I’ve just finished re-reading Mitchel Wladrup’s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
I was struck by how little impact these big ideas seem to have had on the usual way of seeing the world. Perhaps chaos, complexity and emergence have entered the language, but dreams of improved prediction tools or appreciation of principles like unintended consequences don’t seem to have been achieved. There was a feeling when the book was written that we were on the verge of new forms of artificial intelligence and new approaches to economics that would help us understand the interconnectedness of the global economy. We have Google and mobile devices like the iPad. Sadly, it seems like more of the same only faster and in more places.
I had hoped that tools of decision theory, modeling and simulation would change difficult research and development projects like drug development. In my current job I get a pretty fair overview of the industry on a daily basis and can report that little has changed.
Insights from behavioral economics and advances in cognitive science that have had less impact one we way we see the world. There’s a constant stream of media reports about the science, but little evidence that these fundamental insights are informing our discussions about human behavior and ethics.
My original impulse when I started writing On Deciding . . . Better in late 1999 was to be at least one voice discussing what I thought were important implications of decision theory and Bayesian approaches to probability theory. Over the years, I’ve explored the sources of uncertainty in the world and most recently the emerging insights of Cognitive Neuroscience. I admit that mostly I write for myself, to get ideas out into better organized form and critically review them for myself.
My view of the value of writing and publishing on the net hasn’t changed in the last decade. I have a free, universally accessible publishing platform for my ideas. I’ve been fortunate over the years to actually have kindred spirits interested enough to read and comment on my efforts. I’ve been further encouraged over the last few months finding how Twitter as a microblogging environment provides a new venue to widen that circle of interaction like a virtual interdisciplinary conference.
The world of ideas is still vibrant. Its bigger and noisier than it was in 1992 or at the founding of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984. Certainly its bigger than the world of physics was at the time of either Einstein or Newton. However, I’m brave enough to suggest that like our world, those worlds also were ruled by a power law dictating the impact of ideas.
“…those worlds also were ruled by a power law dictating the impact of ideas.”
I would like to see someone look at Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and see how their respective ideas shaped the course of human events.
I suspect that, to our regret, the incomplete understanding of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has enshrined competition as the central organizing principle for nearly all aspects of life.
While I recall an instructor in a history of science class making the claim that Einstein’s theories on relativity had a social impact on the moral order of the sixties, and undermined the authority of the church; I suspect Darwin had a greater impact on society as a whole, and boosted and Adam Smith (although I know he came first).
There has been no corresponding scientific theory to propel Marx, as Smith was propelled by Darwin; though I suppose complexity, chaos and emergence, were they simple enough to be distilled down to something as easily grasped as “competition’ and “relativity,” might do so. Unfortunately, I think they’re probably too “complex.”
Behold the power of “memes!”
I was reminded of the Power Law finding reading Complexity, published in 1992. This relationship appears in all kinds of connected systems so its not surprising how easy it is to find on the relatively easily quantified internet. I think that for every Einstein, Darwin and Smith at the peak of the power curve there are folks like you and me farther down the curve more connected than many but not central nodes like those iconic figures. One of the ideas about the power curve pattern in complexity is that all of the individuals along the curve participate, its just that some are more central.
I presume it takes a long time to fill up the schema of younger brains with new ideas. Some ideas, like religion, seem recur despite new ideas that seem to compete.
Its a point that you’ve made often about these inflection points that promise to change everything. They seem more to change how we do the same old thing.