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Comment by peoplefromibiza

My understanding of the article is that complex systems don't collapse faster, they simply need a lot more time to be built and collapse faster than that

But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all.

Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on.

So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history.

They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not.

A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.

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