Conversation

Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Complexity by M Mitchell Waldrop is one of those weird books where I finish reading it and think "ahh, that was a good yarn, it's totally not useful" and then proceed to have my entire worldview changed in the subsequent months. Just. What.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
To be precise, here’s what the book does, at least to my brain: First, it hammers home the concept of a complex adaptive system, giving you the tools to recognise it in the wild. It does so in story format, making it far easier to remember. So you start seeing CASs everywhere.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Second, it tells you all the ways that mechanistic methods of thinking about CASs fail. It does this subtly. Mostly through stories. So now you can recognise when someone is using a mechanistic explanation to reason about a CAS and feel very uncomfortable.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Third, because you are now distrustful of mechanistic explanations, you find that your thinking about CASs (the economy, business strategy, network effects) become irreparably changed. You no longer believe you can predict the future. You can’t go back.
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swyx 🔜 Dev | Writers | Miami
@swyx
Replying to
@ejames_c
i actually dont find the inability to predict a good thing. people really want predictions. personal outcomes really depend on weighting probabilities right. its not enough to sit back and say “ah look everything is so complex it all depends”. you have to *do something*.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@swyx
Yeah I really should write a blog post about this. You see this idea of “acting without prediction” over and over again — with Bill Miller and Howard Marks and Charles Koch (all of whom seem influenced by CAS). Took me a long while to figure out what they meant.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@ejames_c
and
@swyx
I think the most intuitive way to express this form of thinking is that you treat the market/system/whatever like you would traffic. You can’t predict commute times (“your commute four Fridays from now would be 24 mins 53 seconds”) but you can still plan, act, and adapt.