Arthur Noll
I believe Timothy and I are basically saying the same thing about reductionism and measurement. We can more easily make mistakes in our understanding of complex systems, small details can be very important.
Thinking about the joke about how different professions would solve the problem of milk production, I also see it as a good illustration of problems, though I see a little differently. The way the physicist would solve the problem of the cow producing more, that doesn’t really sound so silly to me. I might seriously start the problem like that. I would then list inside the circle all the factors that I could find that are important to the cow, and outside the circle all the things that are impacting on her, that might be either positive or negative to her, and hence to her production of milk. I did smile at the idea that the psychologist would paint the inside of the barn green, and plant trees to make her environment interesting. That is projecting possible human reactions on the cow, a wrong understanding. She would like trees if they provided shade on hot days, but cows are color blind, and they do not get bored grazing. Likewise the “engineering” solution, was leaving out many possible factors affecting the cow – they might actually not be producing because they are too crowded. These two “solutions” were real reductionist solutions, leaving out many possible factors. The physicist’s approach was actually making room for hundreds of factors to be listed. The cow is a sphere, it is an entity, that many things can have an influence on. When people complain that someone is not looking holistically, what they are really saying in my experience, is that important factors have been left out.
Real physicists and engineers have designed many very complex things that work, and they didn’t do it by leaving out critical details, often very small.
In the present situation, I don’t feel that the details left out are small at all. For a society to totally leave out conservation of resources in it’s measure of things, as is done with money, to totally leave out the fact of interdependence in the attempt to make everyone function independently, these are not tiny little details.
I have had people tell me flat out that our problems were so complex that no single human could possibly come up with a solution to them. And that my solutions are wrong on that basis. Even when I explained that I had certainly built on the knowledge and experience of many other people to come to my solutions, they were adamant that even with this it could not be done. When I asked what they felt was missing from my solution, they could not say. When I asked how they knew the mental capacities of the whole world population so well that they could make such a statement, they were silent. They were sure that something was missing, and they would rather stay with a system that they admitted was not working, rather than join with me on a solution for which they could not find a flaw, and which logically corrected flaws in the existing system. I see this fear of complex systems as counterproductive. It is like a doctor who is faced with a seriously ill patient, and he is afraid to try anything because life is so complex and he might make a mistake. Fear of moving is an act in itself, that is irrational if it is not working.
It is true that one can be a lot more sure that a solution will work, if it has worked in the past. The doctor will usually draw on the experience of many doctors in the past, for how to deal with a situation. Interestingly enough, my solution has indeed worked in the past, as well as having a logic of it’s own. We lived without money for many thousands of years, made conscious group decisions, far longer than we have lived with money and the “everyone go their own way” approach. Herding, hunting and gathering are proven ways to live. If a patient is sick, even the layman knows that having them run around and work even harder is not the solution, but rest, putting less energy through the patient, is best for healing, so what I am saying about reducing our energy use makes sense by that, as well.
But this patient is like a monster, that will not slow down, is crazed in it’s disease, will not be restrained, will not listen to logic. People have a hundred excuses for not behaving according to simple logic. They “strain gnats and swallow camels”, fretting about the danger of altering even small things, and ignoring enormous gaps in logic. Do people prefer to belong to an organization that is like a sick, cancerous and crazed elephant, or a healthy mouse? It would appear they prefer to be the sick elephant.