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This just in, complexity is hard, more at 11 We can think effectively about complexity the same way we've always done it, abstractions, facades, black-box thin

This just in, complexity is hard, more at 11 We can think effectively about complexity the same way we've always done it, abstractions, facades, black-box thinking, compartmentalization, etc. The concept of "understanding" a complex system in its entirety is futile to begin with, that's why we call it "complex," that's what that word means. Are we really going to sit here and say that any one person, at any point in time, was ever capable of grokking an entire societal system of any kind? You think the village chieftain of a 300 person village back when humans first discovered agriculture was capable of "understanding" the entire system required to simply feed his village on a daily basis? This all seems like pandering to identity-driven, individualistic cultural trends rather than any actual analysis of humans or society or complexity in the world.

natmaka 6y ago
> The concept of "understanding" a complex system in its entirety is futile to begin with, that's why we call it "complex," that's what that word means. Complex: "a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts" Complicated: "1: consisting of parts intricately combined a complicated recipe complicated machinery 2 : difficult to analyze, understand, or explain" The thesis here seems to be that an excessively complex system becomes complicated, and that nobody is able to understand a very complicated huge system to the point of being able to control it. "Jacques Ellul’s claim that technique became an autonomous phenomenon during the middle of the 20th century, and subsequently a system, means that the influence people have on technique is much less decisive than the influence technique has on people." (Willem H. Vanderburg, 2004)