Geoffrey West on COMPLEXITY
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an accessible introduction to scaling laws and to why cities keep growing while companies and organisms eventually die.
What it is
Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2014 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Recommends vanderZwan · 2014-08 · on “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]”
Even if you calculated as embodied energy instead of just looking at the energy spent directly on a task? Because a large part of the "inefficiency" of living creatures is physical maintenance of the body. If that is included for machines as well, I'm not so sure if they're better off. For now, of course - as soon as we realise energy is a real constraint, we'll surely start optimising for it. The third link I posted references Geoffrey West who has an interesting high-level physics approach to this issue, but it doesn't really do justice to his points. But I figured posting this 40 minute one, which is much more comprehensive, would be a bit much to ask: [this video] (also has a lot more phycisi
Recommends vanderZwan · 2015-09 · on “Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness”
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: [this video]
Recommends Radim · 2015-09 · on “Interdisciplinary and physics challenges of Network Theory”
For a great, accessible intro talk on this topic, check out Geoffrey West's "On Complexity": [this video]
Recommends schiffern · 2017-06 · on “Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B”
> 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 —
Recommends schiffern · 2017-08 · on “The First Law of Complexodynamics (2011)”
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. [this video]
Cites schiffern · 2016-08 · on “Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster”
>Larger organisms don't need to generate as much heat as smaller ones, because heat dissipation occurs across surface area, which increases as the square of mass, whereas heat generation increases as the cube (assuming a spherical cow, but close enough.) Except that hypothesis doesn't predict the correct exponent. If that were the reason metabolic power would scale as mass^(2/3), but it actually scales as mass^(3/4). [LINK] West's space filling fractal hypothesis predicts dozens of non-obvious scaling laws, not just metabolic power. [this video] >the mitochondria of a human are not that different from those of a rat, or even an earthworm. West is acutely aware of this. In the talk I linked above
Cites schiffern · 2016-08 · on “Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster”
>So have we avoided it, or are we just delaying it? ... Perhaps the next crash just gets to be harder as a result. In fact, this is exactly what West suggests (just not in this relatively puffy treatment of his ideas). He's compared societal progress to a series of treadmills. In order to keep up with the necessary economic growth rate the treadmills are constantly getting faster (evolutionary progress) and we periodically have to jump from one treadmill to another (revolutionary innovation) and we must switch treadmills at an ever-increasing pace (shortening technology cycles). The problem of course being that you eventually have a heart attack. [this video]
Cites vanderZwan · 2018-05 · on “Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs”
The lower on the graph, the more energy efficient. The further right on the graph, the heavier the object. So the trend is towards more efficiency per kilogram for heavier animals, presumably due to square-cube law[0]. Or maybe the 3/4 scaling law[1][2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]