12 ms·

Complex dynamics require complex solutions

214 points by ckemere 2y ago

ckemere 2y ago
Because certain concepts have been repeated so often they've become elements of faith (e.g., "taxes are too high", "government is filled with fraud and waste", "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems"), careful conversation about the complexities of the modern world is difficult to have. I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters, but their time and attention are so captured by sloganeers that they aren't exposed to the explanations.
- crubier 2y ago
  Ok, but taxes are too high though, for real
  - JackYoustra 2y ago
    Too high for what? Too high for desired services level? Too high for most of the people or few? Too high for value? Too high for your personal preference? It's really important to be specific, and what I've written is still impossibly vague to be even close to actionable
    - Henchman21 2y ago
      In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing. So if I am taxed, things need to be done with those taxes. Not just line the pockets of whomever get it. I sure don’t.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        In the US, you get social security, medicare/medicaid, the world's most powerful military, transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, VA benefits, and hundreds of other things. You might not value any of it, but that's the parent's point: You aren't getting nothing, you're getting a lot of expensive things you don't value for your taxes. It's a completely different type of discussion to have and one that's much more amenable to productive discussion.
        Ygg2 2y ago
        > transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, Didn't recent events like LA fires demonstrate just how neglected those services are. Having a better military in a war is great, but having overtly fat military industrial complex isn't that great.
        daveguy 2y ago
        Apparently you fell for the narrative that LA ran out of water because they preferred to save the environment. Just so you know, it didn't matter how much water was in any reservoirs. There was plenty of water. The two failures that happened were -- 100 MPH wind after drought conditions, and the fact that if you try to get water out of every fire hydrant in a large area you will run out of water pressure. The solution to water pressure is increasing the number of reservoirs so that each one services a smaller area. That is done with infrastructure improvements that require a government willing to fund them, and residents willing to accept them. 100 MPH winds + drought conditions + fire over a large area is not addressable without massive over-provisioning. You may want to reconsider where you get your news from, because it seems you are being misinformed.
        pclmulqdq 2y ago
        The local reservoir that serviced the palisades was out of service for months due to a tear in its roof which had yet to be fixed. The repair, per a competent repair person, would have taken a week if they had done it. That's why the water pressure locally was so low. They had already done what you wanted, and increased the number of reservoirs, but the relevant one had been out of service for months. It can both be true that Trump is a bloviating liar and the LA government is incompetent.
        daveguy 2y ago
        It may be a bit more complicated than what a nameless "competent repair person" thought it should have been. Do you worship your news sources too? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palisades-was-commission-fire-started-rcna187217 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palis...
      - lwansbrough 2y ago
        "Americans get nothing for their taxes" is... certainly an opinion.
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        An opinion that can only seriously emerge atop the safest, most prosperous empire to ever exist.
        yard2010 2y ago
        For some people, living hell for the poor.
        throw16180339 2y ago
        It's someone who was born on third base complaining that they have to run to home plate.
      - orf 2y ago
        > In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing He wrote, using his 5g phone connection and the internet from the safety of his home. Outside, a car sits silently in the driveway.
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Yes, I am very safe in my little cage where I take my antibiotics and still kiss with saliva. A cage is still a cage.
        orf 2y ago
        And it’s an entirely different point to the initial one.
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Are you speaking to me or everyone BUT me? Because I’ll be both direct and honest: this is the type of bullshit that causes me to withdraw from interacting with the bulk of humanity. Mock me all you like.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        the point is that all the things that commenter listed are enabled by the taxes we pay - it's the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Saying that they don't directly pay it misses the forest for the trees: we decide to pay taxes for things in a system that overall produces these outcomes, treating them separately is to split parts of a coevolved system
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Civilized society doesn’t require a layer of working poor at the bottom to function. That is what I am a part of: the great mass of unfulfilled workers with no choices, no chance for advancement. I’m a blue collar worker right on the edge of high end white collar work. I see on a daily basis that which I can never possess. The system produces these outcomes because that is the desired design goal of the system. If this is “civilization” I want no part of it. But then, we don’t get that choice anymore do we? Where could I go on Earth to escape my fate? Because all I see is my own death is the only escape
    - Swizec 2y ago
      As a non-american paying american taxes: I would like more of my money to go into welfare and social transfers to make the country more liveable to all, and less into million dollar bombs thrown at thousand dollar homes. Or, like, at least fix all the potholes maybe?
      - JackYoustra 2y ago
        STILL too vague - _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid. Potholes are almost exclusively a local-level thing, so calling them "american" taxes is a bit off, you'd be thinking more about state and municipal taxes at that point. The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment.
        Swizec 2y ago
        > _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid Okay but social security isn’t the government’s money, it’s ours. The program is profitable afaik (gets more than it pays out). Govt is just holding/managing the money and needs to track it as debt when they use that money for anything other than giving to people.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        All of the government's money is our money? Not sure what this means.
        majormajor 2y ago
        > The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment. Housing cost in popular areas/major cities is not solely an American problem. So a lot of the American-specific stories about why it's high - "zoning", "parking requirements", "NIMBY's" aren't fully satisfying. Few places have solved it. Big successful cities often keep growing around the world which means constantly increasing demand which means an affordability trend that rarely goes in the right direction. In a classically-efficient market, where those with the $$$ to do major development projects often substantially overlap with those who have major $$$ stake in prices staying high, few things are more necessary than housing so why wouldn't we expect the price to approach the max that individuals could bear? Removing regulation isn't enough, IMO, since nobody with the money to make major investments in housing wants to rock the price boat too quickly or suddenly. You need proactive regulation on both pricing and public development efforts to undercut the current market.
    - scarmig 2y ago
      The level of taxation is not the most relevant thing, even though it attracts the most attention. There are countless socially valuable things that they can be spent on. The core issue is that Americans don't get back much for their level of taxation. The USA is a fundamentally dog-eat-dog place. Given that, working Americans pay an absurd amount of taxes. I pay over 40% of my income in local, state, and federal taxes. Despite that, it's not hard to imagine being thrown onto the streets to die after experiencing a single issue. Where is it going? Not to me, and not to any services I'll be able to access in times of difficulty.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    No
  - tomtomtom777 2y ago
    I don't no which country you are from but in the western world, if you compare countries by their tax rates, countries with high taxes [1] tend to score quite well on quality-of-life comparisons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
    - yard2010 2y ago
      I would cross check it with corruption levels, sometimes high taxes are just organized crime with extra steps.
  - winwang 2y ago
    And you know this to be true (indubitably), based on what, exactly? (I'm not even sure which country you're referencing either).
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  It reminds me of all the naive engineers that look at a complex codebase, don't fully grok it, and say "this is a mess, it needs a rewrite!". They then find out that every complex rule had a reason for existing. The rewrite takes time and resources to reimplement. As they go they hit snag after snag and add a specific business rule for that only to find out that they are just recreating the original "too complex and inefficient" codebase with a whole lot of effort and money wasted.
  - lwansbrough 2y ago
    We're basically paying the government per line of code written currently. Ask Microsoft how that turned out.
    - daveguy 2y ago
      What do you mean by that? Is that how doge is working? No one in the government has previously been paid per line of code. Am I missing something here?
      - lwansbrough 2y ago
        It's a metaphor for how we pay for the evolving and deepening complexity of government, without any effort being put into processes that might help eliminate complexity -- because there's no real accountability for spending. I think "DOGE" is conceptually a good idea, and if it were executed by a competent administration could lead to great outcomes, as was the case with the USDS.
        aqueueaqueue 2y ago
        Trump could have put someone good on it, but he prefers loyalty over competence.
        daveguy 2y ago
        Well yeah, government efficiency is obviously a "great idea", but that is ridiculously simplistic. No one is paid for "great ideas" without any clue how to execute. Poorly implemented good ideas screw things up just as bad as bad ideas. Maybe worse. If it's a good idea, implemented poorly, you have a lot of cheerleaders worshipping the idea. But if it's a bad idea, at least you have people offering alternative ideas.
- istjohn 2y ago
  Not to nitpick, but "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems" comes off as a bit of a strawman. "Tax the rich" is a common sentiment, but I don't often hear people saying the rest of it. There are plenty of plausible reasons one may want to tax the rich even if you don't believe it is a total solution. For one, you may be concerned about the power imbalance created when a handful of people have more wealth than half the country combined [0]. Recent developments have brought that concern into even sharper focus for many. 0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-richest-people-in-the-us-are-worth-as-much-as-poorest-165-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
  - silotis 2y ago
    It's usually not stated so explicitly, but often implied by people who advocate for expansive entitlement programs. When pressed on how to pay for such programs, "tax the rich" is often their only answer.
    - LPisGood 2y ago
      I think you’re misusing the word “entitlement” as it is used with respect to US government spending. Can you elaborate what you think the connection is?
    - neilwilson 2y ago
      When the real answer is, you pay for it by spending the money. Because money is a circuit, tax is a percentage and money doesn’t stop at its first use.
      - willturman 2y ago
        The technical term for the number of times a dollar is spent in a given time period is the velocity of money [1]. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped sharply over the past 30 years [2] as inflation on inelastic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and food have far outstripped the consumer price index and people opt to spend their money buying things from large corporations instead of small businesses in their communities. The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
- csours 2y ago
  One that really gets me is "Big Government" - we are the government. What you mean is "Big Unaccountable Organization" - which can just as easily be Big Business or in some cases Big NGO/Nonprofit/Religion/etc. I know that my comments do not address the original meaning of "Big Government", but over time "Big Government" has come to encompass anything the government does. Apparently including things that I depend on, but don't know about because they just silently work. Until someone turns them off. Also, remember (or learn) that it was Carter, not Reagan that the bulk of the deregulation. See Dan Davies - Unaccountability Machine --- The version of the narrative that we fight about is the stupidest version of that subject. Gamer's Gate taught me this. From the outside, everyone looked like stupid assholes. I definitely have more empathy for one side vs the other, but each side's narrative is forced into the minimal version that carries the most moral weight. The great tragedy is that we use the moral narrative that appeals to US, not to THEM or even to BYSTANDERS. See Jonathon Haidt - Righteous Mind And Amanda Ripley - High Conflict --- I think the greatest qualities of humanity are curiosity, humility, patience and empathy. To me, nonviolence is not about naivety or tolerance of evil or being unprepared, it's about maintaining the ability to learn about the world and the people in it. Historically nonviolence has been one component of a diversity of strategies - nonviolence itself implies the possibility of violence. The emotion of anger makes people feel right and righteous in themselves - no matter if they are helping or hurting overall. A person's anger does not know what side they are on. Anger makes the world much, much simpler. Our current political environment does not allow for complex problems or complex understanding of other people's needs. You have to fit in my simple worldview. You have to be exactly as angry as I am at all the people I'm angry at. No matter who you feel started this or who you blame, this is all happening inside each of us. We are all being exploited and treated like broken toys. The fight is making us all act and speak very, very stupidly. So if you feel like you have to fight, and you already know who to fight and how to fight them - I am not trying to change that. I am NOT saying that "the other side" has a valid point of view or that the other side has some good people. I am saying that the other side is made of flawed people each with their own history. I am asking you to find some time for curiosity, humility, patience, and empathy for the humans in the world. The tragedy of all anti-war movies is that they show us the horror and terror and destruction of war ... but 'this' is the fight we need to fight, this fight is needed, this fight is good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315
- energy123 2y ago
  One small culprit is the human tendency to think categorically and, as a consequence, to think metaphorically. Abstractions and conceptual thinking can simplify reasoning if used responsibly, but more often this cognitive shortcut is abused to reach emotionally convenient conclusions. Reasoning that contains the string "this is like" is usually suspect. This is a red flag that the individual has categorized the subject of analysis into an overly broad abstraction, and is now attempting to draw a spurious relation to some causally unrelated thing that allegedly belongs to the same category. The difficulty is that this way of thinking is evolved and natural to us. This low-energy, cheap heuristic served us well in our simpler ancestral environments. It's maladaptive in the modern environment. - https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-term-i-invented-to-describe-a-situation https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Anthropomorphization is another problem. As soon as people give things names, they start to treat them like they're individual people even if they're anything but. How many times have you heard someone say "China will..." or "The US thinks..." or "Europe's opinion..." Now these are all potentially useful, context-dependent shorthands...but they're absolutely ripe for misunderstanding. Something I find myself doing a lot these days is asking people to explain what exactly they think is happening on an individual, human level when they declare anything greater then that is "doing" something...because of course, no large organization ever does anything - they're all composed of individuals taking action, potentially under direction but still as individuals.
    - xg15 2y ago
      I think the other extreme - to think about people only as isolated individuals without group identity or power relations - is also too simplifying. (It's also a useful thought exercise to deconstruct sentences like "the US decided to do X" and understand who or what really is meant with "the US" in that sentence. The US government? The political class? Some mainstream opinion in the general population?) But in general I agree with you, especially in the recent years. I find the level of anthropomorphization of countries lately honestly scary, and believe this is a strong sign of how much the political discourse already has shifted back into a "war" vocabulary. The intensity with which people argue this stuff also makes me wonder if they're still understanding it as a metaphor at all. Emotional attachment to flags, nations, peoples, shapes on a map, etc is real and is also a central component of war propaganda.
- jebarker 2y ago
  > I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters Not sure I agree. Not because the large majority aren't intellectually capable, but because there isn't the interest/attention span in most people to understand the nuances of the complex problem that is demanding the complex solution. I feel this in myself increasingly and opt to just not have an opinion on proposed solutions when I believe the problem is much more complex and multifaceted than I'm even aware.
- SilasX 2y ago
  I have a saying: 1) Welfare-enhancing 2) Politically-popular 3) Simple Pick any two. There are policies that meet all three ... but they've already been implemented, and no one debates them.
- xg15 2y ago
  What annoys me is that the assertion "there are no easy solutions" has become a slogan itself, often with the practical meaning that you shouldn't even attempt to understand the problem (let alone think about solutions) and instead let the people in power handle it. In the same sense, "its a complex issue" becomes a weird sort of chiffe for "it's so intractably complex that it's impossible for any mortal human to understand, so you shouldn't even try". Another implication is also that there is no way at all to solve any of those problems, the best we could hope for is to manage them and mitigate the effects. I think this line of thinking is ultimately authoritarian and paradoxically increases "simple solution" thinking or avoidance to think about political topics at all - because that would be all that's left to think about. I like the approach of the OP much more, who argues that we should embrace the complexity of our currently world and try to understand it, instead of shying away from it. That's what I'd understand as "thinking for yourself". I believe, the "simple solutions" can even have a useful role in this - as starting points. E.g. "why can't we just get more water from the Pacific to put out the fires?", "why can't the people in Gaza just go somewhere else?", "why can't we just build more housing?" etc. could be interesting questions to start tackling that complexity.
  - SirHumphrey 2y ago
    When controversial problem remains unsolved, "there is a simple solution" means that you think that people in power could have solved this already but they haven't because they are evil or stupid or both, and "there are no easy solutions" means that you don't really want to do anything and would like to be not blamed for the outcomes. It's the same as when people talk about politicization, free speech, etc.
LeroyRaz 2y ago
I don't like the title. Complex dynamics often require simple solutions. E.g., a complex chaotic system can often be made simple by adding damping (a simple solution).
- aabhay 2y ago
  While I agree with your view point, I think the celebrity mathematician status of Terrence Tao made it obvious to me that the title was referring to mathematical solutions e.g. solving a system of equations.
  - LeroyRaz 2y ago
    I read him as implicitly opining on the "solving" of political or economic systems. In doing so, he is making a false analogy. The analogy fails because the "solution" to a real world problem does not require solving the problem in a mathematical sense (i.e., fully tracing and analytically understanding the system) but rather intervening to make the problem go away. For example, imagine your boss is harassing you. Terrance Tao says, ah, that is a complex system (two people interacting) as such we need a complex solution (a deep understanding of what lead to this occurrence, e.g., do you remind your boss of their unhappy childhood?) but the actual real world solution can be simple, e.g., change job.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tlb 2y ago
  You can make systems less chaotic with damping, but that's not always good. A damped 3-body problem (orbiting planets under gravity) results in the planets losing momentum until they all smash together. If you have an active control system like for controlling a robot arm, adding damping in the wrong place can make oscillations worse.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
aka "reality has a surprising amount of detail"
- lopatin 2y ago
  And people on the internet are simplifying it into memes. Shocker.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Related: "rounding to the nearest common cliche"
r3nruturnEr 2y ago
I've noticed this a lot with climate science, especially. People are waiting for a silver bullet that will reverse climate change and I think in reality, it will have to be a huge, complex, coordinated effort.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Who’s waiting for a silver bullet? Certainly not the climate scientists or anyone actually working on climate?
  - r3nruturnEr 2y ago
    Definitely wasn't talking about climate scientists. Many policy makers, voters, the lay-person. People want a silver bullet solution that is convenient.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Yeah I think this is more like... a huge number of people literally don't care or don't think it's a problem whatsoever, then a huge number think we should be doing tons of little things, and then a small number who are actively working to produce breakthroughs. Group (1) is the impediment to progress on the problem.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  $2.1 trillion was spent on the clean energy transition in 2024. It's a huge complex effort, but it's definitely not coordinated and never will be. https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-transition-exceeded-2-trillion-for-the-first-time-in-2024-according-to-bloombergnef-report/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-...
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Most normal people (not scientists or experts) who got invested enough have given up and see a not so slow approaching doom horizon, but keep a glimmer of hope deep inside, just in case. I personally don't think climate change can be _reversed_ and also don't believe a significant effort will be done in that direction except if it somehow becomes a global strategic stake, like the race to build nuclear weapons or race to space. And no, I'm not holding my breath, which is a tough thing to explain to children.
danjl 2y ago
Simple, obvious answers appeal to a broader, less-knowledgeable set of people. In fact, it really doesn't matter if there is any basis for the answer, like a lower-dimensional approximation. If repeated enough, more people tend to believe the simple, baseless answer. I feel this is a bigger issue these days than needing to use more complex answers among people who understand the complexity of the problem.
- Henchman21 2y ago
  This is what the Murdoch news empire does. It creates the mindset it wants people to have by repeating lies.
- cam_l 2y ago
  There is value in perceiving and responding to the inherent complexity in things, as it meshes you closer to reality giving you a greater predictive and responsive capacity. This doesn't work as well with other people, with society. Even if they individually all try to approach reality as above. Manipulation and coercion are just much more efficient at creating a predictive capacity with other people, because you don't need to deal with reality or complexity. You already know where people are going to (metaphorically) run if you are leading them and herding them. I did enjoy the finer point Terry alluded to though, that even these simplified coercive memeing systems are based on a complex underlying system of reality. And when they get stretched too far, they break in unpredictable (complex) ways.
Barrin92 2y ago
>As such, empirical laws that were trustworthy in the past, may become significantly less accurate, and can in fact become dangerous to rely upon too blindly. Read a really good book on this a few years ago by John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776 https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776), where they talk about the issue of applying the logic of "known uncertain" systems (like games of poker, or volcanic eruptions) to completely dynamic "radically uncertain" systems where any attempt to quantify outcomes is effectively completely made up. Election forecasts being one example, where there's no guarantee that you know the rules of the game, if they stay constant between elections and so on. I think this is very timely because these days you see this kind of cargo cult empiricism where people will say "I am 30% confident that..." as if just talking in a quantitative language means you've somehow understood something about the future or have reason to be more confident.
lanstin 2y ago
A sick burn.
light_triad 2y ago
If you press people on why they believe what they believe, you will often find that the axioms underlying their reasoning are slogans, trite phrases and hackneyed soundbites. But here's the catch: the memes, short texts, or short videos are spread through a complex machinery of interrelating parts with global reach. Explanations are plausible, wrong and very profitable in front of the right eyeballs.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Well for better or worse we are a democracy, so salesmanship for the important ideas is absolutely critical
pylua 2y ago
The reason people summarize things, often without being correct, is that the world has become too complicated to model. It’s an outcome of the situation, not just a corresponding trend.
- NiloCK 2y ago
  Some particular systems have grown in complexity, but the general point isn't 'new' or emerging. No map has never been its corresponding territory.
uoaei 2y ago
The elephant in the room is that this is about as excoriating a jab as Terence Tao can dole out against the brute and unconsidered actions of Ol' Musky on our (federal) government. For our sake, I hope Tao is also correct in that damage to the federal system may not necessarily destabilize structures at other (state, county, municipal) scales as regards socioeconomic organization in the USA.
istjohn 2y ago
Sadly, while this sentiment may be useful to a small segment of society that is highly skilled in navigating our polluted information environment, the vast majority of our society cannot even maintain a grasp on reality, much less coherently reason about solutions of any kind. People live in alternative realities depending on if they get their news from CNN, Fox, TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, or BlueSky. Here's a recent clip from Joe Rogan that illustrates this perfectly [0]. He talks about the different perspectives of liberals and conservatives on USAID. It's likely this will get exponentially worse once our social media feeds become full of AI imposters competing with one another for everyone's attention with outrage bait and fake drama and entire fabricated social media bubbles in which each user is made to feel like the ruler of their own little fiefdom. Video and audio content appealing to every unique combination of biases, superstitions, and political orientation will be available in an endless deluge. I got a preview of this recently when I saw the surreal, gross videos YouTube Reels serves up to my toddler. Similar slop gets eaten up by easy targets on FB. But the slop is going to become more and more sophisticated until everyone is consuming it. I can only hope the solution comes before it's too late. 0. https://youtu.be/yj9jXMEzCZY https://youtu.be/yj9jXMEzCZY
- ckemere 2y ago
  I was shocked to find AI generated post match interviews after the recent Liverpool derby. I was watching and thinking “whoa - I thought Mo Salah was classier than that”. Then I noticed the channel was called “DangerousAI”. But generated within a few hours of the final whistle and undetectable from a quick glance…
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Me and my wife play a game where we look through The Website Formerly Known As Twitter and try to discern from generated vs non-generated art, and while it’s typically rather easy (artistic style plays a big role) some pieces just absolutely blow us away, and I have been tricked a few times.
2358452 2y ago
I'd put it this way. Current society largely (but not completely) relies on experts building highly complex systems. This includes not only public infrastructure like waterworks, buildings and information systems, but also say the very bread you eat (to get it at a low price and high productivity[1]), the computer we're reading this in (mind-numbingly complex system), the internet. It's a feature of capitalism (really, a feature of many administrative systems and product interfaces) that the consumer thankfully doesn't have to be too much of an expert on say computers (say theory of CPU architecture, pipelines, assembly, etc..) to buy a laptop or use software. The consumer only needs to be able to tell which competitor product is best for his use (although often, as he should, relying on expert reviews). We are good at hiding complexity behind interfaces as well, packaging complexity and hiding away its intricate inner workings. All of this enables life in a complex society. I think it's misguided or hypocritical to completely distrust experts specially when it comes to public policy, public administration and science, given how much we rely on experts for everything else. It's not even much of a choice, I believe: the fact that we rely on those complex mechanisms inevitably will make certain failures that often demand public attention also complex. Say a food company synthesizes a highly complex (and not present in most natural products), but good tasting, substance. Then we kind of need equally complex review of its impacts on human health. A highly complex computer network will need highly knowledgeable (and correspondingly highly complex) solution to certain bugs that might appear, specially in cases like cross-domain failures where complexity encapsulations fail for various reasons. Think how unlikely it would be that every discipline has been exploited to extremely high complexity, but just by chance we could get away with simple solutions for public-facing and public policy problems. I like simplicity, and I even like the idea I wouldn't often require experts to understand a public or scientific issue of public concern. But I don't think I'm willing to give up most products of complexity, including computers, medical procedures and diagnosis, and more -- and even if I were willing (I might be able to live with say an early 2000s computer :) ), I don't think it's realistic or feasible to really do that. In part because of collective agreement, in part because of for example the sheer population we have to contend with today. Earlier methods of agriculture for example probably can't sustain that many people. We should therefore apply Einstein's wisdom: try to make things as simple as possible... but no simpler. And trust experts when sensible, when the problem at hand is complex enough to be beyond our comprehension (but still important). Of course, experts can be wrong, but that is something we just have to contend with (like we have to contend with the possibility all the weird procedures we do to produce food or acquire and purify water -- which are managed by experts -- may go wrong, even with significant efforts to otherwise). We can, and probably should, demand explanations (which may be hard to understand for the general public) of the experts and they explain their reasoning. We can examine and expect that their scientific field is healthy, there is consensus and there is a good level of academic integrity. But we should not approach their well informed opinions on important issues from a baseline of arrogance and distrust, because likely they do know much better, in certain cases. [1] Modern agriculture is highly complex. This includes special seeds, harvesting machines, soil science, weather prediction, and so on. Each of those is in turn highly complex requiring experts to exist at current performance.
arscan 2y ago
The system dynamics[1] view here would be that complex dynamic system behavior tends to be dominated by feedback loops; and once identified let you ignore many of the other factors. And the trick is to figure out ways to introduce or activate feedback loops that work in your favor, instead of against it. To me that gives some hope of the existence of “simple” solutions to managing complex system behavior over time. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics
neiman 2y ago
I adore Terence Tao, but this one feels like stating the obvious. Basically, he says that simple solutions to complex situations work sometimes—for example when a simpler system can approximate your system. But many times it's not true! So you need a complex solution to a complex situation. That's kind of stating the obvious, no?
- ozim 2y ago
  I would say yes for myself but as software developer I am baffled by business people to whom I have to basically explain this. Some things are complex and will take months or years to complete - but if it doesn’t fit in a quarter where they can put it as a win on their list they feel offended.
- cowsaymoo 2y ago
  I don't think so. He is rather talking about the properties of emergence in complex systems, and claims that the predictive theories we rely on to navigate the world will not hold in a dynamic system this interconnected ('no effective dynamics'), so we ought to be regularly retesting our assumptions.
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pinoy420 2y ago
Tangential; why is math popular on mastodon like computer science is - but little other subjects? What do physicists use, chemists, mechanical engineers?
- ColinWright 2y ago
  Specifically, this is a post on Mathstodon ... note the spelling. Yes, it's on "Mastodon-the-Platform", but this particular post is on a server that literally has the words "maths" in its name.
  - pinoy420 2y ago
    This is what I mean, there is no physicstodon or similar
    - ColinWright 2y ago
      Ah ... sorry ... I mis-understood. Shrug ... no idea. Christian pung me back in March 2017 and said: There's this new social network thing with different servers ... maybe we should make one to focus on Recreational Maths. We thought for a while, and when we hit on the name (it's his fault ... he came up with it) we figured it had to be done. But thinking about it ... there's very little "Recreational Physics" or "Recreational Mechanics" or "Recreational Electronics". There is, I guess, "Recreational Programming" ... but that doesn't feel the same.
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      Mathstodon welcomes cs, physics and other science-related posts (as well as off-topic posts in moderation---the creator views mathstodon as being less about the topics and more about the people: interested in mathematics, cs, problem solving etc).
orbital-decay 2y ago
No offense intended, but this is idealistic and somewhat expected from a person living in an ivory tower. >long-standing assumptions are tested and updated as new information about the current state of the world comes in The entire problem is that this mechanism doesn't exist in practice. Real-world systems tend to accumulate incidental complexity that serves no purpose, with no real way to review it, as any potential mechanism is subject to the same accumulation. That's called corruption. The only way to compress and simplify the outdated complexity that has some chance to work is total system destruction and rebuilding, with previous iterations taken into account. But when you're stuck a local minimum it makes things even worse. Now, if you have another, easier way that would actually work in real world, I'm all ears.
Anotheroneagain 2y ago
No, I think he's completely wrong. The world isn't being ruined by a meme. On the contrary, our problem is the complexity bias, which seems to have developed over the previous century. As the result, nobody understands anything anymore. I fact it seems that more complex solutions have been worked out, that allow to run on sone kind of protocol, with little to no thinking involved. Time is being wasted on dealing with problems in overly complex ways, and there is no room left for what can't be simplified.
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temporalparts 2y ago
I think Terrance makes a great general point in general, but the specific claim is not always true: complex dynamics can arise from simple initial conditions, therefore, simple changes could resolve those complex dynamics.

214 points by ckemere 2y ago

Because certain concepts have been repeated so often they've become elements of faith (e.g., "taxes are too high", "government is filled with fraud and waste", "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems"), careful conversation about the complexities of the modern world is difficult to have. I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters, but their time and attention are so captured by sloganeers that they aren't exposed to the explanations.

crubier 2y ago
Ok, but taxes are too high though, for real
- JackYoustra 2y ago
  Too high for what? Too high for desired services level? Too high for most of the people or few? Too high for value? Too high for your personal preference? It's really important to be specific, and what I've written is still impossibly vague to be even close to actionable
  - Henchman21 2y ago
    In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing. So if I am taxed, things need to be done with those taxes. Not just line the pockets of whomever get it. I sure don’t.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      In the US, you get social security, medicare/medicaid, the world's most powerful military, transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, VA benefits, and hundreds of other things. You might not value any of it, but that's the parent's point: You aren't getting nothing, you're getting a lot of expensive things you don't value for your taxes. It's a completely different type of discussion to have and one that's much more amenable to productive discussion.
      - Ygg2 2y ago
        > transportation infrastructure, education, fire departments, Didn't recent events like LA fires demonstrate just how neglected those services are. Having a better military in a war is great, but having overtly fat military industrial complex isn't that great.
        daveguy 2y ago
        Apparently you fell for the narrative that LA ran out of water because they preferred to save the environment. Just so you know, it didn't matter how much water was in any reservoirs. There was plenty of water. The two failures that happened were -- 100 MPH wind after drought conditions, and the fact that if you try to get water out of every fire hydrant in a large area you will run out of water pressure. The solution to water pressure is increasing the number of reservoirs so that each one services a smaller area. That is done with infrastructure improvements that require a government willing to fund them, and residents willing to accept them. 100 MPH winds + drought conditions + fire over a large area is not addressable without massive over-provisioning. You may want to reconsider where you get your news from, because it seems you are being misinformed.
        pclmulqdq 2y ago
        The local reservoir that serviced the palisades was out of service for months due to a tear in its roof which had yet to be fixed. The repair, per a competent repair person, would have taken a week if they had done it. That's why the water pressure locally was so low. They had already done what you wanted, and increased the number of reservoirs, but the relevant one had been out of service for months. It can both be true that Trump is a bloviating liar and the LA government is incompetent.
        daveguy 2y ago
        It may be a bit more complicated than what a nameless "competent repair person" thought it should have been. Do you worship your news sources too? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palisades-was-commission-fire-started-rcna187217 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palis...
    - lwansbrough 2y ago
      "Americans get nothing for their taxes" is... certainly an opinion.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        An opinion that can only seriously emerge atop the safest, most prosperous empire to ever exist.
        yard2010 2y ago
        For some people, living hell for the poor.
      - throw16180339 2y ago
        It's someone who was born on third base complaining that they have to run to home plate.
    - orf 2y ago
      > In the US they’re too high for what we get: essentially nothing He wrote, using his 5g phone connection and the internet from the safety of his home. Outside, a car sits silently in the driveway.
      - Henchman21 2y ago
        Yes, I am very safe in my little cage where I take my antibiotics and still kiss with saliva. A cage is still a cage.
        orf 2y ago
        And it’s an entirely different point to the initial one.
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Are you speaking to me or everyone BUT me? Because I’ll be both direct and honest: this is the type of bullshit that causes me to withdraw from interacting with the bulk of humanity. Mock me all you like.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        the point is that all the things that commenter listed are enabled by the taxes we pay - it's the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Saying that they don't directly pay it misses the forest for the trees: we decide to pay taxes for things in a system that overall produces these outcomes, treating them separately is to split parts of a coevolved system
        Henchman21 2y ago
        Civilized society doesn’t require a layer of working poor at the bottom to function. That is what I am a part of: the great mass of unfulfilled workers with no choices, no chance for advancement. I’m a blue collar worker right on the edge of high end white collar work. I see on a daily basis that which I can never possess. The system produces these outcomes because that is the desired design goal of the system. If this is “civilization” I want no part of it. But then, we don’t get that choice anymore do we? Where could I go on Earth to escape my fate? Because all I see is my own death is the only escape
  - Swizec 2y ago
    As a non-american paying american taxes: I would like more of my money to go into welfare and social transfers to make the country more liveable to all, and less into million dollar bombs thrown at thousand dollar homes. Or, like, at least fix all the potholes maybe?
    - JackYoustra 2y ago
      STILL too vague - _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid. Potholes are almost exclusively a local-level thing, so calling them "american" taxes is a bit off, you'd be thinking more about state and municipal taxes at that point. The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment.
      - Swizec 2y ago
        > _most_ of the federal budget goes to SS and medicare / medicaid Okay but social security isn’t the government’s money, it’s ours. The program is profitable afaik (gets more than it pays out). Govt is just holding/managing the money and needs to track it as debt when they use that money for anything other than giving to people.
        JackYoustra 2y ago
        All of the government's money is our money? Not sure what this means.
      - majormajor 2y ago
        > The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment. Housing cost in popular areas/major cities is not solely an American problem. So a lot of the American-specific stories about why it's high - "zoning", "parking requirements", "NIMBY's" aren't fully satisfying. Few places have solved it. Big successful cities often keep growing around the world which means constantly increasing demand which means an affordability trend that rarely goes in the right direction. In a classically-efficient market, where those with the $$$ to do major development projects often substantially overlap with those who have major $$$ stake in prices staying high, few things are more necessary than housing so why wouldn't we expect the price to approach the max that individuals could bear? Removing regulation isn't enough, IMO, since nobody with the money to make major investments in housing wants to rock the price boat too quickly or suddenly. You need proactive regulation on both pricing and public development efforts to undercut the current market.
  - scarmig 2y ago
    The level of taxation is not the most relevant thing, even though it attracts the most attention. There are countless socially valuable things that they can be spent on. The core issue is that Americans don't get back much for their level of taxation. The USA is a fundamentally dog-eat-dog place. Given that, working Americans pay an absurd amount of taxes. I pay over 40% of my income in local, state, and federal taxes. Despite that, it's not hard to imagine being thrown onto the streets to die after experiencing a single issue. Where is it going? Not to me, and not to any services I'll be able to access in times of difficulty.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  No
- tomtomtom777 2y ago
  I don't no which country you are from but in the western world, if you compare countries by their tax rates, countries with high taxes [1] tend to score quite well on quality-of-life comparisons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
  - yard2010 2y ago
    I would cross check it with corruption levels, sometimes high taxes are just organized crime with extra steps.
- winwang 2y ago
  And you know this to be true (indubitably), based on what, exactly? (I'm not even sure which country you're referencing either).
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
It reminds me of all the naive engineers that look at a complex codebase, don't fully grok it, and say "this is a mess, it needs a rewrite!". They then find out that every complex rule had a reason for existing. The rewrite takes time and resources to reimplement. As they go they hit snag after snag and add a specific business rule for that only to find out that they are just recreating the original "too complex and inefficient" codebase with a whole lot of effort and money wasted.
- lwansbrough 2y ago
  We're basically paying the government per line of code written currently. Ask Microsoft how that turned out.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    What do you mean by that? Is that how doge is working? No one in the government has previously been paid per line of code. Am I missing something here?
    - lwansbrough 2y ago
      It's a metaphor for how we pay for the evolving and deepening complexity of government, without any effort being put into processes that might help eliminate complexity -- because there's no real accountability for spending. I think "DOGE" is conceptually a good idea, and if it were executed by a competent administration could lead to great outcomes, as was the case with the USDS.
      - aqueueaqueue 2y ago
        Trump could have put someone good on it, but he prefers loyalty over competence.
      - daveguy 2y ago
        Well yeah, government efficiency is obviously a "great idea", but that is ridiculously simplistic. No one is paid for "great ideas" without any clue how to execute. Poorly implemented good ideas screw things up just as bad as bad ideas. Maybe worse. If it's a good idea, implemented poorly, you have a lot of cheerleaders worshipping the idea. But if it's a bad idea, at least you have people offering alternative ideas.
istjohn 2y ago
Not to nitpick, but "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems" comes off as a bit of a strawman. "Tax the rich" is a common sentiment, but I don't often hear people saying the rest of it. There are plenty of plausible reasons one may want to tax the rich even if you don't believe it is a total solution. For one, you may be concerned about the power imbalance created when a handful of people have more wealth than half the country combined [0]. Recent developments have brought that concern into even sharper focus for many. 0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-richest-people-in-the-us-are-worth-as-much-as-poorest-165-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
- silotis 2y ago
  It's usually not stated so explicitly, but often implied by people who advocate for expansive entitlement programs. When pressed on how to pay for such programs, "tax the rich" is often their only answer.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    I think you’re misusing the word “entitlement” as it is used with respect to US government spending. Can you elaborate what you think the connection is?
  - neilwilson 2y ago
    When the real answer is, you pay for it by spending the money. Because money is a circuit, tax is a percentage and money doesn’t stop at its first use.
    - willturman 2y ago
      The technical term for the number of times a dollar is spent in a given time period is the velocity of money [1]. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped sharply over the past 30 years [2] as inflation on inelastic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and food have far outstripped the consumer price index and people opt to spend their money buying things from large corporations instead of small businesses in their communities. The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
csours 2y ago
One that really gets me is "Big Government" - we are the government. What you mean is "Big Unaccountable Organization" - which can just as easily be Big Business or in some cases Big NGO/Nonprofit/Religion/etc. I know that my comments do not address the original meaning of "Big Government", but over time "Big Government" has come to encompass anything the government does. Apparently including things that I depend on, but don't know about because they just silently work. Until someone turns them off. Also, remember (or learn) that it was Carter, not Reagan that the bulk of the deregulation. See Dan Davies - Unaccountability Machine --- The version of the narrative that we fight about is the stupidest version of that subject. Gamer's Gate taught me this. From the outside, everyone looked like stupid assholes. I definitely have more empathy for one side vs the other, but each side's narrative is forced into the minimal version that carries the most moral weight. The great tragedy is that we use the moral narrative that appeals to US, not to THEM or even to BYSTANDERS. See Jonathon Haidt - Righteous Mind And Amanda Ripley - High Conflict --- I think the greatest qualities of humanity are curiosity, humility, patience and empathy. To me, nonviolence is not about naivety or tolerance of evil or being unprepared, it's about maintaining the ability to learn about the world and the people in it. Historically nonviolence has been one component of a diversity of strategies - nonviolence itself implies the possibility of violence. The emotion of anger makes people feel right and righteous in themselves - no matter if they are helping or hurting overall. A person's anger does not know what side they are on. Anger makes the world much, much simpler. Our current political environment does not allow for complex problems or complex understanding of other people's needs. You have to fit in my simple worldview. You have to be exactly as angry as I am at all the people I'm angry at. No matter who you feel started this or who you blame, this is all happening inside each of us. We are all being exploited and treated like broken toys. The fight is making us all act and speak very, very stupidly. So if you feel like you have to fight, and you already know who to fight and how to fight them - I am not trying to change that. I am NOT saying that "the other side" has a valid point of view or that the other side has some good people. I am saying that the other side is made of flawed people each with their own history. I am asking you to find some time for curiosity, humility, patience, and empathy for the humans in the world. The tragedy of all anti-war movies is that they show us the horror and terror and destruction of war ... but 'this' is the fight we need to fight, this fight is needed, this fight is good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42261315
energy123 2y ago
One small culprit is the human tendency to think categorically and, as a consequence, to think metaphorically. Abstractions and conceptual thinking can simplify reasoning if used responsibly, but more often this cognitive shortcut is abused to reach emotionally convenient conclusions. Reasoning that contains the string "this is like" is usually suspect. This is a red flag that the individual has categorized the subject of analysis into an overly broad abstraction, and is now attempting to draw a spurious relation to some causally unrelated thing that allegedly belongs to the same category. The difficulty is that this way of thinking is evolved and natural to us. This low-energy, cheap heuristic served us well in our simpler ancestral environments. It's maladaptive in the modern environment. - https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-term-i-invented-to-describe-a-situation https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQKk02pgmY
- XorNot 2y ago
  Anthropomorphization is another problem. As soon as people give things names, they start to treat them like they're individual people even if they're anything but. How many times have you heard someone say "China will..." or "The US thinks..." or "Europe's opinion..." Now these are all potentially useful, context-dependent shorthands...but they're absolutely ripe for misunderstanding. Something I find myself doing a lot these days is asking people to explain what exactly they think is happening on an individual, human level when they declare anything greater then that is "doing" something...because of course, no large organization ever does anything - they're all composed of individuals taking action, potentially under direction but still as individuals.
  - xg15 2y ago
    I think the other extreme - to think about people only as isolated individuals without group identity or power relations - is also too simplifying. (It's also a useful thought exercise to deconstruct sentences like "the US decided to do X" and understand who or what really is meant with "the US" in that sentence. The US government? The political class? Some mainstream opinion in the general population?) But in general I agree with you, especially in the recent years. I find the level of anthropomorphization of countries lately honestly scary, and believe this is a strong sign of how much the political discourse already has shifted back into a "war" vocabulary. The intensity with which people argue this stuff also makes me wonder if they're still understanding it as a metaphor at all. Emotional attachment to flags, nations, peoples, shapes on a map, etc is real and is also a central component of war propaganda.
jebarker 2y ago
> I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters Not sure I agree. Not because the large majority aren't intellectually capable, but because there isn't the interest/attention span in most people to understand the nuances of the complex problem that is demanding the complex solution. I feel this in myself increasingly and opt to just not have an opinion on proposed solutions when I believe the problem is much more complex and multifaceted than I'm even aware.
SilasX 2y ago
I have a saying: 1) Welfare-enhancing 2) Politically-popular 3) Simple Pick any two. There are policies that meet all three ... but they've already been implemented, and no one debates them.
xg15 2y ago
What annoys me is that the assertion "there are no easy solutions" has become a slogan itself, often with the practical meaning that you shouldn't even attempt to understand the problem (let alone think about solutions) and instead let the people in power handle it. In the same sense, "its a complex issue" becomes a weird sort of chiffe for "it's so intractably complex that it's impossible for any mortal human to understand, so you shouldn't even try". Another implication is also that there is no way at all to solve any of those problems, the best we could hope for is to manage them and mitigate the effects. I think this line of thinking is ultimately authoritarian and paradoxically increases "simple solution" thinking or avoidance to think about political topics at all - because that would be all that's left to think about. I like the approach of the OP much more, who argues that we should embrace the complexity of our currently world and try to understand it, instead of shying away from it. That's what I'd understand as "thinking for yourself". I believe, the "simple solutions" can even have a useful role in this - as starting points. E.g. "why can't we just get more water from the Pacific to put out the fires?", "why can't the people in Gaza just go somewhere else?", "why can't we just build more housing?" etc. could be interesting questions to start tackling that complexity.
- SirHumphrey 2y ago
  When controversial problem remains unsolved, "there is a simple solution" means that you think that people in power could have solved this already but they haven't because they are evil or stupid or both, and "there are no easy solutions" means that you don't really want to do anything and would like to be not blamed for the outcomes. It's the same as when people talk about politicization, free speech, etc.

LeroyRaz 2y ago

I don't like the title. Complex dynamics often require simple solutions. E.g., a complex chaotic system can often be made simple by adding damping (a simple solution).

aabhay 2y ago
While I agree with your view point, I think the celebrity mathematician status of Terrence Tao made it obvious to me that the title was referring to mathematical solutions e.g. solving a system of equations.
- LeroyRaz 2y ago
  I read him as implicitly opining on the "solving" of political or economic systems. In doing so, he is making a false analogy. The analogy fails because the "solution" to a real world problem does not require solving the problem in a mathematical sense (i.e., fully tracing and analytically understanding the system) but rather intervening to make the problem go away. For example, imagine your boss is harassing you. Terrance Tao says, ah, that is a complex system (two people interacting) as such we need a complex solution (a deep understanding of what lead to this occurrence, e.g., do you remind your boss of their unhappy childhood?) but the actual real world solution can be simple, e.g., change job.
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tlb 2y ago
You can make systems less chaotic with damping, but that's not always good. A damped 3-body problem (orbiting planets under gravity) results in the planets losing momentum until they all smash together. If you have an active control system like for controlling a robot arm, adding damping in the wrong place can make oscillations worse.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

aka "reality has a surprising amount of detail"

lopatin 2y ago
And people on the internet are simplifying it into memes. Shocker.
concordDance 2y ago
Related: "rounding to the nearest common cliche"

r3nruturnEr 2y ago

I've noticed this a lot with climate science, especially. People are waiting for a silver bullet that will reverse climate change and I think in reality, it will have to be a huge, complex, coordinated effort.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Who’s waiting for a silver bullet? Certainly not the climate scientists or anyone actually working on climate?
- r3nruturnEr 2y ago
  Definitely wasn't talking about climate scientists. Many policy makers, voters, the lay-person. People want a silver bullet solution that is convenient.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Yeah I think this is more like... a huge number of people literally don't care or don't think it's a problem whatsoever, then a huge number think we should be doing tons of little things, and then a small number who are actively working to produce breakthroughs. Group (1) is the impediment to progress on the problem.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
$2.1 trillion was spent on the clean energy transition in 2024. It's a huge complex effort, but it's definitely not coordinated and never will be. https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-transition-exceeded-2-trillion-for-the-first-time-in-2024-according-to-bloombergnef-report/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-...
makeitdouble 2y ago
Most normal people (not scientists or experts) who got invested enough have given up and see a not so slow approaching doom horizon, but keep a glimmer of hope deep inside, just in case. I personally don't think climate change can be _reversed_ and also don't believe a significant effort will be done in that direction except if it somehow becomes a global strategic stake, like the race to build nuclear weapons or race to space. And no, I'm not holding my breath, which is a tough thing to explain to children.

danjl 2y ago

Simple, obvious answers appeal to a broader, less-knowledgeable set of people. In fact, it really doesn't matter if there is any basis for the answer, like a lower-dimensional approximation. If repeated enough, more people tend to believe the simple, baseless answer. I feel this is a bigger issue these days than needing to use more complex answers among people who understand the complexity of the problem.

Henchman21 2y ago
This is what the Murdoch news empire does. It creates the mindset it wants people to have by repeating lies.
cam_l 2y ago
There is value in perceiving and responding to the inherent complexity in things, as it meshes you closer to reality giving you a greater predictive and responsive capacity. This doesn't work as well with other people, with society. Even if they individually all try to approach reality as above. Manipulation and coercion are just much more efficient at creating a predictive capacity with other people, because you don't need to deal with reality or complexity. You already know where people are going to (metaphorically) run if you are leading them and herding them. I did enjoy the finer point Terry alluded to though, that even these simplified coercive memeing systems are based on a complex underlying system of reality. And when they get stretched too far, they break in unpredictable (complex) ways.

Barrin92 2y ago

>As such, empirical laws that were trustworthy in the past, may become significantly less accurate, and can in fact become dangerous to rely upon too blindly. Read a really good book on this a few years ago by John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776 https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776), where they talk about the issue of applying the logic of "known uncertain" systems (like games of poker, or volcanic eruptions) to completely dynamic "radically uncertain" systems where any attempt to quantify outcomes is effectively completely made up. Election forecasts being one example, where there's no guarantee that you know the rules of the game, if they stay constant between elections and so on. I think this is very timely because these days you see this kind of cargo cult empiricism where people will say "I am 30% confident that..." as if just talking in a quantitative language means you've somehow understood something about the future or have reason to be more confident.

lanstin 2y ago

A sick burn.

light_triad 2y ago

If you press people on why they believe what they believe, you will often find that the axioms underlying their reasoning are slogans, trite phrases and hackneyed soundbites. But here's the catch: the memes, short texts, or short videos are spread through a complex machinery of interrelating parts with global reach. Explanations are plausible, wrong and very profitable in front of the right eyeballs.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
Well for better or worse we are a democracy, so salesmanship for the important ideas is absolutely critical

pylua 2y ago

The reason people summarize things, often without being correct, is that the world has become too complicated to model. It’s an outcome of the situation, not just a corresponding trend.

NiloCK 2y ago
Some particular systems have grown in complexity, but the general point isn't 'new' or emerging. No map has never been its corresponding territory.

uoaei 2y ago

The elephant in the room is that this is about as excoriating a jab as Terence Tao can dole out against the brute and unconsidered actions of Ol' Musky on our (federal) government. For our sake, I hope Tao is also correct in that damage to the federal system may not necessarily destabilize structures at other (state, county, municipal) scales as regards socioeconomic organization in the USA.

istjohn 2y ago

Sadly, while this sentiment may be useful to a small segment of society that is highly skilled in navigating our polluted information environment, the vast majority of our society cannot even maintain a grasp on reality, much less coherently reason about solutions of any kind. People live in alternative realities depending on if they get their news from CNN, Fox, TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, or BlueSky. Here's a recent clip from Joe Rogan that illustrates this perfectly [0]. He talks about the different perspectives of liberals and conservatives on USAID. It's likely this will get exponentially worse once our social media feeds become full of AI imposters competing with one another for everyone's attention with outrage bait and fake drama and entire fabricated social media bubbles in which each user is made to feel like the ruler of their own little fiefdom. Video and audio content appealing to every unique combination of biases, superstitions, and political orientation will be available in an endless deluge. I got a preview of this recently when I saw the surreal, gross videos YouTube Reels serves up to my toddler. Similar slop gets eaten up by easy targets on FB. But the slop is going to become more and more sophisticated until everyone is consuming it. I can only hope the solution comes before it's too late. 0. https://youtu.be/yj9jXMEzCZY https://youtu.be/yj9jXMEzCZY

ckemere 2y ago
I was shocked to find AI generated post match interviews after the recent Liverpool derby. I was watching and thinking “whoa - I thought Mo Salah was classier than that”. Then I noticed the channel was called “DangerousAI”. But generated within a few hours of the final whistle and undetectable from a quick glance…
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Me and my wife play a game where we look through The Website Formerly Known As Twitter and try to discern from generated vs non-generated art, and while it’s typically rather easy (artistic style plays a big role) some pieces just absolutely blow us away, and I have been tricked a few times.

2358452 2y ago

I'd put it this way. Current society largely (but not completely) relies on experts building highly complex systems. This includes not only public infrastructure like waterworks, buildings and information systems, but also say the very bread you eat (to get it at a low price and high productivity[1]), the computer we're reading this in (mind-numbingly complex system), the internet. It's a feature of capitalism (really, a feature of many administrative systems and product interfaces) that the consumer thankfully doesn't have to be too much of an expert on say computers (say theory of CPU architecture, pipelines, assembly, etc..) to buy a laptop or use software. The consumer only needs to be able to tell which competitor product is best for his use (although often, as he should, relying on expert reviews). We are good at hiding complexity behind interfaces as well, packaging complexity and hiding away its intricate inner workings. All of this enables life in a complex society. I think it's misguided or hypocritical to completely distrust experts specially when it comes to public policy, public administration and science, given how much we rely on experts for everything else. It's not even much of a choice, I believe: the fact that we rely on those complex mechanisms inevitably will make certain failures that often demand public attention also complex. Say a food company synthesizes a highly complex (and not present in most natural products), but good tasting, substance. Then we kind of need equally complex review of its impacts on human health. A highly complex computer network will need highly knowledgeable (and correspondingly highly complex) solution to certain bugs that might appear, specially in cases like cross-domain failures where complexity encapsulations fail for various reasons. Think how unlikely it would be that every discipline has been exploited to extremely high complexity, but just by chance we could get away with simple solutions for public-facing and public policy problems. I like simplicity, and I even like the idea I wouldn't often require experts to understand a public or scientific issue of public concern. But I don't think I'm willing to give up most products of complexity, including computers, medical procedures and diagnosis, and more -- and even if I were willing (I might be able to live with say an early 2000s computer :) ), I don't think it's realistic or feasible to really do that. In part because of collective agreement, in part because of for example the sheer population we have to contend with today. Earlier methods of agriculture for example probably can't sustain that many people. We should therefore apply Einstein's wisdom: try to make things as simple as possible... but no simpler. And trust experts when sensible, when the problem at hand is complex enough to be beyond our comprehension (but still important). Of course, experts can be wrong, but that is something we just have to contend with (like we have to contend with the possibility all the weird procedures we do to produce food or acquire and purify water -- which are managed by experts -- may go wrong, even with significant efforts to otherwise). We can, and probably should, demand explanations (which may be hard to understand for the general public) of the experts and they explain their reasoning. We can examine and expect that their scientific field is healthy, there is consensus and there is a good level of academic integrity. But we should not approach their well informed opinions on important issues from a baseline of arrogance and distrust, because likely they do know much better, in certain cases. [1] Modern agriculture is highly complex. This includes special seeds, harvesting machines, soil science, weather prediction, and so on. Each of those is in turn highly complex requiring experts to exist at current performance.

arscan 2y ago

The system dynamics[1] view here would be that complex dynamic system behavior tends to be dominated by feedback loops; and once identified let you ignore many of the other factors. And the trick is to figure out ways to introduce or activate feedback loops that work in your favor, instead of against it. To me that gives some hope of the existence of “simple” solutions to managing complex system behavior over time. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics

neiman 2y ago

I adore Terence Tao, but this one feels like stating the obvious. Basically, he says that simple solutions to complex situations work sometimes—for example when a simpler system can approximate your system. But many times it's not true! So you need a complex solution to a complex situation. That's kind of stating the obvious, no?

ozim 2y ago
I would say yes for myself but as software developer I am baffled by business people to whom I have to basically explain this. Some things are complex and will take months or years to complete - but if it doesn’t fit in a quarter where they can put it as a win on their list they feel offended.
cowsaymoo 2y ago
I don't think so. He is rather talking about the properties of emergence in complex systems, and claims that the predictive theories we rely on to navigate the world will not hold in a dynamic system this interconnected ('no effective dynamics'), so we ought to be regularly retesting our assumptions.

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pinoy420 2y ago

Tangential; why is math popular on mastodon like computer science is - but little other subjects? What do physicists use, chemists, mechanical engineers?

ColinWright 2y ago
Specifically, this is a post on Mathstodon ... note the spelling. Yes, it's on "Mastodon-the-Platform", but this particular post is on a server that literally has the words "maths" in its name.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  This is what I mean, there is no physicstodon or similar
  - ColinWright 2y ago
    Ah ... sorry ... I mis-understood. Shrug ... no idea. Christian pung me back in March 2017 and said: There's this new social network thing with different servers ... maybe we should make one to focus on Recreational Maths. We thought for a while, and when we hit on the name (it's his fault ... he came up with it) we figured it had to be done. But thinking about it ... there's very little "Recreational Physics" or "Recreational Mechanics" or "Recreational Electronics". There is, I guess, "Recreational Programming" ... but that doesn't feel the same.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    Mathstodon welcomes cs, physics and other science-related posts (as well as off-topic posts in moderation---the creator views mathstodon as being less about the topics and more about the people: interested in mathematics, cs, problem solving etc).

orbital-decay 2y ago

No offense intended, but this is idealistic and somewhat expected from a person living in an ivory tower. >long-standing assumptions are tested and updated as new information about the current state of the world comes in The entire problem is that this mechanism doesn't exist in practice. Real-world systems tend to accumulate incidental complexity that serves no purpose, with no real way to review it, as any potential mechanism is subject to the same accumulation. That's called corruption. The only way to compress and simplify the outdated complexity that has some chance to work is total system destruction and rebuilding, with previous iterations taken into account. But when you're stuck a local minimum it makes things even worse. Now, if you have another, easier way that would actually work in real world, I'm all ears.

Anotheroneagain 2y ago

No, I think he's completely wrong. The world isn't being ruined by a meme. On the contrary, our problem is the complexity bias, which seems to have developed over the previous century. As the result, nobody understands anything anymore. I fact it seems that more complex solutions have been worked out, that allow to run on sone kind of protocol, with little to no thinking involved. Time is being wasted on dealing with problems in overly complex ways, and there is no room left for what can't be simplified.

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temporalparts 2y ago

I think Terrance makes a great general point in general, but the specific claim is not always true: complex dynamics can arise from simple initial conditions, therefore, simple changes could resolve those complex dynamics.