Exponential growth, feed back loops and side effects are all hard to reason about intuitively.

"Business Dynamics" by Stermer was surprisingly good.

"How we know what is not so" by Thomas Gilovich is a good tonic against arrogance (as is "Uncommon Sense" by Comer).

I really like SystemAntics (John Gall - Good luck finding the original!) about, mostly, how our arrogance fails us when we try to define systems that are complex and include humans...

> I really like SystemAntics (John Gall - Good luck finding the original!)

There's a PDF scan of this book available through Google search. Not a great PDF scan so it's not a comfortable read but it's doable. Anyway, I was only going to sample the book from that scan but ended up reading most of it because it was so good. Devastatingly bleak. Accurate. Subtle humor here and there. Highly recommended to anybody who hasn't read it yet. I just need to find a hard copy though ...

I agree that people generally should realize that their broad viewpoints on subjects that they are not familiar with are in a different category from those that they are very familiar with or those that are about specific situations. I disagree that the issue is just that these systems are too complex to understand on any level or that we can avoid having worldviews that encompass these subjects.

I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand. I agree they are complex but that doesn't mean I can avoid having views on them.

> I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand

Sure, we all have world views. When it comes to predictive power however, some world views are superior to others. At the end of the day, and at the level of detail we're currently capable of understanding reality, all of our models are wrong, but some are useful, hence why we keep pushing the process of scientific method, even though it has its limitations.

By acknowledging that something is complex, we can recognize we are limited in our ability to understand it – at least for now – which in turn leads us to question our current views and seek to discover and adopt better models, with even more predictive power.

The problem isn't so much having opinions as expecting strangers to value them.

When you are just another commenter on the Internet, your opinion just doesn't matter that much. It can be hard to get used to that.

Instead of just sharing our outputs, we need to share inputs. What did you read or experience?

While there is a lot that seems to fit with applying complexity theory to economics, I am always uneasy that the area just doesn't seem to yield any overriding direction for people to follow.

Powerful and followable ideas at the level individual decision maker, applied many times over can make big changes in systems. But what story can be told to capture the actions needed at an decision level?

BTW: you might find this paper interesting.

http://necsi.edu/research/economics/econuniversal

The measurement of any system is only as good as the quality of the data being measured. When the Black Swan comes computational interconnectivity of these systems will ensure they all respond together and that is not a natural design if on a short-term timescale.

Behemoths like Amazon are taking a flamethrower to complexity already. Want practically anything? Just click and the day after tomorrow it magically appears at your door.

Google, Amazon, Apple...they are reducing our IQs by simplifying our lives to the point of stupefaction.

>> Society, economy, biological organisms, climate, cognition, etc are all complex systems

You can't buy any of these from any company, and you definitely can't buy understanding of them.

TFA is about wealth and power, not human evolution

Have they? Go to Amazon and search, say, for "scissors". Which one would you buy?

The top result, tagged as Amazon's Choice, is the "AmazonBasics Multipurpose Scissors - 3-Pack" for $6.09. They look like everything I want in general-purpose scissors, there are tons of reviews from people who really like them, and the fact that there are three of them means that unless Amazon has just completely dropped the ball on this one I'll be set for a long time in the scissors department -- and if not, hey, I'm only out six bucks. Free two-day shipping with Prime.

I'm not seeing the problem here?

Well, if you fail to see the limitations and assumptions upon which your decision making process rests, then there's nothing of value I could add. Your decision making model via-a-vis scissors purchasing is perfectly acceptable. But it's just one model. Would you use the same model if you were, say, a tailor?

The one with with most 5 star ratings!

Fiskars.

From a reputable vendor, no less.