Geoffrey West on COMPLEXITY

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schiffern · 2017-08 · Recommendation

I thought that sounded familiar. Geoffrey West gave a talk there, delivering a much better explanation of his research on socio-biological scaling, growth, and sustainability than thepop sci treatments occasionally posted here. [VIDEO]

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schiffern · 2017-06 · Recommendation

> It's certainly not easy to unseat a powerful company, but it also seems difficult to stay at the top. Whether it's inefficiency, inability to pivot to new ways of doing things, or just markets that dry up as they're replaced by something else, companies have a hard time staying in such powerful positions in our society for long. Geoffrey West makes a compelling argument that it's due to the scaling laws around growth itself. The capitalist system demands exponential growth, but companies eventually reach a size where all their resources are devoted to maintaining existing "biomass." The exact scaling depends on the scaling properties of the networks that "feed" each "cell" of the system — circulatory/respiratory networks for animals, infrastructural networks for civilizations, social network for companies/cities. Quite frankly most of the articles on Geoffrey West's work are hand-wavey bullshit, but he outlines it in this talk (including addressing this very question). [VIDEO]

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vanderZwan · 2015-09 · Recommendation

This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system! Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context: [VIDEO]

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