Ray wrote:
> The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it.
> I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from
> everyone. You don't believe it, or you don't understand?
Well, Ray, the "design of large systems" is pretty general. What
direction do you thing we should take with it?
Or prime model for large, complex systems that work -- that work
nearly magically -- is biology and the biosphere. But the reticular
dynamic system of living things was designed by an evolutionary
process red in tooth and claw; "ruthless" if you like to
anthropomorphize it; utterly stochastic if you don't.
We have way to duplicate the evolutionary process and if we did, it
would defy and defeat our purposes; social Darwinism deserves its bad
name.
The evolutionary process doesn't care about individual organisms,
species or biomes. What happens happens and what survives is what is.
If we're designing large complex systems for society, we accept (or
most of us claim to do so) additional restraints imposed by our
notions or human worth, human equality, civility and even kindness.
It is, however, noteworthy that human worth, kindness and similar
humanistic considerations don't show up in most economic theory and
often not in more general policy analyses, which latter often descend,
through a sort of economic reductionism, to what mathematicians might
call "degenerate" cases, cases in which the single variable of
monetary value is the only determining factor.
So we have a problem with the practice of designing such systems from
the start: capitalism, economics and finance trump moral or humanistic
considerations.
So what would you like us to go from here? Wisdom, whether that of
Native Indian shamans [1], that of Solomon or of other famously wise
leaders, remains nonpareil but, first, apparently somewhat in short
supply and, as well, inadequate to deal with large complex systems.
The best, brightest and, yes, wisest among us can no longer take care
of us. That's because wisdom is the expression of intuition --
thinking that occurs below the objective, articulate level of
awareness -- that emerges from objective knowledge and reflection.
Only in large, complex systems, no single brain can encompass enough
of the system for the traditional mechanisms of wisdom to work.
Okay, where intuition and wisdom fail, we -- since the enlightenment --
are inclined to turn to theory, hypotheses about the nature of large
complex systems in general. We have a number of such theoretical
avenues: modeling [2], catastrophe theory [3], complexity theory,
self-organizing systems [4], chaos theory [5], adaptive systems [6]
among others. All of these have proven to be useful. Why, then,
haven't they fixed us up, addressed your concern? Because they've
proved useful in particle physics, in fluid dynamics and aeronautics,
robotics, weather prediction, at the cost of enormous effort on the
part of scientists able to master the math, program the computers,
imagine the algorithms and intuit directions for experiment. These
systems are composed of atoms, molecules, clouds, data bits --
indiividual elements any one or any million of which are, in
themselves, insignificant, dispensible.
But economic and social systems -- large, complex systems the elements
of which are people, families, voluntary congeries and collocations of
people, the abstract entities people engender (sovereign states,
money, religions) -- exceed, not just our computing power but, so far
at least, our intellectual power to model in a way that takes into
account the human, civic, social and experiential aspects of the
world.
Indeed, I have some fear that the emergence of theoretical success with
large, complex systems will lead, sooner or later, to subverting all
of those aspects that we would like to preserve. Advertising,
propaganda, "public relations" and related trades have, in fact,
already exploited the psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and
other achievements of the last 100 years to sell us crap, make
us believe foolishness, ignore what's on the ends of our forks,
conform to pernicious social paradigms and more. Jeez, Ray, Skinner
was a bumbling jerk, Bernays was an anachronistic outlier and Hitler
got all distracted and off-message because of his personal demons. And
those guys didn't have any good theoretical base for large, complex
systems. What are the Next Guys with good theory, good software,
correct systems concepts and all that -- what are *they* going to do
for us?
> The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it.
> I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from
> everyone.
So here you go: non-silence.
> You don't believe it, or you don't understand?
I believe it. What don't we understand? I barely understand the
references cited infra. Where do you suggest we go from here?
- Mike
[1] Pardon me if that's the wrong, or even a politically incorrect,
term. Priest? You know what I mean.
[2] E.g. "Discrete Event System Specification",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEVS
[3] E.g. see ch. 17 of Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications, Tim
Poston & Ian Stewart, 1978, Dover Publications.
[4] E.g., see The Origins of Order, Stuart Kauffman, 1993, Oxford
U. Press.
[5] E.g. see Chaotic Dynamics: an introduction, G.L. Baker &
J.P. Gollub, 1990, Cambridge U. Press
[6] E.g. see Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity , John
Holland, 1995, Addison-Wesley
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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