Take one step toward me (God), I will take ten steps towards you. Walk towards me, I will run towards you.
Sahih al-Bukhari 7405
Have you ever been burdened with the idea that all you need to get done would require so much to fall together; a seemingly insurmountable number of actions to configure the world in a way which you like.
W. Ross Ashby stated his “law” of requisite variety: that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled. Source.
To control your environment, you need to be as complex, if not more. But given the infinite nature of our environment, and our limited capacity fails if the our potential model of our environment deviates significantly beyond our control mechanisms.
I once had a pin art toy on my desk to remind me of this fact:
The number of nodes being effected are the same resolution of our hands; note more. The same goes with the world around us; us alone can only do so much. Now, you can, perhaps prick one pin at a time to create a more meaningful variation, in which case the compounding effect of time has increased our ability to create a desired outcome. Add to that, the complexity of our brain that gives us the ability to create something of meaning as we map our imagination one prick at a time.
And there is no self-organizing system better than nature itself; whether its bees conducting themselves in a way to build their hive and make honey – without a central authority authoring a grand architecture. Through the trial-and-error of evolution, simple instincts were encoded in the bees to create this conductor-less orchestra.
The same can be witnessed in all of the (successful) systems that humans have created. Simple traffic laws, small enough to fit in a handbook, guide millions of car-goers daily. And when we try to create a centralized authority directing the inputs and outputs of a system, à la communism, the central figure lacks the timely intake of information, processing, and decision making to make it a success.
Even as individuals, with seemingly convincing authorship over our bodies, lay at the mercy of millions of chemical processes, even in the bounds of our own skin. Each one performing without “intention”. It’s often our conscious interventions that throw the wrench in this system — from unnecessary Big Pharma chemicals to your run-of-the-mill over-processed snack. Nassem Taleb talks about fragility of systems caused by over-interventionism. Yet of course, we know that first the systems must be created for it to then flourish on it’s own “accord”.
The problem of infinite regress takes its course. The rules of the individuals agents — their programming, so to speak — must be programmed in the first place. Not with a directive to produce a result of grand architecture, but an image to aspire to. The end result is entirely unpredictable, and those who keep adding rules to contain the system to their liking, lead it to it’s catastrophe. And with all systems, the system has to adjust itself, adding and reducing laws; the dance between top-down and bottom-up processes.
The same is with life. The complexity of life only seems to untangle one thread at a time. The people who have goals in mind fall short, and rarely attain it. They can’t anticipate the process nor predict it’s result. But systems – guidelines and tools that can be deployed with scale-invariance can change the face of the planet. Put one foot in front of the other, and the rest will sort itself out.
I often tell new employees I hire, “I don’t measure outputs nor results, I measure inputs”. Of course, I had the experience to know what works and what doesn’t, and if that changes, only then would it need a change in the work itself. You cannot predict the economy, or the mind of the customer on the other end. What you can know is what works X% of the time, and do that thing over and over.
An amazing example is the Biosphere 2, made to be simply an experiment, then ridiculed for it’s “failure”, was designed to be an insight of complex systems and their fragility. With brilliant scientists at the helm, their prediction models couldn’t anticipate the infinite levels interacting feedback loops. Luckily, most of us don’t live in a closed system, nor are forced to create one. All of our bothers in the world derive from prediction-generation, and how we can intervene to direct it. Technology is the direct result of our need to mold the world to us. AI and Statistics are the most complex tool we have in this pursuit. Human’s won’t stop developing it until we reach the absolute limits of our ability to model the universe — see DEVS.
I remember once telling my brother, “if you walk with binoculars, you’ll trip over a stone”. Life can be easy – it doesn’t require you to intervene constantly, nor demand your attention with every seeming failure. It requires the discipline to act on mostly simple ideas that then compound into a daunting force that has the power overwhelming oceans of complexities the world throws at you.
We’re faced with thousands of decisions daily, all of which will alter your the course of your life nonetheless. Put a limit on your thoughts; be decisive, the world only reacts to action and your mind only from feedback. The mind has no way to map the world and it’s causality. A helpful way to decide is the reversibility of the decision; the harder it is to “unmake” the effect of the decision, the longer you should ponder it. All things are irreversible; most things are trivially so.
In the face of complexity – create leverage. Hire people. Raise money. Use technology — build technology. Gather knowledge, tools, and allies. Use time to compound both your habits and your investments. Our hands only amount to 10 fingers, and the universe lends its hand only if you reach out for it.