Jim,
I recently discovered your blog. It is excellent — very smart and very rational. Many thanks for the service you provide.
One of the most important concepts I’ve come across in years is the concept of “adaptive agents” within complex adaptive systems. Here’s a definition from a useful web site:
“An entity that, by sensing and acting upon its environment, tries to fulfill a set of goals in a complex, dynamic environment. Properties: (1) it can sense the environment through its sensors and act on the environment through its actuators; (2) it has an internal information processing and decision making capability; (3) it can anticipate future states and possibilities, based on internal models (which are often incomplete and/or incorrect); (4) this anticipatory ability often significantly alters the aggregate behavior of the system of which an agent is part. An agent’s goals can take on diverse forms: (i) desired local states;(ii) desired end goals;(iii) selective rewards to be maximized; (iv) internal needs (or motivations) that need to be kept within desired bounds. Since a major component of an agent’s environment consists of other agents, agents spend a great deal of their time adapting to the adaptation patterns of other agents.”
Because I regard myself as a smart person, I believe that I would be very foolish indeed if I did not use my smarts, along with all available information sources, to carefully model the environment and then to act on that environment in a way that achieves my goals. A smart person would be foolish to allow ideology to distort his internal model of the external world. Thus it makes no difference that I have for years been a resident of Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco or that my model of the political environment sees by far a greater danger from the political right than from the political left. It only matters that I do my best to model the environment and anticipate future states of that environment.
For some risks (as I see it), the variables are so wild that modeling is almost impossible. Risks that I place in that category include such risks as radiological risks from, say, dirty bombs; or biological risks from both pandemics and terrorist activities. When and where and whether such threats occur is almost impossible to predict, but it’s easy to conclude that one would be better off in the boonies than in a densely populated area.
There is another kind of risk, however, that my model sees as coming at us like a freight train. That is the risk of economic calamity, followed by deep recession, probably followed by hyperinflation, followed by shortages of all kinds, followed by severe social and civil disorder and dislocation. Once conditions that harsh set in, it’s obvious that those who were not prepared are going to be desperate.
Because of my age (58), and because I am descended from generations of hardy people who lived close to the land in and around the Appalachian mountains, and because I saw as a child and remember how they lived, it is easy for me to see that, during the 1930s, such people got through the Great Depression because they had the skills, the land, the infrastructure, and the community support for subsistence close to the land. They didn’t turn on each other. They helped each other out. Such people are an endangered species today. The last 10 years have been particularly harsh for these people as cheap Chinese imports and a flood of borrowed money crushed their economic niche, and as the housing boom ate their land for second homes for city dwellers. For example, Allegheny County, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lost 60 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2005, while luxury housing devoured its little family farms and scenic ridges, while the blind suburban and entitlement mentality of the outsiders ran roughshod over the fragile rural culture.
If my model differs from yours, it is that I’m willing to risk that the social structure may hold up in certain places that are sparsely populated, agricultural, that have a history of self-reliance, and where knowledge of how to live close to the land persists. This rural culture still exists intact in some pockets and escaped the recent building and development boom. Those who doubt my optimism on rural social structure would do better to seek greater isolation.
So what am I doing in Nancy Pelosi’s district? Saving a few more dollars and meeting a few more goals before I head for the hills in about five more months. Two years ago I bought (and paid cash for) five rural acres in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s not much land, but it’s all I could afford, and to me debt is out of the question. My land is all woods, on a southern slope, with a small stream, surrounded by yet more woods and hilly terrain. It’s at the end of a rough gravel road which is reached by a winding country road. I had my well drilled last year. I bought a used camping trailer to live in while I build a small house starting early next year. I admit that I am nervously hoping to time the housing market — to whip out my hard-saved cash and build the house while my dollars are still worth something, while building costs are depressed, and before runaway inflation begins. I would not dare push that beyond 2008. The county in which I bought land is relatively poor, racially and culturally un-diverse, agricultural, and still undisturbed by suburbanization because of its hilly terrain, distance from the interstate highways, and inferior network of small winding roads. In this environment, I’m regarding my neighbors as lines of defense, and potential allies, rather than as threats.
A plan like mine would not work for everyone. Though I have lived in California for 16 years, I lived in rural North Carolina for much of my life, and I understand and know how to work with the rural culture there because I was born into it and have relatives there. For those whose retreat is based on maximum self-sufficiency and isolation, I suppose culture doesn’t matter much. But for those whose retreat includes a modest amount of land and requires cooperation and trust among neighbors, I would regard culture as extremely important. The locals in most places would find it hard to trust someone they regarded as an alien. Trust is a dwindling resource in American society and is one of the first casualties of multiculturalism. This lack of trust, the frightening decline of civility to the lowest common denominator, is in my view making places like San Francisco hard and stressful to the point of being almost uninhabitable. We are coerced from both the political left and the political right to “celebrate” cultural diversity. We are told that it creates vibrant neighborhoods, etc., etc. But recent studies have shown that the opposite is true. Cultural differences cause neighbors to distrust each other, to keep to themselves, and to not work together to solve common problems. My advice to those who’re still searching for their retreat or who’re trying to decide whether they can ride it out in place would be not to ignore cultural factors. Do you trust the people around you, and do they trust you? Insofar as you need the cooperation and protection of others if things get really bad, will you get that cooperation and protection?
I’m attaching an aerial photo of my land (inside the blue line). I’m not sure whether the numbers make it identifiable, so the photo is not for publication.
Our models of the external environment must be constantly updated, else they become inaccurate and lead us into errors of judgment. Your Web site is an excellent source of information for keeping our models up to date. Best regards and many thanks, – David in California
Letter Re: Adaptive Agents and the Blue Ridge Mountains
