Visual Book Notes: Scale by Geoffrey West
Here are my notes on Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.
Allometric:
- When things change during growth
- Different dimensions scale differently
- Examples
- As a person grows, arms scale differently than legs
- As a tree grows, the trunk scales differently than branches
Probability Distributions:
- Independent, Uncorrelated, Random
- Normal/Gaussian Distribution ("Bell Curve")
Types of Scaling:
- Linear
- Slope of 1
- Exponential
- Starts out slow, then rapid growth
- Non-Linear
- Sublinear
- Economies of scale
- Infrastructure in a city
- Metabolic rate
- Ship size and fuel needed
- Superlinear
- Increasing returns to scale
- GDP
- Compound interest
- Socioeconomic qualities in a city
Course Grained:
- Simplify assumptions to approximate results
- a.k.a. Zeroth Order
Composite Risk Index = Risk Event * Probabliity
Logarithmic:
- Orders of magnitude
- Powers of 10
- 10^(x), 10^(x+1), 10^(x+2)+...
- Ex. Richter Earthquake Scale
Zipf's Law:
- Rank order of city inversly proportional to it's population size
- Common words in books
- Must be correlated
Unbounded growth can't occur without:
- Infinite resources
- Innovation that "resets the clock"
Fractals:
- Dunbar relationships (x3)
- It's meaningless to quote the value of a measured length w/o stating the scale of resolution
- Country borders are always longer when zoomed in
- Financial markets look the same zoomed ou over days/months/years
Aging:
- Eating less decreases metabolic rate and prompts less metabolic damage per cell (ie. longer life span)
- Half-life of public US companies is ~10 years
Cities:
- Organic, not euclidean
- Growth = fractal increases
- Contraction = fractal decreases
- Run on self-interest/desire/greed
- The social analogue to our evolutionary biological drivers
- Socioeconomic time has been contracted (travel speeds it way up)
Links in a Network:
- Total * (Total -1) / 2
- Or approx. Total^(2) / 2
- More than 6 people at dinner is a challenge
Network Properties:
- Space Filling
- Invariance of Terminal Units
- Points of delivery and transmission
- Energy and resources exchange
- Ex. Capillaries, mitochondria, electrical outlets, water faucets
- Optimization
Principle of Least Action: Occam's Razor with respect to action
– Mar. 27, 2022