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I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion. The worl

I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion. The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization. The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode. Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed, possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.

kthejoker2 8y ago
It's certainly not just the Internet that has gotten more complex. Grocery stores have gone from an average of 9,000 products for sale in 1975 to over 55,000 today. Similar expansions of products exist in communication, finance, automotive, fashion, appliances... There were approximately 2,000 federal crimes in 1900. Today there are nearly 5,000. People with college degrees skyrocketed from about 10% in 1970 to well over 25% today. Stanfofd conferred degrees in 22 majors in 1968; they offer over 120 today. And to take a small but real example for me, when I went to consider a preschool for my 4 year old, I received more literature on curriculum, activities, nutritional programs, Harvard studies, diversity initiatives, and instructor CVs ... Than I did when I chose my university back in 1998. Or take my job as a Microsoft platform analytics professional. When I started out it was just SQL Server and its 5-10 components. Now someone coming into the same level is expected to have understanding of machine learning and AI, Big Data, chatbots, log analytics and other streaming/event sourcing capabilities, cloud architecture ..oh yeah and SQL Server and its 10-15 components ... I can cite examples in medicine, finance, communications, linguistics (6 million words in Urban Dictionary, most of which aren't in the OED), pop culture ... Taken together you would easily see that all the "convenience" and "simplicity" you're touting is completely offset by the amount of cognitive processing we have to do to navigate our modern world. We have all been forced to carve out mental fiefdoms - filter bubbles - just to cope. And that's led to the break down in coordination you cite - there is less empathy because I simply can't connect with the many someones out there with a vastly different set of life choices than me, at least not collectively. To celebrate diversity is to acknowledge and embrace that we can come together on anything at all given the vast gulfs between most of us.
- bachbach 8y ago
  This may be a semantic argument. I probably mean 'complex' as in useful production by being more sophisticated and you probably mean 'complex' as in there is more of it in a variety of ways.
zby 8y ago
Having much stuff to do is not complex - complex is when you need a lot of work to understand your situation. Carrying water and washing clothes are not complex - they are easy to understand, both why you need to do them and how you do it. It is different when you work in a organization - there are many jobs that need to be done - but to understand why you need to dig deep. Many people don't do that digging and they come to the conclusion that what they do is useless.

kthejoker2 8y ago

It's certainly not just the Internet that has gotten more complex. Grocery stores have gone from an average of 9,000 products for sale in 1975 to over 55,000 today. Similar expansions of products exist in communication, finance, automotive, fashion, appliances... There were approximately 2,000 federal crimes in 1900. Today there are nearly 5,000. People with college degrees skyrocketed from about 10% in 1970 to well over 25% today. Stanfofd conferred degrees in 22 majors in 1968; they offer over 120 today. And to take a small but real example for me, when I went to consider a preschool for my 4 year old, I received more literature on curriculum, activities, nutritional programs, Harvard studies, diversity initiatives, and instructor CVs ... Than I did when I chose my university back in 1998. Or take my job as a Microsoft platform analytics professional. When I started out it was just SQL Server and its 5-10 components. Now someone coming into the same level is expected to have understanding of machine learning and AI, Big Data, chatbots, log analytics and other streaming/event sourcing capabilities, cloud architecture ..oh yeah and SQL Server and its 10-15 components ... I can cite examples in medicine, finance, communications, linguistics (6 million words in Urban Dictionary, most of which aren't in the OED), pop culture ... Taken together you would easily see that all the "convenience" and "simplicity" you're touting is completely offset by the amount of cognitive processing we have to do to navigate our modern world. We have all been forced to carve out mental fiefdoms - filter bubbles - just to cope. And that's led to the break down in coordination you cite - there is less empathy because I simply can't connect with the many someones out there with a vastly different set of life choices than me, at least not collectively. To celebrate diversity is to acknowledge and embrace that we can come together on anything at all given the vast gulfs between most of us.

bachbach 8y ago
This may be a semantic argument. I probably mean 'complex' as in useful production by being more sophisticated and you probably mean 'complex' as in there is more of it in a variety of ways.

zby 8y ago

Having much stuff to do is not complex - complex is when you need a lot of work to understand your situation. Carrying water and washing clothes are not complex - they are easy to understand, both why you need to do them and how you do it. It is different when you work in a organization - there are many jobs that need to be done - but to understand why you need to dig deep. Many people don't do that digging and they come to the conclusion that what they do is useless.