Titlebook: Of Ants and Men; The Unexpected Side David G. Green Book 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Complexity.Feedback.connectivity.soci

glucagon

From Bad to Worse, national disasters. They are symptoms of the complexity of modern society. In many cases they arise as unintended side effects of every day activity. Complexity means that in any complex situation, any decision will have unintended consequences. Examples include immediate needs driving out importan

迫击炮

ANT

crescendo

The Eye of the Beholder,of the world around us are necessarily limited in scope and detail. Also human perception is local, so we are not able to see everything that might affect us. Being unable to understand the complexity that leads to misfortune, people look for simple explanations. One of these has been to attribute m

tariff

The Animal Within,a group and the need for territory and resources. These drives are the seeds of many social problems. Fear of exclusion provides powerful motivation to conform. Leaders exploit this fear, and outside threats, to unite people behind them. The desire for status often leads to destructive competition a

filial

More Things in Heaven and Earth,models mean that unexpected conditions often arise. When confronted with conditions we have never encountered before, our models fail. Accidents and other disasters may follow. A contributing factor is that we are trained to limit our thinking in ways that society expects; another is the tendency to

冲击力

The Sting in the Tail,Laws and customs seek to eliminate extreme behaviour. Standardization aims to remove isolated products and practices. Media reporting distorts public perception of issues by focussing on extreme events as though they are the norm. Many social problems stem from failure to recognize extremes for what

choleretic

Divide and Rule,are easier to deal with. Familiar examples range from designing houses with bedrooms and bathrooms, to dividing large organizations into sections with specialist roles. This classic approach leads to social hierarchies as large issues are divided repeatedly into smaller and smaller roles. It also re

联合

One Thing Leads to Another,grow to result in very late arrival. Government action to improve safety can lead to increasingly complex and restrictive rules and to undesirable outcomes, such as the restrictive “nanny state”. The creation of interlocking treaties between European nations in the late 1800s meant that a single ass

瘙痒

The Snowball Effect,amples include cycles of revenge between rival groups, growth of compound interest, and the formation of market price “bubbles”. In contrast to negative feedback, which dampens change, positive feedback sends systems out of control. It converts small, local differences into large, global patterns. E