Complexity: The Invisible Threat

When you live in a small community for a while and then travel to a full scale city, you are likely to get a sense of being overwhelmed. The streets are full of cars. The commuter roadways have many lanes of speeding lane-shifting traffic. The business districts are built upward towards the sky, while the suburbs apparently reach out to infinity in all directions. The shopping malls are flooded with pedestrians zig-zagging to and fro.

As an urbanite, you may have had a similar experience when traveling abroad to another city or different country. Its called ‘culture shock‘. Its a sense of disorientation due to the lack of familiarity, but compounded by so many diverse, interacting, and interdependent moving parts. There is a lot of uncertainty in the urban world in contrast to the simpler world of rural life. I expect most rural people enjoy a couple of days of excitement in the city and then are bound to head for the comforts of home.

Back home in the countryside, you know people. You know where they live, what car or truck they drive, what school and church they go to, and what work they do for a living. You nod when you meet them, or even strangers, on the village sidewalk. You might spontaneously strike up a conversation with them about a mutual acquaintance who just got a new job, got married or had an accident.

In the city, you will almost never run into anyone you know by accident. Its hard enough to make an appointment to meet for coffee when you live 45 minutes apart through traffic jams and a full workday schedule. The point is this, that we’re so smart that we don’t stop and think about the invisible complexities that surround us until there is a sudden change in complexity.

Maybe you grew up and continue to live in the city. You are familiar with the buzz, the sirens, car horns, the busy parking lots and shopping malls, the six or ten lanes of speeding shifting traffic with entrance and exit lanes. Maybe you were accustomed to kids in your classroom, or co-workers, with whom you have never had a conversation. Imagine when you go and visit your country cousin and you feel out of place, or exposed. Suddenly you are expected to interact with strangers as a whole person, not just in a prescribed role. You are expected to know that everything happens at the general store. Your cousins seem to know everything about everyone! The simplicity is overwhelming!

Managing Complexity

I derive a lot of my arguments from an evolutionary point of view. That’s because that’s where we all came from. Our biological constitutions were designed by Nature to align with the complex patterns of opportunities and threats in our native ecosystems. Our capacity for managing complexity is biologically constrained.

There was a natural limit to the number of people that could survive in a hunting and gathering lifestyle within a geographic range. In many ecosystems our ancestors became nomadic in order to find enough food to survive and thrive. Early languages had only enough words and names, to identify perhaps as few as 500 items that we had to talk about. The division of labour was simply by age and sex. But if you wanted to get the best arrow head for hunting, you knew who the master was and where to find him, even without thinking much about it. You knew who could give the best parenting advice or help someone who was sick.

When all is familiar we are automatic, efficient and effective. We can find time to deliberate, reflect or meditate on the grand scheme of things without disruptions. Some of the greatest wisdom we find today was captured by ancient sages of more than 2,000 years ago.

Today’s world is very busy and getting busier. But it seems as though the busier it gets, the less time we take to really get to the bottom of our struggles. We often treat the symptoms, not the root causes. We frantically grasp at the straws of truth. Its like a feeding frenzy of starving masses, all bumping elbows to get to the trough. I am reminded of the legend of the stampeding lemmings.

Our brains are obviously complex enough to handle more civil complexity than the simple hunting and gathering lifestyle. We can form abstract concepts and principles that allow us to learn from one experience and extrapolate to quite different scenarios. But our capacity for managing complexity is not infinite.

We apparently evolved from tree-climbing apes. That’s why we are upright, bipedal and have great manual dexterity. Our gymnasts demonstrate our species talent for swinging from tree limbs. Most animals have trouble grasping anything except by mouth. So we can become tool makers and tool users. Tools amplify our range of abilities to modify our environments. We can make our worlds quite complex if we want. Some cultures promoted technical progress to an obsession.

The other important thing that makes us different from most other animals is the capacity for vocalizing. Because of the variety of sounds we can make with our mouths, we can code sounds to meanings. Other animals can get language if we teach them. The capacity for language is not ours uniquely. But we have capitalized on this vocalization to be able to capture and share lessons for living, from one generation to the next and across great distances. It is like an accelerated evolution. It is based on memes, or parceled meanings, rather than genes.

There is competition amongst cultures, so no one could afford to ignore progress in food production, health, manufacturing, education and, of course, defense. There is a cultural race that drives the growth of civil complexity. Minority cultures, those that have a smaller population or less influence, must either adopt technology or be consumed by the majority cultures.

Native languages disappear. Traditional cuisine, arts, music, dance, and fashions are threatened. Becoming “normal” by adopting the global standards becomes the preferred route. Most people don’t want to appear to be “backward”. Being backward implies being stupid. Being an early adopter of innovation generally implies higher intelligence, whether true or not.

Our brains were designed by Nature to be able to manage a certain level of complexity, a level we were likely to experience in a rain-forest ecosystem. That served us very well. There were a lot of plants and animals, some of which we could eat, others would poison us or otherwise kill us. Some water sources were safe while others would make you sick. In other words, there were opportunities and threats and we could tell the difference and act accordingly. We approach opportunities and avoid threats. What our instincts didn’t tell us about good and bad, then our culture would tell us, originally by mimicking, then by oral traditions such as instruction or story-telling.

But now we find ourselves in a different world, a world in which civil complexity often exceed Nature’s complexity. We live in a world in which our environment does not evolve over centuries and multiple generations, but in decades, or now in a matter of months.

I have come to believe that our brains have a dysfunctional way to dealing with unmanageable complexity. We know there are many dysfunctional coping mechanisms. Usually successful coping mechanisms begin to fail when over-used, or used inappropriately. Denial, for example, used appropriately in small doses, can be quite useful. But when we rely on denial too often or at critical decision points, it can be disastrous.

Denial is one way we can habituate to complexity. Denial is a kind of filtering. We do it all the time to get focused and stay focused. We deliberately decide to ignore some things and attend to a limited number of other things. When cooking, cooks experiment with one or two variables at a time, such as volumes of salt or sugar, to see what change results in the end product. In scientific experiments, scientists hold most variables constant and experiment with a limited number of variables to study their effects.

However, real life is more complex than simple patterns of cause and effect. We have more things, more types of things, more relationships among things and more types of relationships among things. We have more people, more diversity of people, more jobs and more specialized jobs, more of everything — and more variety of cars and buildings, transportation routes, and other public infrastructure. These are all variables in the civil system we call the city.

The more variables you have in system, the more unpredictable it becomes. There are not only more variables, but more relationships among those variables. The parts of a modern city are generally all interdependent. Any variable could impact any other variable at any time.

This complexity produces uncertainty. The uncertainty produces anxiety. Anxiety produces defensive herding behaviour, then defensive posturing. Defensive posturing leads to polarization of people along some emergent faction lines. Existing faction lines are likely to become exacerbated. Other faction lines may dissolve in favour of predominant factions. In other words, we put down other boundary lines that previously divided us in order to accept newcomers into our tribes. Open conflict, driven by mass hysteria will escalate in a winner take all, kill-or-be-killed, mentality. When a winner emerges, the losing competitor is erased, taking with it the complexity it had contributed to the society. So life is somewhat simpler for a while, for the victors.

But civil complexity continues to grow once again.

In the urban city there are more variables than you will find in rural villages. In modern times you will find more variable than in ancient times. We need better tools for understanding and navigating civil complexity.

Knowledge engineering is the applied science of developing knowledge bases, some of which are more efficient and effective than others. To understand complex systems we can use the body of knowledge called systems science.

While knowledge engineering is primarily associated with computer-based systems and technologies, the principles and methodologies of knowledge engineering can have practical applications even without the use of a computer. Here are a few examples:

1. Knowledge Organization: Knowledge engineering techniques can be applied to organize and structure information or knowledge in various domains. For instance, you can use knowledge engineering principles to develop a well-organized personal library or create a systematic classification system for physical documents or books.
2. Decision Making: Knowledge engineering emphasizes capturing and representing expertise and domain-specific knowledge. Without a computer, you can still utilize knowledge engineering methods to formalize decision-making processes. For complex decisions, you can employ techniques such as decision trees, decision matrices, or rule-based systems to organize and evaluate different options systematically.
3. Knowledge Sharing: Knowledge engineering emphasizes knowledge acquisition, representation, and dissemination. You can apply these principles in non-computer contexts by documenting and sharing your expertise or domain-specific knowledge with others. This can involve writing manuals, guides, or instructional materials that systematically present and explain knowledge for others to learn and apply.
4. Education and Training: Knowledge engineering methodologies can be employed in educational contexts to design effective learning materials and curriculum. Even without a computer, you can structure educational content using knowledge representation techniques such as concept maps, hierarchical organization, or knowledge frameworks to enhance understanding and facilitate learning.
5. Expertise Development: Knowledge engineering involves capturing and representing expert knowledge. Without a computer, you can still engage in knowledge engineering techniques to document and formalize your expertise or the expertise of others. This can include creating written guides, manuals, or mentoring frameworks that codify and transmit expert knowledge to others.

While the practical applications of knowledge engineering without a computer may not fully leverage the computational power and automation that computer-based systems provide, the principles and methodologies can still be applied to enhance knowledge organization, decision making, knowledge sharing, education, and expertise development in various contexts.