against. The demolition of whole sectors of the economy through 2020 is only beginning to show up in disruptions in supply chains and lengthening delivery times for all sorts of specialty items. The recent slowdown in dozens of industries due to pressure on simple microcontroller chips almost monopolized by a handful of Taiwanese manufacturers is only one (very visible) example. They seem to still be following a 'shock doctrine' playbook for simply blowing up some part of the economy to goad the rest into moving in a direction they want. In one sense this is like watching people play some game like the once-popular Sim City, where everything is simple and one-dimensional and there's always a cheat code to get more free money, which always buys more stuff. 2021 will show a lot more of this.

It's still not clear which way the trend will break this year, but we have at least seen a major move that is accelerating the timeline. When we see many of the rulers of the major power structures proclaim repeatedly (often with enthusiastic relish) how they see a narrow "window of opportunity" to carry out their crash program of consolidation, they aren't joking. They might have bought a year or so, or they might have pushed it further down the Seneca cliff. 

While the plot is a freehand sketch just to give the general feel of the shape of the trajectories, it does seem that we are learning in the past year some important hints about how much energy and complexity are necessary to keep a modern technological empire intact- just how much can be cut before it begins to imperil the rest of the structure. There had been a lot of speculation in the past few years about this matter. Would the economy remain functional through a 5% decline? 10? 20? how far down the slope would it hold together? It seems that single-digit percentage shocks of only a few months duration are already almost fatal (and might yet be). 

To paraphrase Tainter's definition of collapse: a rapid and involuntary reduction in complexity. It could be that, in their attempt to push all the resource decline onto the weaker population, the powerful players have also even more rapidly accelerated the collapse of the only system that allows them to convert those resources into ongoing power. 

Cataclysms and the Megamachine: Is History a Cycle or a Progression?

This image by the Tuscan painter Piero della Francesca exudes such power that it may truly blow your mind. Apart from the mastery of the composition, the perfection of the details, the fascination of the human figures, a canvas in the hands of a grand master is not just an image: it is a message. In this case, all the figures are static, there is no one moving. Yet, the painting carries the message of a tremendous movement forward in time. It shows a great change occurring: something enormous, deep, incredible: the triumph of life over death. And those who sleep through it are missing the change without even suspecting that it is happening. Just like us, sleepwalkers in a changing world, where gigantic forces are awakening right now. 

"Cataclysms" (*) is a recent book by Laurent Testot (Univ. Chicago Press, 2020) that goes well together with "The End of the Megamachine" (Zero Books, 2020) by Fabian Scheidler of which I wrote in a previous post. 

Both books see human history using the approach that I call "metabolic." It means to take the long view and see humankind in terms of a living entity. Call it a "machine" (as Scheidler does), call it "Monkey" (as Testot does), call it a "complex system" (as it is fashionable, nowadays), or maybe a holobiont (as I tend to do). It is the same: humankind is a creature that moves, grows, stumbles onward, destroys things, builds new things, keeps growing, and, eventually, collapses. 

Bot "Cataclysms" and the "Megamachine" catch this multiform aspect of the great beast and both emphasize its destructive aspects. Both understand that the thing is moving. More than that, its trajectory is not uniform, it goes in bumps. It is a continuous sequence of growth and collapse, the latter usually faster than the former (what I call "The Seneca Effect"). 

So, what's happening? Is history going in cycles, or is it progressing in some ways? It is a question that has been asked and answered in various ways over centuries of historiography, at least from when Edward Gibbon (in 1776) started wondering why the mighty Roman Empire had disappeared. 

For the Christian eschatological view, there was no doubt that the Empire had served its purpose and it had to disappear to leave space for a new world which, in turn, was bound to disappear in the Final Judgement. For the thinkers of the 19th century, instead, a different kind of teleology was at work. It was an interpretation of Darwin's ideas that saw evolution as a movement toward higher and higher levels of perfection, with the white European man as the pinnacle of the trend. 

Later, these ideas started to look naive, and a catastrophistic streak of thought started to grow. The collapse of the Western Civilization was clearly seen for the first time in a telescope aimed at the future in 1972, in the study sponsored by the Club of Rome titled "The Limits to Growth." The study had gone full cycle, returning to the old eschatological view of the end of the world. It was a cataclysm. Unavoidable, unless the megamachine could do something that the megamachine could not do: to stop growing.

But the universe is complex and the best-laid computer models of mice and men gang aft agley. Over the history we knew, no collapse has ever been the final one. After every collapse, there has been a rebound. So, history is both a cycle and a progression. There is something on the other side of the unavoidable collapse we are facing nowadays. All collapses bring change: it may well be their purpose in the universe. Just as the Romans couldn't imagine what would come after that their empire was gone, for us it is impossible to imagine what will come after us. We can only perceive that something enormous is stirring. Now we see it through the glass of our models, darkly: but then we will see it face to face.

(*) I had started this post with the idea of writing a review of Testot's book, but as I kept writing, the text grew by itself and it became something else. But, about "Cataclysms," by all means it is a great book -- not just dealing with catastrophic events but giving you an organic view of history, full of concepts and ideas that you cannot find anywhere else. By all means, do read it! It will change the way you see the world.

How Resource Depletion Leads to Collapse. The Story of a Lost Kingdom

The Garamantes were a North-African civilization that grew at the time of the Roman Empire. They were powerful enough that the Romans had to build a system of fortifications to defend their possessions on the coast. But the Garamantes ran out of their water resources and they faded, leaving little trace in history, except ruins, some graffiti on rocks, and a few lines written by ancient historians

 

 

The idea that a civilization may collapse because of resource depletion is often hard to believe for historians. They seem to believe that society is such a complex entity that it is impossible to find a single reason for it to collapse. And, yet, it is typical of complex systems that an external perturbation generates a cascade of feedback effects that may mask their origin and make it appear as a series of events had somehow cooperated to bring down the whole structure. But it is all the effect of that initial perturbation unbalancing the whole system: it is the straw that brought down the overloaded camel. This is the basic idea of what I call the "Seneca Collapse." 

The Garamantes were a classic case of a civilization that collapsed because they ran out of an unreplaceable resource: in this case, water. They were an interesting case of a society that had grown and prospered in a barren land, in the middle of the Sahara desert. 

But they were able to prosper by means of a sophisticated irrigation system. It is called the foggara technology in North Africa, in Persian it is kārēz and in Arabic Qanat. (image from Wikipedia)

It is a sophisticated technology but it has a defect: it uses a non-renewable technology, fossil water. When the Garamantes started deploying these systems of wells and channels, around the last part of the 1st millennium BCE, it may be that the Sahara still contained relatively large underground aquifers inherited from the time when it had been green a lush with forests, about 10,000 years ago. (image source)

The water bonanza led the Garamantes to become a major regional power, enough to force the Romans to build fortifications to defend their coastal possessions and to use as starting points to launch raids into the Garamantes territory. Caesar fought and defeated them, while the last confrontation we know of was a military expedition launched by Emperor Septimius Severus, who is said to have captured the capital city of Garama in 202 AD. But the Romans never settled in that region.

In the end, the prosperity of the Garamantes was short-lived and they declined in parallel with the Roman empire, even though for different reasons. The story is described by David Keys in his article titled "Kingdom of the Sands." Clearly, Keys understands perfectly well how resource depletion takes down kingdoms and empires. It is not so much a question of running out of the resource. It is that you run out of the means to exploit it (in the case of the Garamantes, slaves).

In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the fourth-century A.D. Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability (local defensive structures from this era may be evidence for political fragmentation). Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.

The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world. Like its more famous Roman neighbor, the once-great Saharan kingdom became, little by little, simply a thing of myth and memory. Along with the rest of the world, Berbers living in the Fazzan today have all but forgotten their ancestors. The kingdom's legacy has faded so dramatically that local residents believe the vast water-extraction system--the pride of the Garamantes--is the handiwork of Romans.

It seems that the city of Garama still existed when it was conquered by the Arabs, during the 7th century AD but, after that, there are no more records about it. 

It is curious how little is left of a kingdom that, once, was powerful enough to challenge the mighty Roman Empire. We have only fragments of knowledge of a civilization that was considered already remote and mysterious during classical times. Today, the Garamantes are mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in his masterpiece "El Immortal" as people who "keep their women in common and nourish themselves with lions." The Garamantes are one of the civilizations you can choose to play in Sid Meier's Civilization V. And we have a few more snippets, including a recent novel (2018) that features an archaeological search in the former land of the Garamantes. I figure that if there existed a list of the worst novels in history, this one would make it to the top (that's why I don't give you the link, but if you like to harm yourself, ask me privately!)

And so it goes, civilizations grow, become powerful, then they are lost in the sand. That was the destiny of the Garamantes. What will be left of ours, well, it is all to be seen. But they say that humans always march toward the forest, leaving the desert at their back. And the Earth is round.

 

Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War

 

 

Professor Bernard Lown died this February at 99. A great man by all means: Physician, cardiologist, professor at Harvard University, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was the inventor of the defribrillator, the proposer of many successful ways to help people suffering from heart failure. He was also the recipient of the Nobel prize for peace for his activity against nuclear war.

 

 

It was in the 1980s when I attended a seminar in Berkeley given by a member of the group called "International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War." Some decades later, I am not completely sure the talk was given by the founder of the group, Dr. Bernard Lown, but from what I remember, it was him. I was impressed by the clarity of the talk. The speaker said it very simply, "it is not a question of being left or right: nuclear war is the greatest medical emergency I can imagine." 

 

It is the way you frame a problem that gives you the tools to solve it! Just like "The Seneca Effect" gives a name to a typical behavior of complex systems, that of collapsing, framing the nuclear confrontation as a medical emergency and not as a political struggle brought it to the realm of concrete problems that people could understand. We might also frame nuclear war as an especially nasty kind of Seneca Cliff affecting humankind and the whole planet. 

 

Probably because the problem was framed right, the Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had a remarkable success. At some point, it had some 200,000 members, and Bernard Lown, its Western founder, was invited to Moscow to meet the newly elected secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (an encounter that the Western Media refused to cover). One of the results was the group was awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 1985. Whether their work was one of the reasons why we remained free from nuclear war up to now, it is hard to say. But efforts in a good cause are never wasted.

The Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War is still active, nowadays. The interest in preventing a nuclear war faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but we may be actually closer to war today than we were in the 1980s -- it is just that we haven't been thinking so much about the matter. 

So, I missed the news of the death of Dr. Bernard Lown, less than one month ago.

 

You can read Lown's thoughts on his blog that he kept until 2012. It is a fascinating read, it was this blog that had made me rediscover him more than 30 years after that (perhaps) I had met him. In the blog, he describes his career and how often he had to fight with the medical establishment to make them accept that some traditional healing methods were not only useless but harming the patients. A case in point was the habit of keeping bedridden people who had suffered a heart attack. It took a remarkable effort to convince physicians that setting patients on a chair was a way to give them the psychological comfort they needed to heal themselves. Lown was a man who always did his best to do what he thought was right.  We would need people like him, now, but where have they gone?

 

Lown died at 99 this February. Gaia was gentle with this son of hers who did so much for all of us and she gave him a long life that I can imagine was full of satisfactions. May he rest in peace.

 

 

 

 

Bernard Lown's Blog: worth reading as an unending source of wisdom on the practice of medicine.

Seneca and the Virus: Why does the Pandemic Grow and Decline?

 

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, knew the term "virus," that for him had the meaning of our term "poison." But of course, he had no idea that a virus, intended in the modern sense, was a microscopic creature reproducing inside host cell. He also lived in a time, the 1st century AD, when major epidemics were virtually unknown. It was only more than one century after his death that a major pandemic, the Antonine Plague, would hit the Roman Empire. 

But Seneca was a fine observer of nature and when he said that "ruin is rapid" he surely had in mind, among many other things, how fast a healthy person could be hit by a disease and die. Of course, Seneca had no mathematical tools that would allow him to propose a quantitative epidemiological theory, but his observation, that I have been calling the "Seneca Effect," remains valid. Not only people can be quickly killed by diseases, but even epidemics often follow the Seneca Curve, growing, peaking, and declining. 

Of course, the concepts of growth and collapse depend on the point of view. In many cases one man's fortune is someone else's ruin. What we see as a good thing, the end of an epidemic, is a collapse seen from the side of the virus (or bacteria, or whatever). But, then, why do epidemics flare up and then subside? It is a fascinating story that has to do with how complex systems behave. To tell it, we have to start from the beginning. 

One thing that you may have noted about the current Covid-19 pandemic is the remarkable ignorance not just of the general public about epidemiology, but also of many of the highly touted experts. Just note how many people said that the epidemic grows "exponentially." Then, they got busy extrapolating the curve to infinity, predicting hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths. But, to paraphrase Kenneth Boulding, "Someone who claims that natural systems grow exponentially has to be either a madman or an economist." It just doesn't work that way!

But how does an epidemic grow, exactly? The basic shape of an epidemiological curve is "bell shaped" (yes, just like the Hubbert curve for petroleum extraction). 

 

The reason for this shape is easy to understand in qualitative terms. Initially, the virus (or the pathogen) has a whole population to infect, so it grows rapidly (nearly, but not exactly, exponentially). Then, as it grows, its number of targets decline. Eventually the virus can't grow any longer for lack of targets. It reaches a peak and starts declining. 

These considerations can be set in a mathematical form: it is the model called "SIR" (susceptible, infected, removed), developed already in 1927. You may be surprised to discover that the SIR equations are exactly the same that describe the growth of the oil industry and the phenomenon of "peak oil." They are also the same equations that describe the behavior of a trophic chain in a biological system. I won't go into the details, here. Let me just tell you that, with my colleagues Perissi and Lavacchi, we are preparing a paper that describes how these and other physical systems are related to each other. 

Of course, modern epidemiological models are much more complicated than the simple "bare bones" SIR model, but it is an approach that tells us what to expect. No epidemic grows forever and even if you do nothing to stop it, it will eventually fade out by itself. After all, pathogens have the same problem we have with crude oil: they are exploiting a limited resource (us).

Now, back to the Seneca Effect, we said it implies that ruin must be faster than growth. In other words, the shape of the "Seneca curve" should be something like this:

 

 

There are such cases in the history of epidemics.

 

 

Let me show you an example: the cholera epidemic that struck London in mid-19th century (data from Wikipedia Commons)

 

And here you clearly see the Seneca shape. The decline of the cholera burst was significantly faster than its growth. The data for more recent cholera epidemics show the same shape. 

Yet, that "Seneca shape" is not common in epidemics. Often, we see the opposite kind of asymmetry. Here is an example: Hepatitis A, with data taken from Wikipedia. You see how the curve declines more slowly than it grows. 

Here is another pre-Covid example: the acute respiratory syndrome of 2003 in Hong Kong. 

There is no fixed rule in these historical cases, let's just say that this asymmetric shape is rather common. So, let's go to the current pandemic, and here are some data for the first cycle of 2020. (Image from "The Economist"). Also here, the trend is clear: decline is slower than growth.

 

 

 

 

It is a common trend all over the world and we could call it the "Anti-Seneca" effect. But, apart from giving it a name, why this shape?

The answer is not univocal: there are several factors that may affect the shape of the curve. In this case, the easiest explanation has to do with the parameter that describes how fast infected people cease to be infected, either because they are healed or because they die. If they heal/die fast, the curve goes down fast, otherwise it is the opposite. It makes sense: cholera may kill affected people in just a few hours, if untreated. Instead, people infected by the Sars-Cov-2 may go through one or two weeks of agony before their demise. That would explain the different shape of the curves.

 

But, be careful! As I said, there are other possible explanations. For instance, if you compare Sweden with Italy, you see that the mortality curve is more asymmetric for the former. Why is that? It is hard to think that sick Swedes would take more time to die than sick Italians. More likely, it is a question of geography. The Swedish population is concentrated in the southern regions, where the pandemic hit first. It took some time for the virus to spread northward and that explains the "tail" in the mortality curve. In Italy, instead, the first pandemic wave was confined to the Northern regions, which are relatively homogeneous in terms of population. Probably, geographical effects account for the commonly observed asymmetric curve shapes of the COVID-19 epidemic in other regions of the world. 

 

With vaccinations, the SIR model shows that we should see the epidemic curves falling down fast, at least if the vaccinations are started before the peak. So far, this effect is not seen anywhere, it may be too early. As vaccinations progress, we should be able to say more on this matter.

As for everything in science, epidemiology takes a little work to be learned, a virtue that's difficult to find in the discussion on social media. Even experts in virology and diseases don't really study epidemiology, their job is to heal people, not to make mathematical models. That's the reason why the behavior of the virus is so widely misunderstood. But, as Einstein said, "The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not." Epidemiology may be subtle, but it is not impossible to understand how epidemics grow and spread.