Seems like the “cruft” theory of social rules. Everyone wants to do big picture design, no one wants to do rule maintenance. It take a collapse for bad rules to be wiped out.
Actually, it’s a basic pattern in almost any process, from stellar development to human life to ecology to society to you name it. I wonder if someone worked out the underlying math.
My reading of the given quote is the same as buybuy’s. Maybe you’re talking about a more general process? Your comment here is tantalizing, but I don’t have any particular reason to believe it; can you give examples, or explain it further, or something?
Here is an example from stellar evolution: hydrogen fusion at a certain core temperature, then a shorter phase of helium fusion at a higher temperature and brightness, eventually leading to a wildly fluctuating red supergiant, finally running out of stuff to burn and collapsing and/or exploding. The material the old dying star spewed out into the space becomes a seed for new stars to form, and so on.
Apparently Heraclitus/Kant/Hegel (later hijacked by Marx[ists]) each described a general pattern like this at some point as “dialectics”, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, negation of negation, quantity->quality, helical change etc., though my knowledge of philosophy is rather rudimentary, so someone more knowledgeable in the history of dialects feel free to chime in.
Seems like the “cruft” theory of social rules. Everyone wants to do big picture design, no one wants to do rule maintenance. It take a collapse for bad rules to be wiped out.
Actually, it’s a basic pattern in almost any process, from stellar development to human life to ecology to society to you name it. I wonder if someone worked out the underlying math.
My reading of the given quote is the same as buybuy’s. Maybe you’re talking about a more general process? Your comment here is tantalizing, but I don’t have any particular reason to believe it; can you give examples, or explain it further, or something?
Here is an example from stellar evolution: hydrogen fusion at a certain core temperature, then a shorter phase of helium fusion at a higher temperature and brightness, eventually leading to a wildly fluctuating red supergiant, finally running out of stuff to burn and collapsing and/or exploding. The material the old dying star spewed out into the space becomes a seed for new stars to form, and so on.
Apparently Heraclitus/Kant/Hegel (later hijacked by Marx[ists]) each described a general pattern like this at some point as “dialectics”, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, negation of negation, quantity->quality, helical change etc., though my knowledge of philosophy is rather rudimentary, so someone more knowledgeable in the history of dialects feel free to chime in.