Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study
phys.org342 points by pseudolus a day ago
342 points by pseudolus a day ago
On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.
The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.
The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.
Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0
A bit of caution with this line of thinking, because I was blindsided by it after more than decade of hand waving away "academics"
When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.
The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."
Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.
> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.
This varies substantially by field, or by subfield. There is a vast decades-long intellectual wasteland of bad economics predicated on bad models that are only appealing on normative grounds. The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam. Etc etc. Science advances one funeral at a time hard part because people are unwilling to let go of their models, even when they have outlived their usefulness or have been simply proven too wrong to be useful even in their original purpose.
> The entire field of behavioral psychology might be a scam
I studied cognition and came to the very same, sad conclusion. There’s a reason there was a reproduction crisis and it’s far from over. I remember vividly how one of my professors, during a paper debate, would end criticism with: “but it’s been published” as if that handwavy gesture could explain away serious research gaps that even graduate students saw through right away. Shoddy statistics in a system that rewards quantity can do a lot of damage.
Until this moment, I hadn't even thought that economics might be a scientific field. Do they really see themselves as one? It hasn't seemed like one from the outside.
without getting too deep into "field purity" [0], it's certainly a field of study insofar as game theory, psychology, anthropology, etc. are fields of study. It's possible to make certain models of behavior or outcome potentials, but running experiments is significantly more difficult than e.g. physics or biology.
So it's science inasmuch as anything with n=1 repeatability can be science
Weirdly, it's much easier to run empirical experiments in psychology (my field), but economics for whatever reason is MUCH more rigorous and empirical than psychology in my experience.
It may have to do with the overall complexity being easier to effectively model. Psychology has such big error terms that you either give up or get comfortable with a lot of hand-waving and dogma. A huge proportion of psychologists are just activists and have no real interest in being scientists (beyond the prestige).
Astrophysics cannot make experiments either, but it's a (most fascinating) science indeed.
What are you talking about? Astrophysicists do all kinds of experiments. The Nobel was just awarded to a guy that designed an Astrophysics experiment.
They are meaning experiments in the sense of adjusting the state of the thing being experimented upon. Astrophysics and economics experiments are both limited to adjusting the way we collect the data, not the subject itself (you can’t practically poke a star or an economy with a stick). Presumably the reason they’re using this line in the sand is that it is the key technique to separate correlation from causation, which is a limitation that tends to be more of a problem in economics than astrophysics (but certainly does frustrate in both fields).
The real problem of course is that economics is like astrophysics with only 1 star (or maybe 100 stars that bump into each other constantly… the analogy is imperfect)
Economics can certainly test theorems with n>1. "Supply and demand", that is, "The ratio of supply over demand changes inversely with price", has been verified in trades done by crows and monkeys, and uncountably many times in humans.
Of course, more specific economic hypotheses (such as "Universal Basic Income produces inflationary pressure") can be harder to separate from hidden variables and noise.
Economics is a scientific field in the same sense that Astrology and Politics are. You formulate theories about what your customers want to hear. Then test those theories by telling your customers things, while observing both immediate reactions and how situations develop over time. That latter in conjunction with formulating updated theories about what your customers want... Endless loop.
Do they believe it's a science? Assume that Upton Sinclair's famous quote applies.
This is silly. Economics is not science in the same way physics or chemistry is. But it is not totally without predictive power like astrology is.
Etymology helps.
Eco: house, household, or dwelling place.
The -logy suffix is 'science'. So ecology is: the scientific study of how living organisms interact with one another and with their physical surroundings.
The -nomy suffix is a field or system of something.
Economy is the ecology of finance. Or, Economy is a field of science that predicts financial systems. Any scientific field helps you make predictions, once you know the material. But useful predictions require useful measurement.
-logy is ‘-thoughts’, -nomy is ‘-naming’, right?
In this context close enough, but tangentially it's much more interesting.
Logos in particular is my favorite word. The logy suffix derives from it, and one approximation is "thoughts" or you might also see "word". The Bible begins with "In the beginning there was the Logos". We translate that as "Word", even though the connotation is also "thoughts". It might be more accurately understood as "the patterns, rules, logic of the universe". For the Greeks, thought was not something one "had", in the same sense we think, but rather something innate in nature that one participated in.
So the Bible verse might be better understood as "in the beginning there was the same working logic in the universe that we observe and participate in now, the same innate rules governed the cosmos that do now". That's actually a much more useful and honest interpretation than "in the beginning was God's words".
When one studies their particular -logy, biology, ecology, etc, they are not just looking at things describing them, they are more intrinsically bound up in a truth discovery exercise about something whose patterns and working can be figured out.
Natural Science could be conceptualized as a logology - literally studying how the Logos works in its various dimensions.