"The Seneca Strategy" -- Asking for Suggestions from my Readers

About Amelia the Amoeba, she is a pedigreed Naegleria Fowleri, a species known for her habit of eating human brains - an interesting case of a Seneca Collapse for the owner of the brain. But Amelia is a good girl and she won't do that to you if you are nice to her.

My second book on the concept of "Seneca Collapse" (or Cliff, or Ruin, or the like) is nearly completed and it should be available from Springer before the end of the year. It is a sequel to my first book, "The Seneca Effect", but this second one is thought as more easily readable "trade" book. It will be sold at a reasonable price, unlike the first one that was supposed to be a specialized, scientific book.

You see above a first attempt at a title and a cover for this book. Of course, the publisher will devise a better cover illustration, but the real issue is the title, still provisional. I used "The Seneca Strategy" as a title because the book focuses on how to deal with collapses rather than on the physics of collapses. It proposes a strategy that's based on the Stoic view of the world revisited under the lens of system dynamics. It is the idea that you don't try to force systems to do what you want them to do, a concept that Jay Forrester termed "pushing the levers in the wrong direction."

But, as it stands, the title is no good. My editor told me that, "“collapse” is not a friendly, or familiar, word to most readers. It seems to apply only to extreme events that don’t affect most people. " That is, people won't understand what the book is about. I think he is correct and that I need a better title -- a title that explains what's inside the book.

So, dear readers, could you focus your creative skills on this task and suggest a few titles for me? I think the title should contain the words "collapse" and "Seneca," but then there are many possibilities, for instance, I am toying with "Paths to Ruin" but creativity often consists in trying many different ideas and I am sure many of you could suggest something good. Hoping that not all of my readers are bots, I'll sure appreciate your efforts! (Amelia will also be grateful)

Here is the index of the book, to give you some idea of what it is about.

1. Table of Contents

1. Preface 4

1.1 A quick glossary of the terms you’ll find in this book. 5

2. Summary: Six Things You Should Know About Collapse 6

3. Plan of the Book (not necessarily to be published) 8

4. Collapse: An Introduction 9

5. Models of Collapse 14

5.1 Models of the Future: The Russian Roulette 14

5.2 The Limits of Models. Nightfall on Lagash 23

5.3 Why Models are not Believed: The Croesus Syndrome 29

6. The Science of Collapse 36

6.1 Complex Systems: The Goddess’ Wrath 36

6.2 The Power of Networks: The Ghost in the Shell 42

6.3 Living and Dying in a Complex Universe. The Story of Amelia the Amoeba. 52

7. The Practice of Collapse 76

7.1 The Collapse of Engineered Structures: For Dust you are and to Dust you Will Return 76

7.2 Financial Collapses: Blockbuster goes bust. 84

7.3 Natural Disasters: Florence’s Great Flood 94

7.4 Mineral Collapses: The Coming Oil Crisis? 103

7.5 The Seneca Cliff and Human Violence: Fatal Quarrels. 111

7.6 Famines, Epidemics, and Depopulation: The Zombie Apocalypse 117

7.7 The Big One: Societal Collapse 125

7.8 Apocalypse: the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystem 132

8. Strategies for Managing Collapse 138

8.1 Technological Progress against Collapse. The Cold Fusion Miracle that Wasn’t. 138

8.2 Avoiding Overexploitation. Drill, Baby, Drill! 148

8.3 Leadership Against Collapse: The Last Roman Empress. 155

8.4 Collapse as a Weapon: The Iago Strategy 164

8.5 Deception as a Strategy: the Camper’s Dilemma 174

8.6 Life After Collapse: The Seneca Rebound 181

9. Conclusion: The Seneca Strategy 189

10. Appendix: a personal note on Lucius Annaeus Seneca 192

11. Acknowledgment 195

12. REFERENCES 196

On being a Cassandra: more than 500 posts and continuing!

The Cassandra blog was started in January 2011 and has been growing, even though growth seems to have been slowing down during the past year or so. I am not sure how much the statistics provided by Blogspot are to be trusted, but they say that Cassandra has now around 60,000 hits per month for a total of nearly two million visits and 521 posts published. Not so bad for a blog kept by one person, without SEO tricks or anything like that.

About the posts published so far, the biggest impact was the post on the "Seneca Effect" that even generated a new blog specifically dedicated to the concept expressed by the old Roman philosopher that "increases are of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid." It is also generating a whole book that I am trying to write. Hopefully, it will be published in early 2017.

Does this blog have an impact on the real world? Hard to say; probably not. The themes treated here remain something discussed only among a relatively small group of people whom the rest of the world ignores. But, after all, for a blog that bears the name of "Cassandra," that's something to be expected!

And if you would like to know something more about the ancient prophetess Cassandra, I am proud to present to you an interview with her, summoned from Hades!

Image from Cassandra Consulting

Seneca's gamble: why the road to ruin is rapid

Why people can so easily destroy the resources that provide their livelihood? Fishermen, for instance, have destroyed fisheries over and over, and every time they refused to take even the most elementary precautions to avoid disaster. Eventually, I came to think that it is related to a basic miswiring of the human mind: the "gambler's fallacy". Fishermen, it seems, see fishing as it were a lottery and they redouble their efforts thinking that, eventually, they will get lucky and strike it rich. Alas, it doesn't work in this way and all what they obtain is to destroy the fish stocks and create a spectacular collapse of the fishing yields. This way of creating one's own ruin could be termed "Seneca's gamble", from the words of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca who stated that "the road to ruin is rapid".

The "Martingale" is a strategy to be played with games which have a 50% chance of winning. It consists in doubling one's bet after every loss, believing that, eventually, a win will pay for the previous losses and provide a gain.

The Martingale is an example of the "gambler's fallacy". Typically, gamblers tend to think that some events - such as the numbers coming out of the wheel in the roulette game - are related to each other. So, they believe that, if the red comes up several times in a row, it is more probable that the black will come out the next spin. That's not true, of course, and the Martingale is a surefire way to ruin oneself, and to do that very rapidly. Nevertheless, many people find the idea fascinating enough that they try to put it into practice. It is the effect of a bad miswiring of the human mind..

The gambler's fallacy may explain some aspects of the human behavior that would be otherwise impossible to understand. For instance, in a previous post I was showing this figure, describing the yields of the UK fishing industry (from Thurstan et al.).

Compare the upper and the lower box, and you'll see that the fishing industry was ramping up at an incredible speed their "fishing power," just when fishing yields had started to decline. Note also how they still had a lot of fishing power when the fisheries had all but collapsed. How could it be that they kept fishing so much even when there was little or nothing left to fish?Thinking about this matter, we can only come to the conclusion that fishermen reasoned like gamblers at a betting table. In other words, they were playing a sort of "fishing Martingale", doubling their efforts after every failure.

Gamblers know - or should know - that casino gambling is a negative sum game. Yet, the gambler's fallacy makes them think that a streak of bad results will somehow increase the probability that the next bet will be the good one. So, they keep trying until they ruin themselves.

Now, consider fishermen: they or should know  that, at some point, the overall yield of the fishery has become negative. But, like gamblers playing roulette, they believe that a streak of bad luck will somehow increase the probability that the next fishing trip will be the good one. So, they keep trying until they ruin themselves.

The mental miswiring that gives rise to the behavior of gamblers and fishermen can create even larger disasters. With mineral resources, we are seeing something similar: operators redoubling their efforts in the face of diminishing returns of extraction; the story of "shale gas" and "shale oil" is a typical example. Maybe it is done hoping that - somehow - the destruction of one stock will increase the probability to find a new one (or to create one by some technological miracle). So, instead of trying to make mineral stocks last as long as possible, we are rushing to destroy them at the highest possible rate. But, unlike fish stocks that can replenish themselves, minerals do not reproduce. Once we'll have destroyed the rich ores that created our civilization, there will be nothing left behind. We will have ruined ourselves forever.

In the end, the gambler's fallacy is one of the factors that lead people, companies, and entire civilization to a rapid collapse. It is what I have called the "Seneca Cliff" from the words of the ancient Roman philosopher who first noted how "the way to ruin is rapid". In the case described here, we might call it the "Seneca gamble" but, in all cases, it is a ruin that we create with our own hands.