Respecting complexity sounds like a modest, reasonable attitude — but in reality it dismantles many of the most cherished illusions about knowledge, politics and disagreemens. In practice, it demands something more challenging, if not paradoxical: extreme humility paired with intellectual courage, respect for your own ideas but not those of others, and a slight departure from one of the most basic tenets of intellectual life; that effects can be traced back to causes.

Respecting complexity has many implications, but in this piece I will explain three that I consider important. Taken together, these constitute a significant upgrade to how many people think about everything from personal decisions to important and “big” issues like politics and bitcoin.

Strong opinions, lightly held?

Respecting complexity means being aware of your own ignorance. It is possible, in principle, to quantify the things you know. But it is impossible to put a number on the things you are ignorant of. The closest we can get is “infinite” (as Karl Popper said: “While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal”).

This means that we are all stumbling around in the dark. Your feelings of certainty cannot be trusted, because feeling certain of a truth has exactly the same flavor as feeling certain of a lie. In hindsight we can think “I should have seen it”; but you didn’t, and you won’t next time either. This is the core of fallibilism.

So far so good, but here is where people often go astray. “Because I know nothing”, they say, “I must be careful to hedge my bets. I must abhor certainty, be ever mindful and respectful of other opinions, and constantly remind myself and others that I may be wrong”. This performative humility — what I call fake humility — is a scourge, and pours sand in the machinery of everything it touches.

Yes: Fallibilism implies that you may always be wrong. But it also implies that you may always be right (or at any rate, more right than anyone else in the room). And if you embrace uncertainty, you’re disregarding the possibility that you may have stumbled upon a truth. It was important that Einstein was willing to believe that literally everyone else in the whole world was wrong, and he alone was right.

You see, a good idea is never obvious. If so, everyone would already agree about it. Finding a good idea, realizing it is actually good, and convincing others of it, is a long and arduous road that requires hard work and motivation. No one else will fight for your ideas, and so you have a responsibility to do it. Civilization may depend on it.

Respecting complexity in this case, means being mindful of two facts that are somewhat in conflict with each other. First, that the world is far too complex to be understood by a single mind; and second, that your ideas can be better than even you understand. So to quote Popper again, “What if you’re wrong?”, but also what he forgot to ask: “What if you’re right?”.

Humans first, systems second

Respecting complexity means respecting humans. Perhaps the most visible trait of centralization is that it reduces humans to dumb cogs. School treats children as programmable robots. The good bureaucrat mindlessly executes regulation. The perfect doctor autistically follows the manual.

Production science is an interesting exposé of the difference. Henry Ford can be called a pioneer of automation, since his production lines not only didn’t require any competence, he famously wanted as little of it as possible from his workers. “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”, he supposedly said (but probably didn’t).

Many decades later, visiting Toyota executives observed that the wastefulness of such production lines was potentially staggering. Every worker contained the machinery to detect problems, solve them, and so produce an endless stream of improvements to the production line, without oversight. All of this machinery remained unused in Ford’s production line.

Their wildly successful invention (Toyota Production Systems) focused on harnessing the problem solving faculties of employees. They probably weren’t the first to try, but Toyota was the first ones who did so while respecting the complexity of humans, and hence the momentous task of trying to get a big group of them working towards the same goal.

This is the opposite of how the state treats humans. It is also the opposite of most self-help and parenting manuals. Human will, motivation, intuition, tastes and feelings matter, it’s not things to be assumed away in the name of efficiency. Building good systems means putting humans first, and building around them. This is incidentally precisely what Satoshi Nakamoto did in designing bitcoin, and what Fiatjaf did designing the nostr protocol - whether or not they realized it themselves.

Evolution is smarter than you

Finally, and partly following from the previous points, respecting complexity means accepting absolute limitations on your ability to control outcomes when dealing with complexity. We can, in theory, control what happens to the sun, because the sun dumbly follows natural laws. But controlling a single human is beyond any amount of understanding or procedure. We may manipulate people to some degree, but such attempts are always ridden with uncertainty and vulnerabilities.

You may wonder at this point, what complexity means. It may best be understood by contrasting the word complex with the word complicated. A car engine or a mathematical equation can be very complicated, meaning it consists of many interlocking parts, requires a lot of study and hard work to understand, and is sensitive to small mistakes. But complicated things will yield to determined attempts to understand them. They can be modeled, predicted and simulated on a computer with arbitrary precision.

None of this is true of the complex. Causation in such systems is not linear, but forms interlocking feedback loops that can intensify or break, small changes can cause system wide phase shifts, and interactions at the base layer causes entirely new dynamics to emerge at higher levels. The classic formulation is that complex systems are more than the sum of their parts.

This means that in approaching complex systems, one has to keep in mind that any amount of fiddling can have unexpected outcomes. Society may be one of the most complex systems there are, consisting of a criss-crossing maze of groups, who consist of creative unpredictable adaptive agents, who themselves have a complex ecosystem of fighting ideas in their heads.

The idea that the government can introduce a new regulation into this system, and have any hope whatsoever of seeing their predicted results without any unintended negative side effects, is a joke. Indeed, even the idea that we can keep track of all the side effects of any intervention in this system, is a joke. Even a farmer cannot hope to know the effects of changing his fertilizer.

The standard reply to this, is that there’s an obvious difference between outlawing alcohol and tweaking the tax rate by 1%. But this objection itself misunderstands how complexity works. Outlawing alcohol may turn out to have relatively small consequences, because the black market may step in between government and society to act as a breaker. The 1% change in tax rate, on the other hand, may be the final straw that forces 60% of businesses to change their operating principles, and the second and third order effects down the line can be enormous.

Not only that, but the changes are in principle untraceable, which means that when the problems arise, government will not realize that it was originally caused by the 1% tax increase. Which means that their attempts to fix the problem will itself cause more problems down the line. That is indeed the situation today; a patchwork of regulations meant to fix each other.

Respecting complexity, then, is no gentle suggestion. It is a demanding upgrade to how we think and act. It tells you to reject both arrogant certainty and its fashionable twin — performative doubt. It demands you defend your own ideas with courage, accepting up front the humiliation of being wrong, and it rejects outright any idea of fitting humans into a mould - we may have been shaped by the world, but now it is our turn to shape it in turn.

In the end, respecting complexity means living with the uncomfortable (or maybe comforting) truth that we’re all fumbling through infinite ignorance, yet we may stumble upon truth. The world is too complex to be controlled, but that very complexity is what makes it interesting.

In my first point I said we should not be humble with respect to our own ideas in discussion, but when time comes to act in the world, we should be very humble indeed. Smallest possible interventions, wait-and-see attitude, and, at least to some degree, putting intuition on par with knowledge.

This final point is taking me to the bleeding edge of my own understanding, and is itself little more than an intuition. In my next article I hope to give it some depth and a convincing explanation.