Failure in Collective Systems:
The Effect of Environmental Stability on Collective Self-Organization
and the Chaotic Effect of Multiple-Issue Platforms in Electoral Processes
Norman L. Johnson
nlj@lanl.gov
There is a growing appreciation of the power of
diverse collectives in solving difficult problem, as exemplified by global
efficiency in large financial markets, social movements that precipitate
needed change (e.g., the fall of the Berlin wall), or knowledge self-organization
driven by human actions in electronic databases (e.g., book referral at Amazon.com).
As we rely more on these collective processes to solve society's and businesses'
more challenging problems, we must understand the stability of these processes.
Two examples are used to illustrate mechanisms of failure in collective systems.
The first example is a simple self-organizing
system - the foraging for food by ants (one of the sample simulations provided
with the public software - STARLOGO). This system is argued to be similar
in dynamics to many decentralized collective systems - ecologies, economies,
knowledge systems, societies, etc. The simulations are first shown
to illustrate a developmental view of evolving systems proposed by Salthe
and Johnson, captured by the developmental cycle of Formative, Co-operational
and Condensed stages. The effects of different rates of environmental
change are then presented. No effect is observed from small rates of
change. As the rate increases, innovative information becomes more
important. As the rate further increases, stabilizing informational
structures (collective pheromone clouds) fail and the system regresses to
earlier developmental stages. It is observed that just before the times
of failure, the system exhibits high collective coherence, which results
in a loss of innovation that could have prevented the failure.
Hence, the collective processes that form these structures are shown to inhibit
the performance of the system as a whole in rapidly changing environments
and can lead to undesirable episodic failure. In rapidly changing environments,
the system remains in the Formative stage, all the productivity results from
the innovators, and the existence of collective structures only degrade the
overall system performance. The important lesson learned from these
results is the role that collective effects play in system failure and how
collective effects should be managed depending on rates of environmental
change.
The second example concerns diversity in electoral
processes. In the 2000 Presidential election, many of the states had
popular votes that were equally split between the two main candidates - Florida
being the prime example. This 50/50 split caused the outcome to be
sensitive to details of the voting procedures and participation - aspects
that in prior times were considered less important. The sensitivity
of a global outcome to the smallest details is characteristic of a chaotic
system and does not bode well for future elections if it is likely to occur
again. Many ascribe the chaotic outcome of the 2000 election to an
unlikely event, possibly enhanced by candidates seeking the common middle
ground. Is democracy in crisis or was the 2000 Presidential election an anomaly.
A theory, and supporting simulations, is presented that shows that this was
not an unlikely event and will be prevalent in the future. The results
in the 2000 election are shown to be a direct consequence of platforms that
appeal to multiple issues, which in turn reflect the increasing diversity
of views important to voting populations. This conclusion is shown
to be true even if single issues are largely one-sided in the populations.
A variation of the Central-Limit theorem (combination of a sufficient number
of diverse distributions will result in a normal distribution), when applied
to the voting preference populations, provides the theoretical basis.
The simulations show how random assembly of platforms constructed from voter
preferences based on actual exit-poll data result in 50/50 splits as the
number of issues in the platform increase. This is shown to be
independent of the skewness of the distributions underlying the voter preferences,
in agreement with the predictions of the Central Limit Theorem. This
example illustrates the undesirable consequences of applying traditional
democratic methods to increasingly diverse and large populations.
In both of these examples, diversity of information
is shown to be the critical perspective in the analysis. The relevance
of these results to societal challenges faced in modern times by increased
globalization and faster rates of change is discussed.