“How Complex Systems Fail”

[marmar]

from Naked Capitalism:



“How Complex Systems Fail”
Posted on August 21, 2015 by Yves Smith


Lambert found a short article by Richard Cook that I’ve embedded at the end of the post. I strongly urge you to read it in full. It discusses how complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure, how that possibility is held at bay through a combination of redundancies and ongoing vigilance, but how, due to the impractical cost of keeping all possible points of failure fully (and even identifying them all) protected, complex systems “always run in degraded mode”. Think of the human body. No one is in perfect health. At a minimum, people are growing cancers all the time, virtually all of which recede for reasons not well understood.

The article contends that failures therefore are not the result of single causes. As Clive points out:

This is really a profound observation – things rarely fail in an out-the-blue, unimaginable, catastrophic way. Very often just such as in the MIT article the fault or faults in the system are tolerated. But if they get incrementally worse, then the ad-hoc fixes become the risk (i.e. the real risk isn’t the original fault condition, but the application of the fixes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire#Wigner_energy documents how a problem of core instability was a snag, but the disaster was caused by what was done to try to fix it. The plant operators kept applying the fix in ever more extreme does until the bloody thing blew up.

But I wonder about the validity of one of the hidden assumptions of this article. There is a lack of agency in terms of who is responsible for the care and feeding of complex systems (the article eventually identifies “practitioners” but even then, that’s comfortably vague). The assumption is that the parties who have influence and responsibility want to preserve the system, and have incentives to do at least an adequate job of that.

There are reasons to doubt that now. Economics has promoted ways of looking at commercial entities that encourage “practitioners” to compromise on safety measures. Mainstream economics has as a core belief that economies have a propensity to equilibrium, and that equilibrium is at full employment. That assumption has served as a wide-spread justification for encouraging businesses and governments to curtail or end pro-stabilty measures like regulation as unnecessary costs.

To put it more simply, the drift of both economic and business thinking has been to optimize activity for efficiency. But highly efficient systems are fragile. Formula One cars are optimized for speed and can only run one race. ...............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/08/how-complex-systems-fail.html

[eridani]

1. In living creatures, redundancy is good for you n/t

[bemildred]

2. Complex systems are, well, complex.

They don't have simple closed form solutions.

But yeah. Efficiency is "profit", and profit is not quality, most emphatically it is not excellence. Profit leads to cheap junk at high prices.

[ladjf]

3. The failure of complex mechanism is one of the fundamental principles of

Evolution. nt

[Hortensis]

4. "belief that economies have a propensity to stability" - which came first, chicken or profits?

This is an opportunistic profit-driven theory, of course. Adam Smith certainly didn't believe economies stabilized themselves.

After decades of cutting government "waste," degraded mode pretty much describes the patched-together support systems 330,000,000 Americans rely on to sustain life. Reminds me, the GridEx III test will be run this fall. Maybe improvements will be sufficient to allow some results to be released....