I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I look for in new people I meet more generally. It’s not that we always have to be knees-deep in the details of a topic, but just being able to respect complexity, even that which you don’t understand, is something that I find admirable. Yet, over time, I feel we have lost a lot of our own respect for these people. Complexity is hard. Hard to work with, hard to remove if it’s unnecessary, but most of all hard to understand. We talk about complex subjects all the time. Medicine, politics, economics, sociology, morality and more. These are all deep topics that you can study your entire life, but everyone will end up talking about most of these, even quite often. So this isn’t just about academic papers and overly abstract hand-wavy blogposts like this one. I’m talking memes, news, thanksgiving dinner arguments, water cooler chats. We are constantly asking our brains to grasp at complex topics and distill down at least our own perception of them to something manageable.
We may be becoming worse at this. It’s not set in stone but the need to have quick and easy explanations for things, having peaked many centuries ago, has begun to rise again since the techno-optimistic days of only a few decades ago. That’s not been entirely without good reason, many things were promised then that have failed to materialize. From flying cars to world peace, some more sought than others. But the idea was that we would trust that society was heading in a good direction, and so these complex topics could be safely left to some group of people who would make it their life careers and so overall we would trust them to get the job done. Now, when many may challenge that notion of consistent progress of the world toward a brighter future, letting somebody else do it just doesn’t seem so right. Instead we now live in a time of doing your own research, of skepticism, but most of all, of the idea that understanding the full complexity of every topic that might cross your path is not only possible, but somehow, expected.
How did this happen?
Lots of people have spoken about the information age and what the internet has done for our perceptions of things. You can also look at geopolitical issues and point fingers to tensions or collapsing trust due to specific events. Even one can talk about how the improving lives we live can make us forget about both the value of what we have and the work it took to get there (I’m thinking of vaccines). All of these are valid contributing factors that others have covered, but I want to talk about one I love to talk about in general: Automation.
What does robots taking our jobs have anything to do with people’s respect for complexity? Well, it’s simple. One of the best ways of improving your understanding of something is proximity to it. Do you work in the steel industry? You probably get a better feel for how manufacturing works. Are you waitstaff? You’ll probably live the rest of your life being kind to servers. Does your friend you know work in an essential industry for the economy? You will over time develop a better idea of how much real complexity is involved in that thing. These are not useless anecdotal ideas if they allow you to give more respect for other areas you do not understand but believe are equally complex. Having a deeper understanding of a single value creating and complex system helps us put other such systems into context (at least, for most people). As we take these foundational industries like agriculture, manufacturing, engineering, construction, and automate them (or for that matter, move them overseas) we detach ourselves from real complexity and I think we lose something from that. Then, when we are trying to contextualize grocery prices, repair costs, bugs in our software, roadworks that seem to never end, we do a worse job. We likely get frustrated looking for an answer that may be many fathoms deep in the details. Now, it was never likely that your cousin who does road work might be in the car with you to explain the intricacies of asphalting, but almost as good is to simply have a respect for the complexity that is almost certainly involved. You don’t even need your cousin to tell you that.
What to do?
Am I implying that we should all get out our shovels and start little home gardens? Well, I don’t think that would be a bad idea, but notice that even people who do that may still not grasp the complexity of the global agriculture industry (in fact, people who grow their own gardens are more likely doing it because of a distrust of that industry). So, really, the gulf between subsistence farming and modern complex industries is to large to be crossed on its own.
Schools, then? Sadly, the education system itself suffers from the effects of this lack of respect. It does seem to currently be in a negative cycle, meaning less trust in teachers means less funding, which leads to less understanding kid’s and so on. However, juvenoia is a recurring theme across history so I’m inclined to be optimistic. This may just be part of the ebb and flow of trends and ideas. Still, clear answers don’t seem ahead of us
What? Don’t look at me like that? I didn’t promise you any solutions at the start of this text. It’s a complex problem, and it’d be genuinely ironic if I now gave you the fix-all solution. I have more respect for the problem than to try and do that in a blogpost. Still, it’s very easy to get worried about the rhetoric and the new developments in news and elsewhere that seem to all point to disaster, and wanting some comfort. If there’s merit to this theory above then another big question of our time, how much might AI disrupt human labor, will have even more riding on its outcome. All I can do is continue looking for those people who have that respect for complexity. Some find them boring, or indecisive, or just wrong for not buying into some extreme. I think those are dumb ideas. My trust in people rises immensely these days when they have the ability to sincerely say “I don’t know”. Being all-knowing shouldn’t be the coolest thing to be since, given that it’s impossible, anyone who comes off that way is, in a sense, lying. Respect for complexity? Now that is cool.