HN Reader

It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.

One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)

It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.

Kind of neat, especially with a bit of skepticism toward the bigger is always better claim. Lot of "really" large animals, not actually that successful.

Elephants, Rhinos, Tigers, not especially successful. Start to become really high value targets with limited ability to defend against threats from every direction, and almost every nearby animal is "red circle", including humans. The Asian elephant is Endangered, the African savanna elephant is Endangered, while the African forest elephant is Critically Endangered. The the black, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos are Critically Endangered. Tigers are Endangered at 5% of historic range.

Dinosaur replenishment rates became negative in the Late Cretaceous, even before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. More species were going extinct than new ones were evolving with a decrease in the development of new traits or adaptive strategies. It all started stagnating, and then they could not cope with sharp changes.

A lot of cities are similar. Paralysis, stagnation, difficulty dealing with threats and changes, and almost every member of human society views them as a high value target. Why target podunk nowhere for pocket change, when a single success swindling New York or Los Angeles is millions. Politics targets them constantly. Now they're even drawing federal military responses.

Bigger's definitely got issues.

I'm not fluent in this topic. Is there much overlap between these scaling laws and dissipative structures in thermodynamics and/or systems theory?

Seems we are rediscovering concepts familiar to the Sumerians, where cities were considered as gods. Following the article, what animal (or components of an animal) would your city embody?

Made me think of A City Is Not A Tree - https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html

The paper in question [1].

Their big results seems to be that on a log-log scale CO2 emissions are linear with respect to population with a slope of 1.12.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501224122

Let's be a little more clear: these are not "laws" as much as they are scaling relationships, this is not "new math" (see Ziph and others), and central planning has always had an impact on city development. Nevertheless, I appreciate this line of inquiry.

It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster.

As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.

As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action

Jane Jacobs: The Nature of Economies.