On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:41 AM, Bruce Bostwick <[email protected]> wrote: ty and the presence of certain fail-safes in the
> Never forget that you're dealing with a system made up of the collective > behavior of millions of individual human beings, because that understanding > is fundamental to the understanding of how the system as a whole works and > why it breaks down the way it does. It's very efficient at what it does, > but the nature of what it does is itself chaotic, and that human element is > the most chaotic part of it . This made me think of something I had read, but it took me a while to find it. This is from Friedrich A. Hayek: http://mises.org/story/3229 | This corresponds to what I have called earlier the mere pattern | predictions to which we are increasingly confined as we penetrate from | the realm in which relatively simple laws prevail into the range of | phenomena where organized complexity rules. As we advance, we find | more and more frequently that we can in fact ascertain only some but | not all the particular circumstances which determine the outcome of a | given process; and in consequence we are able to predict only some but | not all the properties of the result we have to expect. Often all that | we shall be able to predict will be some abstract characteristic of | the pattern that will appear — relations between kinds of elements | about which individually we know very little. Yet, as I am anxious to | repeat, we will still achieve predictions which can be falsified and | which therefore are of empirical significance. | Of course, compared with the precise predictions we have learned | to expect in the physical sciences, this sort of mere pattern | predictions is a second best with which one does not like to have to | be content. Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the | belief that in order to have a claim to be accepted as scientific it | is necessary to achieve more. This way lies charlatanism and worse. To | act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which | enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, | knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do | much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection | to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought | not to discourage the overconfident because their experiments may | after all produce some new insights. But in the social field, the | erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial | consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men | being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in | itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those | spontaneous-ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man | is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims. We are | only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system | the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based — a | communications system which we call the market and which turns out to | be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than | any that man has deliberately designed. | If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the | social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other | fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, | he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of | the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge | he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes | his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the | appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does | this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of | ever-growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has | engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success," to use | a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our | natural but also our human environment to the control of a human | will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge | ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility | which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal | striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a | tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of | a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from | the free efforts of millions of individuals. _______________________________________________ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
