Scientists Who Study Complex Systems Offer Solutions To The Pandemic

I have ranted a lot on complexity and complex systems in this blog. This week, I even said

Every school, every university, every office, and every household should learn about complex systems. You do too.

I have also ranted enough on "lock-in" syndrome where we get locked into a bad choice by sheer randomness. Think, if only Christianity emerged in Europe or North American or Asian where there is so much diversity of life instead of middle eastern deserts with only a few rodents then we wouldn't have these monolithic religions putting humans on the pedestal. By sheer, randomness we have to live with this bullshit probably for the remainder of this civilization.  Plus that "lock-in" happening in the middle eastern desert as far as we know might be the cause for the demise of this civilization.

Complexity scientists from Sante Fe Institute have finally broken their silence and have a good hypothesis:

The damage we are not attending to is the deeper nature of the crisis—the collapse of multiple coupled complex systems.

Societies the world over are experiencing what might be called the first complexity crisis in history. We should not have been surprised that a random mutation of a virus in a far-off city in China could lead in just a few short months to the crash of financial markets worldwide, the end of football in Spain, a shortage of flour in the United Kingdom, the bankruptcy of Hertz and Niemann-Marcus in the United States, the collapse of travel, and to so much more.

As scientists who study complex systems, we conceive of a complexity crisis as a twofold event. First, it is the failure of multiple coupled systems—our physical bodies, cities, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Second, it involves solutions, such as social distancing, that involve unavoidable tradeoffs, some of which amplify the primary failures. In other words, the way we respond to failing systems can accelerate their decline.

We and our colleagues in the Santa Fe Institute Transmission Project believe there are some non-obvious insights and solutions to this crisis that can be gleaned from studying complex systems and their universal properties. One useful way to think about a complexity crisis is in terms of the strategic tradeoffs that need to be managed and the complex mechanisms that these tradeoffs involve. These mechanisms include ideas of contagion, epidemic cycles, super-spreading events, critical phenomena, scaling, and path dependence.

[---]  

The processes of contagion, super-spreading, self-organized criticality, and urban scaling are all nonlinear and tend to result in multiple different outcomes or equilibria. One of the hallmarks of systems with multiple equilibria is path-dependence, meaning it is far easier to move in one direction than another. This often leads to “lock-in.” For example, it is well known that it’s easier to continue with an existing technology than adopt a newer and better one, such as the preference for silicon transistors over the superior metal oxide transistors in the early 1960s. And the same goes for social habits such as the continued preference for the QWERTY keyboard once it was widely adopted over all alternatives. And vastly more worrying is the lock-in around racial and gender-based hiring preferences which perpetuate an historical precedent rather than rewarding ability. The social habits we tend to see as either the fabric of society or unintended corollaries of social life—gathering at high-density, shaking hands as a greeting, traveling, and interacting when infectious—have become established as social norms. Path-dependence tells us that far more energy needs to be invested in campaigns to eliminate these habits than is required to perpetuate the habits.

[---] 

It is high time we attended to issues resulting from the long-term consequences of this crisis and its interconnection with all socio-economic life across the planet. We have modest understanding in these areas, and we are in desperate need of support and new ideas. In the future, we need to be thinking more about the threats of a full complexity crisis with all their attendant tradeoffs rather than the means of mitigating a single threat. The challenge for all healthy societies is deciding where to place the fulcrum that balances competing priorities and not treating priorities as if they were independent concerns. 

Please read the whole piece, it's enlightening.