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This is an excellent article - if marred slightly by the red-herring political moaning - but the central thesis, that we've finally crossed some sort of thresho
by mellosouls 6y ago
This is an excellent article - if marred slightly by the red-herring political moaning - but the central thesis, that we've finally crossed some sort of threshold seems a little off - the world has always been too complex to understand in the way he suggests; the difference now is the incredible scale.
- anm89 6y agoAgreed, this has probably been true for fifty years. It is certainly orders of magnitude worse now and getting worse at an increasing rate.
- mikepurvis 6y agoIt's a fuzzy line, though, because abstractions and pedagogy get better over time too, especially for long-standing systems which become increasingly well-understood over time. Basically, I'm saying that the world of 50 years ago is probably much more comprehensible to a highly skilled 2020 human than it was to someone actually living in it. It wouldn't be totally comprehensible to either, of course, but certainly the added context brings a lot of advantages.
- fn1 6y ago"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” - Albert Allen Bartlett
- Koshkin 6y agoThis has been upgraded to quantum mechanics.
- soneca 6y agoI would phrase that the humanity understanding of the world has always been just behind its complexity. As we advance in our understanding of the world, world’s complexity advances a bit more.
- chillwaves 6y agoThat sounds more like a limit in humanity's ability to understand than a constraint on the complexity of the world.
- aeternum 6y agoI would argue that the complexity of the world itself is not changing all that much. Instead, as the sphere of human knowledge grows, our awareness of the area just outside that sphere becomes both larger and more obvious. The general complexity of the universe exists regardless of how much humans understand it. (probably)
- glasss 6y agoFrom the blog: > I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible. This statement rubs me the wrong way, in a similar fashion to what you've pointed out. All of the world's systems and technologies haven't been able to be understood by one human for (most likely) a very long time now. The world is incredibly complex, but at this point in history I can go and learn about pretty much all of it whenever I want. By definition that means it is very comprehensible. It just isn't practical for me to do so. Modern scale as you've pointed out, and speed at which things are expected to happen to keep that modern scale going, are the bigger factors I think.
- zdragnar 6y agoWhen I started programming, i expected that I would have a learning curve that went like this: the more I learned, the less I needed to learn. Instead, I found that the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. Finding answers inevitably lead to more questions that I had answered in the first place. I don't know that we will get to the point that will stop being true, or how many lifetimes it would take a single person to understand it all. It certainly feels like we are past 1 already. [Edit-] My comment originally focused more on natural sciences in general, but then I changed the opening quip to the personal anecdote about programming. The last paragraph, however, was geared more towards science, and knowledge in general, not programming languages per se.
- deegles 6y agoDon't forget how your knowledge becomes out of date with frightening speed. I can read a novel and that knowledge will be good for decades. Documentation on your favorite web framework? 6 months if you're lucky.
- Retric 6y agoThat’s overblown, jQuery for example hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years. The bleeding edge changes rapidly, but that’s what it’s there for.
- 6y ago
- polishdude20 6y agoIt's not that the world is vastly more complex than before. It's that we have vastly more sources of information to wade through. We are now more than ever better equipped to learn about the complexities of the world and what we are learning is its more complex than we thought. It's always been. It's kind of like opening a door to a room you though was a small basement but it turns out to be a large cavernous tunnel system than leads everywhere and nowhere.
- nradov 6y agoUp until the mid 18th century it was at least possible for a wealthy person to learn pretty much everything known in Western civilization. That would include physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering, architecture, agriculture, astronomy, medicine, theology, philosophy, history, etc. Obviously not every last detail but a lifetime of study would allow for learning at least the key points of every major field. Of course even then very few people actually did it, and now we're way past that point.
- Balgair 6y agoTrue, but the things that would most matter to that person were still out of their control. Those things change from place to place, but lets put them in Jamaica, for instance. They have no knowledge of the hurricane coming in a month, or the yellow fever next door, or the goings with tax laws back in the metropole, etc. The grand effects of nature and other people outside of your little plantation were totally unknown to our Jamaican. This has been true for eons, and I'd say it's mostly still true today. But, strangely, it is a bit less true today. We do have pretty good hurricane predictions now, and pretty good practicing epidemiologists (though with covid it's debatable), and pretty good information on the goings on in the capitol, etc. I feel that the complexity of the world is finally being laid a bit more bare, whereas it was more covered before.
- mikem170 6y agoWhat about the complexity that we create? The bureaucracies, the financial systems, the unintended affects of millions of interdependent but uncoordinated parties, etc. None of this is based in an increased understanding of nature, these are all problems we've created for ourselves. And nobody can see the problems coming (like the great recession), or convince all the disparate special interests to fix them (like climate change), until things blow up. As a programmer I've learned to be scared of too much complexity. I have the same feeling every time I have to deal with the government or big corporations, where they are complex that they are often utterly retarded. And it seems like everyone's first solution is more of the same :-(
- Accujack 6y agoActually, the scale hasn't changed, either. It's just that we are more aware of the scale and complexity. It's not really incomprehensible either, you just have to adjust your expectations toward not knowing everything well enough to predict its behavior.
- mikem170 6y agoThe scale hasn't changed? A thousand years ago there were numerous independent but relatively identical farms and towns, all facing a circumscribed set of similar problems. Life was simplier. Fast forward and now we have the a limited set of large powerful nation states, and groups of nation states, centrally controlling finance/trade/health/education systems that are invented (by politicians and lobbyists!) as they go, and affect everyone. Instead of many simple small similar systems we have fewer larger more complicated systems. More eggs in less baskets. Some politicians in the U.S. decided in the 1990s to allow banks to sell securities, which resulted in an almost collapse of the worldwide financial system not twenty years later, millions of people drastically affected. That was not possible one hundred years ago, because the world was not so complicated and interconnected. Wouldn't you agree that the complexity has scaled up enormously? Or were you thinking of something else?