Judging Dances from Pictures
In which we muse at the tendency of flattening the complex into the complicated, making it even harder to nudge the kind of systems we desperately need to learn to influence.
Alex Mordvintsev (of deep dream fame) recently shared a creation he called “calligraphy of chaos” which is a beautiful simulation of the path traced by a 4-sections pendulum attached to a fulcrum rotating at a constant radial speed. This is an example of a complex system composed by simple parts: individually, the pendula are easy to model and forecast but combine just a few of them and the resulting system presents unpredictable behavior.
As Alex himself puts it:
We can't precisely predict the future of a chaotic system, but we can throw dice and make guesses. Sometimes we can see far, but sometimes bifurcations hide the future from us.
Peekaboo
All small children love to play peekaboo until they don’t. We retain the wonder of the experience (so that we can play it with our own children) but the game loses appeal. Piaget’s model of cognitive development suggests this is due to the newly developed ability of the child to model object permanence. When humans are born, they can’t model the existence of an object outside of their sensory experience: I see it, it’s there. I can’t see it, it’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore.
This is why peekaboo is so much fun: mommies and daddies are magicians! They disappear and re-appear, over and over. It’s an awe generator!
Until it isn’t: pff, daddy is just hiding behind his hands… boooring!
The child has learned to model the existence of daddy independently of present sensory input. It has abstracted an extremely complex and unpredictable sensory generator (daddy) into a permanent abstraction, an object that exists even when daddy is not in sight.
The notion of abstracting complex, unpredictable processes into durable objects easier to memorize, store and reason about seems to be a fundamental aspect of human cognition.
Complex vs. Complicated
Most people think of complex and complicated as interchangeable synonyms, but in the Cynefin framework of sense-making, they are not. Complicated problems can be difficult to solve but they can be dissected into smaller problems without fundamentally changing the nature of the system. Complex problems cannot. In fact, one could argue complex problems can’t be “solved” because “problem” and “solution” lose meaning in such dynamic environments.
Conceptually, there is no such thing as a “complicated” system unless it’s extremely linear and composable with absolutely no feedback loops (direct or indirect). In practice, our sophisticated sense-making machinery is able to abstract all these “complexities” away and create permanent “complicated” abstractions.
The one important disadvantage of object permanence being one of the first things we learn to model is that “objectification” is a strong force in us and it tends to project the complex down into the complicated. This is always a lossy process and for most of our lives, the loss was minimal and it provides great advantage at interpreting and predicting the world.
As we grow older and we reach for more meaningful and satisfying problems, the number of complicated problems shrinks and the number of complex problems grows. Increased population density, globalization, faster and cheaper dissemination of biological and informational material, all conspire to make complicated problems complex.
Dancing with Systems
In this beautifully evocative piece, environmentalist and systems thinker Donella Meadows suggests that:
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
A dance is a fantastic metaphor for a complex system because even as children we recognize that the abstraction of a dance (a series of carefully timed and executed body movements) has an inherent dynamism that can’t be reduced to its parts.
It is obvious to everybody that in order to evaluate a dance, we can’t simply observe the “steps” that compose the model of the dance combined with a few pictures of the performance. The loss of such modeling projections is so high it would be a meaningless exercise.
And yet, we seem to be doing it constantly.
A Complex need for Complexity
Recently, I mused with a few friends that:
It fells like we need a term for projecting a complex process onto a complicated object and making it easier to memetically transmit but also harder to be useful at ultimately influence that process.
The pandemic has highlighted this effect dramatically: current human society appears to lack the ability to talk fluently about complex systems without having to consistently resort to project on the complicated.
The virus will be defeated! The economy will recover! Covid is like the flu! I decide what goes into my body! The effectiveness of vaccines wanes! Covid is an hoax invented to make Trump look bad!
These all feel like projections of the complex into the complicated and they appear across the political spectrum.
The problem is that just like evaluating a dance from a few pictures, the dance itself is lost. The judgement tells us more about the existing model in the judge’s mind than anything about the dance itself.
And yet it seems that’s all we do lately: pandemics, economic recovery, climate change, privacy protection, mental health, impact of gaming and dopamine addiction on society, liberty, governance models, military interventions. Each one of these topics cannot be reduced into a series of composable pieces, individually understandable in isolation.
We all collectively wish they could, but they can’t: they are what they are because of the intense feedback loops between the parts that make them up. And to evaluate our ability to influence them, we take a few pictures of the dance, pick those that resonate or not with our existing mental models, cast our judgement on those and apply object permanence to such judgment.
This is how you get Covid risk deniers among a population of sick and dying, maintaining their denial on their deathbed. Changing their epistemic stance requires not just a change in judgement, but a change in the amount of attention and cognitive resources that we are willing to allocate to judging these dances, the ability to be willing to operate in a realm of complexity where dynamic, unpredictable, bifurcating and uncertain is the norm, not some unnecessary fluff that we can strip away without consequence.
And yet, the more we find ourselves embedded in complex problems, the more they tax and saturate our ability to dedicate the appropriate amount of attention and cognitive resources to keeping the complex in our heads without falling back to the tendency of projecting it down to the complicated.
All further exacerbated by the fact that it takes now thousands of words to describe all this with the appropriate amount of nuance and emotional detachment, making it harder to read, harder to share, harder to influence.
So much so that we don’t even have a word to describe this phenomenon!
It’s easy to despair and predict that humanity will succumb and be destined to be annihilated or decimated to more manageable rates of complexity. And yet, we forget that even this planet system we are describing is complex and might bifurcate rather dramatically.
This, weirdly, gives me hope.