At the risk of sounding elitist about my educational background, I suspect this is something thats super intuitive to physicists or anyone thats taken statistical (thermo)mechanics and much less so for the rest of the populace: most important things in the world are the result of emergent behaviors in complex systems. You cant just start with one or two players and assume you know everything about the way a group behaves. These things arent infinitely scale-able, and in fact theyre probably not even *moderately* scale-able. Some things *only* exist at a complex, large-scale level, and its all or nothing with grokking them. The weather is not a simple thing. You cant break it into its constituent molecules, analyze them and voila, insta-forecast. Your brain is not a simple thing. You cant break it into individual cells, analyze them and have a clear picture of how the entire neural network functions. A multinational corporation is not a simple thing. You cant break it into its constituent people and predict its corporate behavior. Advocates of simple solutions, purveyors of but if wed JUST do ___ are lying to you or deluding themselves unless the problems theyre addressing are truly trivial. Our society doesnt like things that cant be condensed into 5 step plans and news bytes, but thats the way physical reality actually works. Its chaotic and complex and cant be summarized into One Weird Trick answers.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:14:52 +0000
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