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I don't think it's worth arguing about when this threshold was exactly crossed. The point, and it's a good point, is that every time this threshold is crossed,

I don't think it's worth arguing about when this threshold was exactly crossed. The point, and it's a good point, is that every time this threshold is crossed, it puts some weird kind of new restriction or constraint on us. And this isn't a kind of scientific complexity like how biology is and always has been too complex for us to understand. This is the things that you and I use and rely on being too complex to understand. There is a famous talk by Milton Friedman forty years ago about nobody knowing how to make a standard pencil anymore. The red rubber tip, the yellow paint, the graphite, that little metal brace. Most of us could probably re-create most of it, but nobody could create the whole thing by themselves. (edit: apparently the pencil point (ha ha) was famously made by others going back to at least 1958.) In my mind there's a (pretty weak) analogy to the gold standard for money, or having an alternative when negotiating. With the gold standard, if somebody offers you one bitcoin (or equivalently X gold) for your widget, and you know how you value your widget and how you value gold, it's easy to decide whether or not to sell (weak analogy, full of holes, I know). Or if someone is offering to pay you some wage, but you could go back to the family farm and just make more food for yourself than that wage would buy you, then there is some kind of grounding of that wage in terms of concrete do-it-yourself alternatives. The more the things that we rely on and depend on (like the Internet) are so complex that the only alternative is whatever else happens to be furnished by "the market," the more of life turns into sort of a Keynesian beauty contest in a bad way, without a concrete grounding, and only a "what you think other people think that other people think that..." equilibrium instead. Not that the alternative is any better. I like my computer and my Internet and my prescription glasses and my ballpoint pen. It sucks that I'm practically required to have them, but I really do like them.

ssivark 6y ago
> And this isn't a kind of scientific complexity like how biology is and always has been too complex for us to understand. This is the things that you and I use and rely on being too complex to understand. The same is true for biology and ecosystems; we just don’t think about it even when effecting large scale ecological changes. We might well be depending on un-understood delicate balances that could easily be thrown out of whack by Eg: hunting certain species to extinction, releasing genetically modified mosquitoes, building dams, climate change, etc.
deleted 6y ago
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andybak 6y ago
> I don't think it's worth arguing about when this threshold was exactly crossed. But I think myself and others in this thread would argue "it was never crossed - it was always too complex to understand". Not sure if that changes your fundemental point but it might warrant a reformulation of it.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Heh, yeah, but a proper reformulation would have to make it an essay. It's a big topic! When I said it as "every time the threshold is crossed," I was thinking about this threshold being crossed for different aspects of our lives. The world is too large of a scope to look at singularly, but you're absolutely right that we've never been able to understand all of the relevant bits.
- natmaka 6y ago
  As far as I understand the central point isn't about some absolute/perfect understanding of anything but about the capacity to deliberately and effectively modify the way we live. To do so we need a certain quality of understanding of our "technological system", which was maybe attainable but now seems impossible to reach. This may be summed up in the article by "instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls ((...)) politicians can’t effect change. Not really. They might not understand why, exactly, but there’s this increasing sense that leaders have lost the ability to make fundamental changes to our economic and social realities". This is all about "technique" (the concept described by J. Ellul) and control. Terse summary: https://www.slideshare.net/rredekopp/ellul-and-technique https://www.slideshare.net/rredekopp/ellul-and-technique
jbotz 6y ago
I think the arguments being made here in this thread are largely missing the point, although that's because the author of the article also didn't put his finger on it very well... yes everything is incomprehensibly complex, but what about this is it that makes it not work very well anymore and how exactly is it different from past complexity? I think the answer is that as we add complexity to the world there is always some benefit, some problem is solved or new form of wealth created, and there is also some cost, not just in the obvious terms of energy used, but also in terms of "brittleness" of the system and long-term sustainability of it all. As Joseph Tainter said in his ground-breaking 1989 book "The Collapse of Complex Societies", as societies get more and more complex the return on this cost (the ROI on additional complexity) diminishes, i.e. the costs of additional complexity at some point start to outweigh its benefit. That's what I think is really going on... we've crossed that point and the while the problems we have created with added complexity in the past might be solvable with additional added complexity (i.e. global warming might be solvable with a combination of "green" energy and carbon capture and draw-down) the additional complexity needed for such solutions is now incomprehensibly expensive.

ssivark 6y ago

> And this isn't a kind of scientific complexity like how biology is and always has been too complex for us to understand. This is the things that you and I use and rely on being too complex to understand. The same is true for biology and ecosystems; we just don’t think about it even when effecting large scale ecological changes. We might well be depending on un-understood delicate balances that could easily be thrown out of whack by Eg: hunting certain species to extinction, releasing genetically modified mosquitoes, building dams, climate change, etc.

deleted 6y ago

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andybak 6y ago

> I don't think it's worth arguing about when this threshold was exactly crossed. But I think myself and others in this thread would argue "it was never crossed - it was always too complex to understand". Not sure if that changes your fundemental point but it might warrant a reformulation of it.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Heh, yeah, but a proper reformulation would have to make it an essay. It's a big topic! When I said it as "every time the threshold is crossed," I was thinking about this threshold being crossed for different aspects of our lives. The world is too large of a scope to look at singularly, but you're absolutely right that we've never been able to understand all of the relevant bits.
natmaka 6y ago
As far as I understand the central point isn't about some absolute/perfect understanding of anything but about the capacity to deliberately and effectively modify the way we live. To do so we need a certain quality of understanding of our "technological system", which was maybe attainable but now seems impossible to reach. This may be summed up in the article by "instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls ((...)) politicians can’t effect change. Not really. They might not understand why, exactly, but there’s this increasing sense that leaders have lost the ability to make fundamental changes to our economic and social realities". This is all about "technique" (the concept described by J. Ellul) and control. Terse summary: https://www.slideshare.net/rredekopp/ellul-and-technique https://www.slideshare.net/rredekopp/ellul-and-technique

jbotz 6y ago

I think the arguments being made here in this thread are largely missing the point, although that's because the author of the article also didn't put his finger on it very well... yes everything is incomprehensibly complex, but what about this is it that makes it not work very well anymore and how exactly is it different from past complexity? I think the answer is that as we add complexity to the world there is always some benefit, some problem is solved or new form of wealth created, and there is also some cost, not just in the obvious terms of energy used, but also in terms of "brittleness" of the system and long-term sustainability of it all. As Joseph Tainter said in his ground-breaking 1989 book "The Collapse of Complex Societies", as societies get more and more complex the return on this cost (the ROI on additional complexity) diminishes, i.e. the costs of additional complexity at some point start to outweigh its benefit. That's what I think is really going on... we've crossed that point and the while the problems we have created with added complexity in the past might be solvable with additional added complexity (i.e. global warming might be solvable with a combination of "green" energy and carbon capture and draw-down) the additional complexity needed for such solutions is now incomprehensibly expensive.