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Bo102010 comments on Rationality quotes: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure if economic development actually makes economies more fragile and prone to collapse - if a very undeveloped economy collapses, do we not notice it because we label it something else, e.g. famine or civil unrest?
The theory goes that less developed economies almost by definition have wasteful redundancies and lack of hyper-specialization.
As we've seen with the Green Revolution and the last few centuries, the freeholding small farmer is highly inefficient - they produce far less food with far more human input than our farming system. But! The small farmers are highly resilient: if a bomb takes out one Afghani village, the others are unaffected. On the other hand, if a bomb takes out a country's only refinery or port, all its farms are soon going to grind to a halt because they're mechanized and need gas.
So it's a trade-off: efficiency versus resiliency/redundancy. Market economies seem to be biased towards efficiency and against redundancy - efficiency pays off now, resiliency much later if ever. (If I really wanted to be trendy, here's where I'd bring up black swans.)
Modern systems are highly resilient and redundant in places where this is likely to pay off. Look at the power system. Look at the Internet. They are capable of working in spite of big localized failures.
The Internet is sometimes capable of working. It can go down and has; the Morris worm wasn't even malicious (according to Morris). Designs for 'Warhol worms' which do the same thing in just a few minutes have been floating around since the mid-nineties - it's just that botnets are more profitable. And even inadvertent mistakes can cripple lots of functionality.
In the real world, malicious attacks are just as valid a source of failure as randomness. (It doesn't matter why the patient dies if he dies.)
Neither Morris worm nor any other worms caused long term damage to the Internet.
Neither societal collapse nor any other economic failure caused long term damage to the Humanity.
This is also true, but Internet worms have particularly little effect of any kind, even for definition of "long term" being a "month or more".