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maybe i should just avoid popular science
Aug. 18th, 2018 03:11 pmi've just started to read scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, and needlessly prolonged subtitles, by geoffrey west. like animal weapons, it got a good review in science.
i'm not even quite through the introduction, and i came upon a claim that raised a red flag and stopped me cold:
and not just little cities: big cities fail too, usually because of war or natural disaster; hell, some big cities vanished so completely that they were thought to be myths: mycenae and troy come to mind. (i could add a long list of other ruined cities from mesopotamia, the levant, greece, or egypt, but y'all get the idea.) wakipedia includes a long list as well, which includes towns in france destroyed in the world wars, and those abandoned after the little oopsie in chernobyl.
i'm also going to skip the fact that just as companies are bought by or merge with other companies, suburbs are annexed by nearby cities, and sometimes cities merge to form bigger cities, like budapest. because that sort of direct parallel is just a quibble.
now, i could simply dismiss this all as an oversight -- i mean, what's a few hundred counterexamples among friends? -- but the author emphasizes that despite him being a physicist, these scaling laws apply universally in a broad range of areas. i'm not sure i want to read a repeat of animal weapons where broad-brush claims by an expert in one field are riddled with such obvious exceptions in another field to make me doubt their applicability. (and then later another expert in the first field casts doubt on the expert's in-field claims themselves, just to rub it in. ;) ) for the moment, i'm going to continue onwards and upwards, but this really isn't what i want from the introduction to a supposedly reputable book of popular science.
i'm not even quite through the introduction, and i came upon a claim that raised a red flag and stopped me cold:
why do almost all companies live for only a relatively few years whereas cities keep growing and manage to circumvent the apparently inevitable fate that befalls [...] companiesbeyond the weasel-word "relatively" -- relative to what? the age of the universe? the lifespan of a dormouse? -- and the personification of companies -- a pet peeve -- there's an implication that cities last forever. the table of contents seems to bear that out as well. but cities fail too. we even have a term for their abandoned husks: ghost towns.
and not just little cities: big cities fail too, usually because of war or natural disaster; hell, some big cities vanished so completely that they were thought to be myths: mycenae and troy come to mind. (i could add a long list of other ruined cities from mesopotamia, the levant, greece, or egypt, but y'all get the idea.) wakipedia includes a long list as well, which includes towns in france destroyed in the world wars, and those abandoned after the little oopsie in chernobyl.
i'm also going to skip the fact that just as companies are bought by or merge with other companies, suburbs are annexed by nearby cities, and sometimes cities merge to form bigger cities, like budapest. because that sort of direct parallel is just a quibble.
now, i could simply dismiss this all as an oversight -- i mean, what's a few hundred counterexamples among friends? -- but the author emphasizes that despite him being a physicist, these scaling laws apply universally in a broad range of areas. i'm not sure i want to read a repeat of animal weapons where broad-brush claims by an expert in one field are riddled with such obvious exceptions in another field to make me doubt their applicability. (and then later another expert in the first field casts doubt on the expert's in-field claims themselves, just to rub it in. ;) ) for the moment, i'm going to continue onwards and upwards, but this really isn't what i want from the introduction to a supposedly reputable book of popular science.