About
I have a dream that I can help change the way we think about our human social world.
If we think about it as the complex unconscious world it is, we can do things differently, and if we do things differently, it becomes possible to tackle the big problems facing us like health care and global warming in a way that makes sense and can work.
Complexity is a way for thinking about things; the more components and interactions you add to what you are interested in, the more complex it becomes, and the more you take away, the simpler it appears. As things become complex, their behavior change.
They self-organize, within them rare events occur more commonly than expected, components adapt and retain a memory which affects future behavior, and patterns emerge that are more than the sum of the parts. We avoid complexity because it appears chaotic to us; once we understand how it works, it no longer appears chaotic.
As humans, we are interconnected and interrelated in a complex world and respond to each other, from our actions patterns emerge unpredictably and without being planned, and although those patterns appear stable to us, they constantly change in small and sometimes big ways.
There is an immense creativity locked up in human diversity, but to unlock it we must understand how we do things and why. It requires cooperation, experimenting, and learning, but above all conversation and dialogue.
There is an old German proverb, for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of a rider the message was lost, for want of a message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost, all for want of a nail.
We’ll keep losing the big battles until we do one small thing; change how we think about our world and specifically our human world.
