Review of Mortality Report by Chris · 11:39pm Jul 8th, 2015
Chris does thoughtful, extended reviews on his blog, One Man's Pony Ramblings. He finally reviewed one of my stories at length: Ramblings on Mortality Report. So what happens when Minnesota Nice meets Bad Horse?
Well, he didn't like it very much:
Mortality Report is, in a lot of ways, a very limited fic; its one that has little beyond, perhaps, a mild enjoyment of the "twist" to offer a distracted or lightly invested reader, and the wheels on the vehicle which drives it are rather too obvious for a more attentive one.
There's some truth to that, depending on your taste. I think the issue there is that highbrow literature has lately demanded a more slice-of-life approach. But this is not a slice-of-life story; it's an end-of-life story, and to my thinking it's natural for lots of big thoughts, secrets, and summarizations to come out when facing the end of your life.
I responded to Chris' comments, and said what I think are some of the key things the story does, on his blog, which is the proper place to talk about his blog post. My own assessment of the story's problem are that:
1. It is too slow and boring, with too much talking. That was an unavoidable trade-off I chose to make in order to tell the story I wanted to tell.
2. The mood is sad, and many, many readers reasoned like this: "Celestia is immortal. Celestia is sad. Therefore, immortality is sad." That's rotten logic, but that's how emotions work. The story's emotions thus act against a message that the story contains.
I really liked mortality report myself. I wouldn't mind there being a sequel someday.
It's a story that wants to do something and does it. Quite well, I think. However, it may not be something the reader wants to see done and it may be disappointing to people who expected a less... utilitarian? approach.
I mean, take one of mine: A Canterlot Carol. That story does want to do something (you once wrote an excellent blogpost pinpointing exactly what), sure, but it is also (and, indeed, predominantly) a story about Some Things That Happened and also a story about making the reader laugh and also a story about explaining Zebrica trade relations because, well, I'm addicted to worldbuilding. Depending on taste that either makes my story better (because it interleaves plot with character with theme with &c) or worse (because it compromises all of the above in order to get them to fit).
In the end it is a rather good story which isn't going to be to everyone's liking.
3221117 Yes, indeed. I was aware of that while I was writing it, but I couldn't think how to spin it into a tale. I struggled with that for a very long time, but in the end I couldn't think how to do it.
3221245
Some things really can't be, I don't think. Not a conventional story. If it were me...
...well I'd never write a story like that. Not enough people being arch at each other over politics. But if I did I'd probably try for a cross-section-through-life approach and show Celestia interacting with mortality, morality, and eternity throughout her life. That's the obvious way to do it. You could perhaps run some sort of narrative thread through all of that, but it still doesn't really have plot. I'm not sure it can.
I don't know if I'm using the terms correctly, but--it seems he was expecting a symphony, or at least a cantata, when what you actually wrote was an étude, a study.
3221298 I might, though, be able to spin a story onto it. I wrote a second chapter, but it came out poorly. It had a bit of Dotted in it, but that made people expect it to be funny, which may have been a mistake.
3221320
I don't really know the relevant terminology, but it sounds about right to me.
3221334
That's the problem when you have a character most known for comedy, yeah.
Also, Gods help me, but the events of Mortality Report would break Dotted in half.
And it may just be possible to graft this sort of thing onto a story, certainly, but the problem is that your first chapter is, in fact, the last chapter. Lives end, lives are saved, secrets come out, the heavens themselves shake. Even if you answered the question 'What comes next?' could you keep the emotional momentum of the story?
You may be able to do it only if you raised the stakes. I don't know. Twilight decides she wants Celestia back and is willing to kick open the doors of Heaven and demand answers to do it. Promaretheus Strikes Back: The Twilight of the Gods?
3221356
I don't know if I've ever seen someone else do it other than Henry Kuttner, but coming to a conclusive and dramatic stopping point, and then going on and doing it again, is something I've tried to do repeatedly. "Moments" has 4 endings (the 4th isn't published yet). "Fluttershy's Night Out" has 2. "Happy Ending" has 3. "Big Mac Reads Something Purple" has 3.
Chris does pinpoint what always has been - as I know we've discussed at length - one of my fundamental sticking points with the story : The 'Suffering is necessary' is never adequately justified for me to buy into. And, well, you know, the other part about 'PS we're allowing everypony to fade to oblivion until they achieve enlightenment' which to my personal moral coda is literally the sickest thing you can do to someone, so I can never see Titania as anything but something I utterly loathe
Yet I still love you Bad Horse! Honest!
3221377
True. I can never get my head around multiple endings like that, I find. When I write some strange part of me has to believe that what's being written is really happening, for sufficiently weird values of 'really.' As a result multiple endings just don't make sense. Only one of 'em can ever be 'real.'
Weird, really.
3221435 That's true of "Big Mac reads something purple", but the others have multiple endings all within the same story. The story comes to what appears to be a dramatic conclusion, with no or few apparent loose ends, but then other events follow after that lead to a different stopping point, and sometimes a different way of looking at the earlier "ending". I see no reason not to do it that way.
3221441
Ah, that's what you mean. That I've no trouble with—it's great writing if you can get it to flow just so, which you generally can.
3221356 ...Twilight decides she wants Celestia back and is willing to kick open the doors of Heaven and demand answers to do it....
Ah, a Hercules/Megthera plot complication. I can see Celestia sitting down with Majesty for tea when they are interrupted in that fashion, which peaves Twilight off to no end when she sees a third place setting waiting for her.
I think that calling it "a frame to let you fill in the painting..." is dead-on, and that's why I liked the story so much when I originally read it.
3221334
Regardless of how poorly it came out, I'd like to see the second chapter. I know Skirts has a scraps thing for pieces parts and stories he threw out.
3221600
The problem is in this universe there is no afterlife. Poof, dead, oblivion, nothing. Ech
I read in it a story about a goddess that is weary of immortality and chooses to give her own transcendence to her almost-daughter rather than survive her. I believe your story compares favourably with any of the Greek mythological classics. Of course that you could have extended it, a lot, but it would have gone from the beauty of brevity to the pedantry of Tolkien.
3221412
While I agree with on the second bit about Immortality, I have to say, the "Suffering is Necessary" idea seems fairly self-evident in real life.
One needs conflict for growth. One needs character flaws to be a 3 dimensional person. Both imply suffering of some level. Thus, suffering in necessary. Unless you were referring to something else? I haven't read the story.
1 thing which grabbed me about the review is that the reviewer complains about indents and returns between paragraphs. I prefer indents and returns between paragraphs to a wall of text. ¿Why does not this blogpost have indents?
3222043
On a personal level? Yes. But this is something of a 'We must let their society suffer and die for generation upon generation until they are enlightened'.
It's like how in the real world we view say, the Middle East. America can't fix the Middle East, it must fix itself.
Except the disconnect there is that America can't fix the Middle East because it lacks the power & resources to do so. If the world were united, we could stick a million, two million, ten million soldiers in there to force peace on the region and then build it up while ensuring that any insurgency could be stomped into oblivion with ease. That's the sort of circumstances we have here. They have the ability to teach and demonstrate, and are refusing to do so save Titania's own petty methods.
It seems I did misuse étude, at least a bit: the term originally meant something more didactic--"exercises for the student." I meant that you seemed to be noodling around on a theme that interested you. More like a jazz musician than Chopin.
Fanfic is full of that, which isn't a bad thing: it's exactly what I was doing in "Beneath your feet, what Treasures," and I knew it. I'm still gobsmacked that people liked it as much as they did. Perhaps it's because nobody brought any expectations to it because it was my first published piece.
But someone who'd read "The Magician and the Detective" might be wanting and expecting, at least subconsciously, more of the same from subsequent Bad Horse stories. That's okay too--it's how you build a brand. Then again you're not really interested in building a brand but in trying new things and developing as a writer.
So not everything you write will be a hit with everyone, or even with the people who thought your previous work a hit. Eh, it's all good. It's not like we'll demand our money back, and it's not like you've lost revenue. That sounds a bit dour, but what it means is that being thus insulated from losses, both the writer AND the reader are free to experiment.
3222344
I'm avoiding going into the good/bad of specific nation-state systems, other than to say I feel we can all agree the socioeconomic status of many Middle Eastern nations is -not good-, and that it would be a good thing if it were possible to be building infrastructure and societal bonds that led to a decrease in violence. The constant Sunni-Shia conflict results in a bunch of senseless bloodshed and if I had the power to enforce a peace there in order to get people to see 'Killing each other over religious dogma is wrong', I would.
As for economic systems, the capitalist model tends to fall under the Churchill-Democracy label, although it does seem like we're approaching finding something better, soon. It's just a when-not-if thing.
I always feel faintly shamed when a major reviewer comes out 'against' a Vault selection.
Ah, well. I liked it.
3222965
You can enforce a military peace, however it requires much greater resources than we ever were willing to commit. Improving education isn't going to happen when bombs are going off every 2-3 days. And you -can- impose said peace, as was done in the 90s for the various Bosnian/Serbian/etc conflicts.
The reason we aren't/can't is that there is not adequate consensus to do such a thing, not is there anyone willing to actually foot the bill.
As for the democracy/capitalism thing, the quote from Churchill is :
The point I was making with it is that yes, Capitalism has considerable flaws when left unchecked - but it's still the best we have, at the moment. I could go on further but it'd be slipping into essay territory and I'm trying to dodge that.
Though to address the debt point? That one's kind of...well, for lack of a better word, overblown. A bunch of that debt is countries owing debt to each other (And thus they could cancel it out), and the remainder fits in with the same issue that's facing democracies as a whole right now which is the burgeoning inequality debate. And going into all of the complexities of that, again, is another giant essay
3223026
Have you ever considered that highbrow critic types are just prone to being tosspots who deliberately misinterpret things to look smarter than they are?
3223110
Post-WW2, peace was imposed by foreign militaries and worked just fine. And, again, we have the Balkans in the 1990s as an example of where this can work. It could well have worked in Afghanistan/Iraq had the United States pursued more intelligent policies near the beginning. It's not an EASY thing to do, but it is possible. It's just a matter of having the will & way to do so that's the issue.
3223110
I find austerity policies foolish and misguided for simple Keynesian reasons. Suffice to say I have not been happy with Merkel/Germany these last few years as they are busy crippling economies instead of pursuing intelligent growth-based policies (Nevermind the Euro is never going to truly work until it becomes a true economic union, akin to the United States in terms of which states support others; basically, a single currency is a bad idea unless all parties are willing to prop up the others).
As for economic systems, the big trouble there is that they're so entwined with the political system in place it's difficult to extricate the two. Russian Communism is different from Chinese Communism just as US Capitalism differs from Pinochet-era 'capitalism', and Swedish socialism is radically different from Venezuela's system. Then you have your hybrids like feudalism, and you have systems like slavery/serfdom and so forth. So we've tried a number over the ages; capitalism is what works 'best' thus far, but the interesting part about capitalism is taken to its final extreme it nullifies as it increasingly eliminates scarcity, thus making it so the only goods worth anything are those one cannot reproduce at will.
Well Bad Horse, clearly you're not so evil that you won't call my reviews "thoughtful;" you're not getting soft, are you? Regardless, I'm glad you found the review worthwhile, even if you didn't agree with every word I wrote (blasphemy!).
3221836
Well, Celestia says that the "equations" prove that there isn't... since it's is told entirely from Celestia's perspective and doesn't include any events that would suggest so (or not), the story never actually gives us a reason to believe that the formulae used by Celestia's people are as infallible as Celestia thinks they are, beyond her own opinion.
Just one more delicious bit of ambiguity!
3222068
Some people get persnickety if you use both. I was being facetious there (hence the "you strange person, you" tacked on the end), but some people want you to stick with one or the other, because... well, I'm sure there's a reason they care so much.
3223026
Don't worry, RBD. Mortality Report can have the coveted "Chris liked it and doesn't retroactively love the PFV less" award!
Now, about some of those other fics you picked...
3223447
That's why I keep bringing up the Balkans in the 1990s - because that was an ethnic/religious conflict, so it's fairly comparable.
For the last sentence, what I meant is that capitalism is at its heart about constantly improving the means & quantity of production. Or, in other words, real GDP per worker goes up continually. If you extrapolate this out, eventually you get a point where real GDP per worker is so high that all the basic goods of life - food, clothing, shelter, etc - are so easy to obtain as to be virtually free. For example, with us, the technologies that are going to be the next paradigm shifters are 3D Printers / Solar energy, in that they're going to make two large bundles of scarcity...much less scarce. When energy is cheap & renewable, and goods can be literally printed nonstop, then...well. It becomes way easier to make them, yea?
3223452
I forgot about the 'equations' but yea. I'll just recast it in my ornery horse ways and say those don't satisfy either
3223452
3222812 For many many years, we tried to manage forest fires in the US by putting out fires. Surprisingly, putting out fires led to losing more trees in forest fires than not putting out fires did.
What happened was that, naturally, forests burn in small local fires when local areas accumulate a certain amount of dead wood. When you put out fires, everyplace accumulates dead wood until a fire breaks out of control. Then all the dead dry wood that's accumulated over the past 40 years goes up in a huge, vast conflagration that ends up burning more trees than all the natural, local fires combined would have.
Wars might be like that. The thing we're doing wrong might not be failing to keep the peace, but failing to let people fight it out. It might be better for the world in the long run to let the Jews and the Arabs and the Sunnis and the Shiites kill each other until one side wins. If you pick any large region of the world that has reliable long-term peace today, such as the US, China, Japan, or Australia, it's usually because sometime in recorded history, there was a series of wars that wiped out the previous patchwork of ethnic groups (who were continually at war with each other) and forced one culture on the entire area.
How many times have the US and the Soviets / Russians come closer to World War 3 because of stupid brinksmanship games played in the Middle East? We still see this today, with disagreements over Syria and Iran threatening peace between Russia, the US, and China.
3224104
Taking the forest fire bit as an example, yes, letting them burn naturally is one way to solve it. Another would be to remove all the dead wood before it can build up to inflammatory levels; of course, that would be prohibitive to do right now, but at some future point it may well be a cake & eat it too scenario.
Wars I would contend are not like that. If they were, then World War 2 shouldn't have happened because World War 1 should have made the region go 'Uh, what are we doing?'. But WW2 happened BECAUSE WW1 didn't resolve itself in a reasonable way, and left Germany with a major chip on its shoulder. Western Europe remains at peace because of the post-WW2 order that was forged by rebuilding the entire region, including Germany. Forgiveness, instead of retribution.
In Iraq, we were making great progress in calming the country once we began engaging sectarian leaders, bringing them all to the table, and getting them all engaged so that everyone had a vested interest in succeeding together. That all came tumbling down when Maliki decided to completely ignore a segment of his populace, who grew increasingly angry until, well, ISIS found a semi-receptive area and took over.
The United States really is having its own version of that right now. Everything from Michael Brown onwards is the product of long simmering racial tension boiling to the surface. It hasn't turned worse, however, because we all at least still agree 'Violence and rioting and wanton destruction/vigilanteism are wrong'. But that racial tension is exactly the sort of thing that in a less developed country serves as the catalyst for civil wars.
Russia I would contend is its own special case, and that's because Russia has reverted to a Soviet-style dictatorship in all but name. Putin controls the country and the shape of Russia when he finally leaves power, through whatever means, is something I don't think anyone can predict right now.
China on the other hand is fairly simple to understand. China cares about China, and nothing else, and as long as you can get China's self-interest to align with the greater world's interest, everything will go swimmingly. There may be saber rattling over the coming decades, but the degree of economic integration is such that I have trouble seeing anything like a Ukraine occurring that torpedoes relations, because China as a whole is a much more diversified economy with far greater trade integration, whereas with Russia their economy is largely oil-based and due to macroscopic circumstances that is not a good bargaining chip right now.
3223452
I would rather err on the side of too much white space than not enough.
3222123
3223093
3224244
3224856
You'd have a stronger point if you stuck to making your point directly instead of in vague allusion.
In scenario A, I am primarily referring to ISIS / Syria. If your contention is ISIS is reasonable in any fashion, then please state it so that I know not to engage further, because I cannot conceive of how to even begin there.
In scenario B, I will assume you are referring more to drone strikes. And, yea, those aren't really productive. Which is where the massive boots on the ground comes in, as well as a willingness to take a few punches forcing things to settle down. When you're dealing with an insurgency, and your goal is to turn the civilian population to your side, sometimes that means accepting the other side has to be allowed to shoot first. It's part of claiming the moral high ground. In other words...yea, bombing doctrine ain't the best. Unfortunately it's the best of a bad lot in many cases, right now (Again, ISIS being a perfect example where bombing is the one thing we have support for and can do)
As for point 3, no, they are not. Tension does not automatically build up over time, there. It's something that has to be cultivated, and can be nipped in the bud via adequate systems in place for marginalizing extremists and ensuring grievances can be settled in acceptable ways.
3224871
3224871
I have to use vague allusions because I have no idea what I'm talking about.
3224912
But it is working in the United States, in that despite all the tension it has not degenerated into civil war like it does in other countries. That's the point - despite all the fucked up racial shit we've done, our institutions are strong enough that progress is made through mostly peaceful means.
3225015
Which is largely my point : Allowing a region to 'fight it out' does not resolve the underlying issues. I cited WW1 there because if letting people fight it out worked, then that should have settled things, but did not due to nobody learning the right lessons in how to handle the aftermath.
3225100
You can change the measure if you wish for total accuracy; the point here is that capitalism continually leads to us making more goods with less labor which is a net positive. However we're nowhere near the point that we can get rid of money because we aren't at the point that replacing things easily. Cars are still very expensive to make and if you can get a new one for free people are going to try to upgrade way more often. And that's not touching on the fact that tons of jobs will utterly crash and burn at '3-4 hours of voluntary work per week'; in mine it takes multiple weeks to actually train someone to do what needs to be done, and often several months before they are really up to speed, and that's at 40 hours a week of continuous practice/instruction.
I dislike the emphasis on 'work as an inherently noble virtue, not working = bad' because it's a faulty premise that is finally having its rotten roots exposed, but we've got a while to go before everything is stabilized there. And of systems of government, anarchism is the one that falls down first because the instant a single entity decides to stop playing by the rules the whole system starts breaking down.
3225906
Unfortunately barring some major rewiring of the human brain, that latter is not going to happen because you're going to get sociopaths and they throw all that right out the window.
We've had some luddites fighting against progress, yes, but the typical reason is it remains cheaper to employ people than to automate their jobs. As soon as the minimum wage movement wins, you'll see that scale tip for a while, bringing the 'We must reevaluate' day closer.
As to how capitalism leads to reductions, that follows from point B like so : Business owner seeks to increase productivity or decrease costs because that leads to more profit. One way to do both is tech advances; hence, business owner has incentive to invest in either direct research or purchasing from a tech company (who then does the research), and thus things move forward.
For an easy example, you've got the entire computing industry whose driven forward by this basic impulse. This is also where government enters the picture as a useful entity, because it can function like a business who invests in the entire society at once through things like basic research or infrastructure development, where the logic is 'Any one person/individual lacks incentive for this because the gains are diffused to everyone, but collectively this is great!'
Which is another area anarchy falls apart in; if you live in an anarchist society, then whose supplying the means to allow for all that basic development? Why do I want to spend a bunch of time on roads & bridges as my own individualist self? And that's only for positive externalities. For negative externalities, anarchy is even worse off. Who regulates pollution? What happens when I as someone running a factory decide to dump my waste in a river or emit it into the air? Who penalizes me there? If you have some form of adjudicating body in place, then...it's serving a governmental function, even if it's ostensibly 'private enterprise' (At which point it's transformed from anarchist to anarcho-something else at a minimum).
Anarchism in its ideal form would work, sure. So would communism, so would socialism, so would capitalism. Hell, if everyone were enlightened capitalism would be amazing because every single business would operate under the assumption they are in a constant iterated prisoner's dilemma and therefore cooperation would be the default strategy leading to mass gains all around.
But people are not like that, and if your governmental system relies on fundamentally changing human nature, then I'd say it's pure pie in the sky. The difference capitalism holds relative to all the others listed is that it's still able to function with humans-as-humans, and it provides a framework where in conjunction with government we can check the excesses, and bridle previously unrestrained impulses to channel them productively.
3226437
Once again, that doesn't account for people whose brains are simply...broken, through various means. You are going to have aberrant behavior, and you can't simply believe it will not happen - it may happen less, but it will happen. So again, what is the plan for when - and that's a when, not an if - people begin deviating from the norms? And what do you do when said deviation cannot be corrected? Who is going to agree to hold a serial killer in prison for life?
This is something I actually do work in, on the tech end. There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into an automated system that you aren't thinking of. You need the actual hardware developed. You need software written. You need that software secured. You need support staff who can service the machine if it breaks / update it as necessary. You need to update the hardware every so often. And you need your customer base to adapt to it, and accept it, as opposed to simply going somewhere else. And I am sure I am forgetting other elements of it as well, just that it's not so simple as 'Put in an automated scanner and call it a day' in many many cases.
And all of that is pretty much an up-front cost you have to pay in one big lump sum. So even if once it's all up and working (Assuming no errors! And let me tell you, you will get errors!) yes, it will supersede a worker over time. But it's not so cut and dry and it's also difficult and many people will accept 'less efficient but way less stressful' until something forces them to reevaluate - like, say, the cost per worker going up by 50%. Otherwise, inertia is a powerful force.
Capitalism is not about evading taxes. Minimizing taxes is one way to generate more profit, yes, but tax evasion is not inherent to the system. That's more a flaw of poor governance and a few other things (Its own lovely complicated soup) than 'Capitalism = dodge taxes' because some people will dodge or try to dodge taxes under any system, period.
3225015
Ooh. How can I get one?
3225879
Fighting it out eventually resolves things, when one side wins by a big enough margin. Not in a way you would approve of. But imagine what the US would be like today if the settlers hadn't obliterated the natives. Diversity--real diversity, not just different styles of clothing and music and food--is opposed to human instincts, which are to kill people who are different.
Nobody won WW1 militarily, and the Germans were justifiably upset when later they found out their leaders had converted a stalemate on the battlefield into a massive loss on paper. If the Germans had been beaten in the old-fashioned way--their men enslaved to work in the fields, their language outlawed and forgotten--things would have been settled.
The dynamics of interacting cultures are a predictable system. We should try to understand its rules (mathematically). so we at least know what we're doing and what trade-offs we're making.
3226465
... everyone? Except me, of course. I say, just kill him now.
3228735 Can I buy the land and call myself Conseil Municipal?
3228871 Sigh. It's unfortunate that the idea of approaching politics & sociology scientifically will forever be associated with that silliness.
3229015 I like Asimov fine, but the super-accurate model of scientific prediction of the future in Foundation is just silly, and people often bring it up when I talk about analyzing the dynamics of social and political systems.
3228676
'Kill everyone' is a way to resolve things. It's also, I daresay, not one that's advisable nor one that will work in this day and age because humanity is spread out enough it's not gonna happen. Further, if we say allowed the Shia-Sunni conflict to go truly hot, the entire region is going to eventually go up in a nuclear fireball and I don't think any of us want to deal with the both literal and metaphorical fallout of such a scenario.
The idea that we can mathematically model this with any reliability right now strikes of arrogance. We've been trying to model just economics alone decades and yet the econ models consistently, horribly fail. Similarly mapping cultures is almost certainly doomed to fail for reasons Asimov saw ages ago - as soon as a Mule shows up, the psychohistory goes out the window.
As an easy example? Putin is a Mule. The entire paradigm is upended by him and him alone, whereas a different leader in Russia well could have entirely altered the last 10 years of US-Russia relations. And that's a single person. The butterfly complexities here are massive.
3230484 3230136 The very silly psychohistory that Asimov wrote about is a fraud. One can, however, gather statistic and construct models that accurately answer question such as: What is the shape of the distribution of wars given these circumstances? What is the distribution for economic collapses? What is the relationship between wealth, or wealth inequities, or ethnic diversity, and violence?
To prevent conflict seems like the obviously right thing to do. But remember we live in a universe in which, so far, intelligent life has always killed itself off. We should see an unknown but very large number of extraterrestrial civilizations, and instead we see zero. The obvious right thing leads inevitably to extinction.
3232023
That's operating off of a lot of assumptions though. All we can say for certain right now is 'We have not observed any intelligent life'. That does not mean it's died off. It could mean it chooses not to contact us for whatever reason, or has evolved into something beyond our ken, or takes a form we don't even realize the message of, or the interstellar distances are so vast that exploration/communication is impractical, or any number of other theories.
I mean I would wager that if WE by pure luck became the universe-owning civilization, then we'd likely adopt something akin to the Prime Directive.
Now, on the other point : I'd argue you can't accurately model war for simple reasons. Try modeling World War 1 before WW1. You're going to fail. Try modeling WW2 before WW2. Good luck foreseeing the atomic bomb. The main reason we could model a hypothetical WW3 is that it becomes 'where do all the nukes fall?'.
And wealth/inequality/etc, sure, you can make models. And then some unknown R factor comes in and fucks the model over completely. Nobody has yet created an economic model that consistently and accurately predicts the future. Something always snarls them. Black swans abound.
3232081 Black swans aren't everywhere. They are important when an event has a power-law distribution
event frequency = 1 / size^c
and c = 1. So your saying that black swans are significant is in fact a precise claim about the distribution of events.
I think we can say nearly for certain that there is no intelligent life in our light cone. Intelligent life, very very shortly after reaching our level of intelligence, would learn how to tap the energy of stars. And they would do that unless there were some very, very strong reason not to use the energy of stars. That would mean we'd see no starlight from any regions of space with intelligent life. This is one of those things that is absolutely invariant regardless of the form of life; all life uses energy, and intelligent life can (after a few thousand years) convert energy into life, and realizes that leaving energy untapped is equivalent to mass murder.
You seem to have the idea that "modelling" means something like predicting who wins or how they are fought. I don't mean anything like that.
3233578
You need to define what you mean by capitalism. Current venture capital and banking practices rely on growth to fund new ventures. A lot of people's retirement plans would be wrecked if growth stopped, but it isn't obvious that growth stopping would prevent investment, nor that investment is a defining feature of capitalism. Investment banks were founded under monarchies and mercantilism, not under what we call capitalism today. Communist governments make investments. Just not very good ones.
What is an overproduction crisis? I mean, who specifically do you imagine "overproduction" hurts? Surely the mass-scale production of very low-cost goods in China that's taken place over the past 20 years is the very definition of overproduction. The low prices of Walmart are "overproduction." But where is the crisis, and whose crisis is it?
3253292
What I am saying is the models cannot account for something completely anticipated. So if, prior to WW1, we try to model what the war looks like, we fail horribly because the paradigm shift was so great as to be beyond anyone's conception of 'war'.
Or, as another bit, we know Yellowstone will erupt 'at some point' - but that time window is millions of years long. You can model what happens if Yellowstone erupted now, but not if it does so in 50 years - as, by then, we may well not be concerned due to having some way to contain it.