Re: Medical science and Rosennean Complexity

The issue of side effects also has the context of what's causing it. In medicine, you have a situation where your models are simple but the actual system is complex. Thus side effects are actually effects but they aren't what was intended. It's like looking at something with tunnel vision when what you need is a wide angle lens.

In environmental issues, the damage is caused by not thinking about the effects of various practices AT ALL. When the world was less heavily populated, that wasn't such a problem. But now there are so many people doing things according to habit that the effects are threatening to swallow us.

The solution for these two cases is also different. In the medical side effects case, a switch to models based on a Rosennean premise would give more of the necessary advance planning to therapies and drugs such that extra, unwanted effects would be minimized. In the environmental case, it's more of a case of using some common sense when rethinking old habits. The situation of water treatment plants-- the current system where we bring all water up to drinking standards even when it's going to water the lawn, and we put "gray water" (water that was used to wash the vegetables for dinner, say) down the same sewer pipe as sewage from the toilet (which environmentalists refer to as "black water") when it would be fine for watering the lawn with. There are many, many areas of modern human life in urban and suburban settings that only need a little tweaking in order to be going down a more sustainable path. I don't know what it's like in other locales, but here in Western N.Y., we could be composting and recycling a heck of a lot more than we are.

But it has to become a priority for all of us or it won't get done. Humans are lazy. And old habits are hard to break. Dumping something toxic down the sink is easy because it SEEMS like it's gone. People say, "Oh it will get diluted..." but not if everyone's doing it. Humans just don't like to be careful when throwing things out. Have you ever noticed after a movie in a theater, that a large percentage of the audience couldn't be bothered taking their own "garbage" the distance from their seats to the garbage can-- the very garbage can that they had to walk past to get out of the theater! The garbage that people leave behind-- on the floor, on the seats, in the aisles-- is astounding! Sometimes we just want to shake people and say, "You are an adult! Take your crap with you and put it in the garbage can. You're going past it anyway-- there will hardly be any wasted motion! How hard is that?

It's the simple things, in my view, that generate the most problems and need to be re-imagined. Food production, housing, transportation, waste disposal, energy production, energy consumption... If systems for cities were designed with some thought going into what the end products would/should be, and the goal was designing systems to be the most positive/least wasteful cycles that are humanly possible, we would be in much better shape, globally. It's kind of the larger version of the old adage: "You ARE what you EAT" or "Garbage IN, garbage, OUT."

> The alternative that is needed is a kind of solution that is a real
> net solution - some mode of science + technology for which in the
> integrated, total accounting of all main and side-effects the whole
> effect is positive for life as a whole, with some balance of "good
> for the one" as in organism or person and "good for the many" as
> in interdependent biosphere boat we are all in.
>
> That truly net positive science + technology is the great promise
> I see in Rosen's work, and also the near magic I see operable in
> life itself (but life as organisms-in-ecosystems, not just organisms).
> Life already knows how to make things better as it goes, to not
> only solve a local problem but to have the side-effects be beneficial
> too. Good example is soil - it is an emergent, systemic property of
> myriad actions of zillions of organisms and it increases both the
> productivity and the productive capacity of life systems like forests.
> Pretty good models + technology when your residue or waste is so
> darn good. And 180 degree different from the trajectory we are
> heaed in. Anything good about our waste products? Ever been to a
> land fill?
>
> Dan