Stability

Full Title or Meme

A system can be considered stable when external changes can be accommodated without major disturbance to the status quo.

Stability is boring. Is that good or bad?

Context

• Control theory is the study of enabling stabile system, whether static or dynamic.
• An identity ecosystem can be considered stable when the binding of an identifier to an object can be trusted over some extended period.

Problems

• Nothing in our reality lasts forever. Even the Earth beneath our feet and the oceans around us are in a state of flux.
• In an evolving Ecosystem stasis typically results in replacement. Even though the stable species may survive in niches for millennia.

Static Stability

• A system can be considered stable when the mechanisms inside the system provide a restorative force against changes that does not cause wild variations in the state of the system.
• A control system that is stable may have mild overcorrection, but when that is limited to one cycle, it is considered to be critically damped.
• Such a system can be called Homeostatic.

Dynamic Stability

• When the system is not stable without external inputs, it is considered to be dynamically stable when such external inputs are available and operational.
• As described by the wiki page Homeostasis stability will require changes to the system of laws to enforce some level of stability. Unfortunately there seems to be no consensus on how that can be legislated in the current political systems.
• It is empirically clear that the current state of the world's identity ecosystems are not currently stable.

Political Stability

What is a human but one of homo sapiens that has evolved to work well in small communities but has multiplied to the point where formalized rules have become necessary to avoid them killing each other.

Perhaps we're closer to chaos than people realize. One loose nut and the whole thing comes apart. The one thing working for us is that there are multiple ecosystems. We can hope that enuf of them keep working as examples to the rest. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Canada - keep it going guys.

Solutions

• Resilience must be factored in to overcome the times when Stability brakes down, as we know it must.