Scale – when size really matters!
Post #8 in a series seeking to answer "What is Understanding made of?"
“The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.”
- Stanley Kubrick
It has been a while since I have written. That will change now that the holidays are over. But here is a reminder of what this series is all about.
Every thing we think we know comes from a model. Thus everything we know is a representation of reality and not reality itself. Since models are the basis for all understanding, I am exploring what we know about every model, i.e. what are their common characteristics. Why? Because much of human history is littered with the carcasses of misunderstanding, and if we can see how human understanding is developed and used, maybe we can eventually stop its abuse. Another hope is that our exploration will act like the biblical mustard seed, starting at a very small scale but after planting firmly in bits of soil, begin to have an impact at an entirely different scale, maybe even moving mountains.
So far we have looked at models as having starting conditions, supporting evironments, needs, language and limits. This post looks at scale, i.e. the size of the phenomenon that we are using our understanding to explain and at times control. The reason this is so important is that a model designed to explain how small systems work may be useless if the problem you are addressing has large scale components, and vice versa. For example, physics models that Newton and others developed to look at the movement of stars, planets and even baseballs, are incapable of describing the movement of atoms, just as quantum science which shows how atomic particles appear and disappear in space and time, is simply strange when viewed at the scale we live in: just ask a physicist about his quantum cat, if you are up for some strange conversation.
In other words the usefulness of a lot of current knowledge is restricted by the scale of the phenomena it purports to describe. Macroeconomics looks at the wealth of nations whereas microeconomics looks at individual purchasing behaviors. Biology looks at the make-up of individual organisms; on a larger scale ecology looks at how these organisms interact with each other and the environment that supports them; on a smaller scale microbiology and biochemistry look at the cellular components of the same organisms. In almost all of these cases, rules that define one set of truths typically have limited power to describe and predict behaviors at a different scale.
But because innately we have a need to “understand” the world, we often apply what we know from the scale we live in or have studied to everything else we confront without concerning ourselves if our ideas are at all appropriate for the scale we want to impact. How often do we use local weather to support our feelings about global warming? To many of us, a heat wave proves the theory and an overly cold winter invalidates it, though in reality climate change can only be measured on a much larger physical scale than the backyard we see from our kitchens and a much longer time frame than the specific season we find ourselves in.
There are other examples how in all things environmental, scale (and a related concept, frame of reference) matters a lot. Individual human impacts on the environment are almost always small and if looked at from the individual (small scale) perspective, almost insignificant. Thus it becomes easy to say I as an individual am not responsible for the degradation we sometimes see. But when added to the other insignificant contributions from the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, our combined impacts become so huge that our individual responsibilities can actually be shown to increase with population, not decrease.
Look at it this way: as the planet’s population increases, each individual may seem less and less important. After all when I was born, I was 1 in 2.7 billion, or 3.7 X 10-8% of the planet’s population. And today when looked at from the point of view of an individual, I am an even less significant 1 in 6.7 billion or 1.5 X 10-8% of the planet’s current crew. But what if we look instead at population from a macro scale (top down vs. bottom up frame of reference)? From this vantage point we first see that planet is limited in what it can annually produce in way of crops and energy, as well as in how much waste it can absorb without creating toxic pockets. Some say that we surpassed many of these limits during my lifetime. Now if each person were allocated a fair share of what turns out to be fixed limits, then as population grows, each individual’s allotment is lowered. This also means that each individual gains greater responsibility to be aware of their impact on the planet, not less.
Scale is also important in matters of love and war. Large-scale actions meant to cause fear and gain compliance in individuals, if applied on a massive scale like “Shock and Awe” may instead lead to a social resolve to resist future assaults with deeper commitments of those individuals to smaller (harder to attack) groups. And actions meant to win the hearts and minds of individuals within a society, if applied one by one with the best of intentions, may still fail if they cannot be implemented in ways that just as deeply respect the ties of those individuals to the societies they need to remain part of. I think this is one reason the initial US invasion into Iraq did not create the benefits that the architects of that war predicted, because they failed to account for the complexities of Iraqi society at the scale of their ties to each other.
Sometimes we have no choice but to take a model developed and validated at one scale and apply it at an entirely different scale, a process engineers call “scale-up” or “scale-down” depending on which direction they need to go. This requires a systematic and disciplined approach because something important at one scale will often be inconsequential at another. Hopefully we won’t be so tied to our favorite approaches that we fail to see these differences when we apply our understanding to something new.
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Tags: frame of reference, models, scale, Understanding
Understanding | Stan Kaczmarek | 06 January 2010 |
