If you rely primarily on RSS feeds, as I do, you can miss some interesting things at some sites. One site that requires actual visits is Arts & Letters Daily because the Nota Bene section isn't in the feed. The link for today points to Shakespeare Meets The Selfish Gene, an interview with Literary Darwinist Jonathan Gottschall, co-editor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, which argues that "an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology and culture can produce powerful new perspectives on storytelling". OK, not novel, and not highly regarded it seems, since it challenges so many beliefs about humans.

All literary theory — Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism — is ultimately based on a theory of human nature. A Darwinian literary approach takes its guidance from theories of human behavior and psychology that are now emerging in the evolutionary sciences. . .

You know, Einstein once said that theory defines what we can see. If Literary Darwinism has anything going for it we should start to see things in literature that weren't seen before, or seen as crisply before. I say this because I feel that I saw things in Homer that even 2,600 years worth of Homer scholars hadn't seen.

Some of the less biased critics - those with a bit less exposed skin - grant the basic idea while still objecting to the particular readings of humans that have come from the dreaded sociobiology camp.

What interests me here is the Einstein quote since it is very close to the old dismissive saying that "you must believe to see", an allusion to the fantasy aspects of many arguments based in ideology. Many earlier posts here have dealt with instances of fantasy cognition. This was the subject of the post Mental Tools a couple of years ago.

Donella Meadows was one of the leaders of a blundering, ineffective sort of environmentalism for many years in the last part of the twentieth century. As lead author of the doomsday book Limits to Growth - commissioned by the doom think tank Club Of Rome - she epitomized a heart sick, mean spirited and anti-humanist approach to change. Meadows built her career around doom mongering and hectoring humanity to stop developing, stop growing and stop enjoying itself.

Inspired by Systems Dynamics, a.k.a. systems thinking, Meadows and a coterie of fellow travelers fully embraced command and control governance as a mechanism to contain and diminish humanity, an objective that she and others justified with model based scenarios of impending global doom due to anthropogenic causes, especially population growth and resource consumption. A generation of concerned but uninformed believers treated her pronouncements as gospel and her methods as enlightened. She is still held in high regard by many and the influence of her work still has a baleful effect on global policy, especially in Europe where the Club of Rome is located.

Systems Dynamics is not at fault, it's a useful mental tool for analyzing small systems in great detail in a way that focuses on processes as much as parts and reveals flows of information and resources between sources and sinks . Large systems can't be analyzed as well since there are problems with identification and measurement of objects and relationships which prevent useful definition of system bounds. One can still gain improved understanding of large systems but not enough to allow control or identify safe interventions that won't have unanticipated consequences.

Meadows eventually recanted in part:

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. . .

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. . .

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.

Her fall back position, imagination coupled with political power, is as old as humanity. It's religion, a shared delusion. The important part isn't that the envisioned future comes to pass, it's the sharing, the group fantasy. It makes no difference to believers when their fantasies don't come to pass, they just shrug it off when their group prayers don't work, when the Pentagon fails to levitate, and the end doesn't come in a year ending in 66.

Cynical activists of all sorts use this human tendency as a marketing tool. A current favorite method that avoids the now widely understood defects of modelling that Meadows spoke of is scenario development. The cynics vigorously deny that the scenarios are predictions in order to inoculate themselves from criticism, but do in fact use the scenarios as predictions to brow-beat opponents and delude followers. Those who argue for using scenarios print elaborate directions on the kool-aid packet to avoid responsibility.

My previous column noted the difficulty -- indeed, impossibility -- of predicting the path of technological evolution for any but the most trivial incremental changes. This is one of those historical truths commonly overlooked in practice, but its implications for the environmental and sustainability discourses are profound.

Thus, for example, one of the most common predictive techniques used in the sustainability literature is “backcasting” -- defining the world that one wants to be in decades hence, and then backcasting to determine what policy initiatives are necessary to make that world happen. In the most sophisticated approaches, this is understood not as a “predictive,” but as a “scenario” exercise -- that is, not as a statement that one actually expects the postulated future to happen, but as a thought experiment to determine what policies might be valuable in moving towards a scenario emphasizing one aspect of possible futures. But many believe that the postulated state is actually achievable by making appropriate social and political decisions -- that “sustainability” is a simple matter of defining a distant future, then just figuring out and implementing policies to make it happen.

This is an unhelpful myth. The idea that anyone understands enough about current historical, social and technological trends to predict the future even several years out, much less decades in the future, blinks any historical experience. It is a reflection of wishful thinking coupled to a powerful ideology, a projection of teleology rather than a reasoned understanding of how human systems actually evolve. A scenario, properly used, is a stimulus to conceptualizing potential future paths, and building robust option spaces within which to respond to various alternatives and contingencies. An alleged prediction, however, is unhelpful because it has the opposite effect: it validates rigid ideological viewpoints and stifles the exploration of alternatives. A scenario process builds resiliency; a prediction process tears resiliency down. More subtly, a scenario process encourages exploration of many dimensions of a complex and unpredictable future and thus multicultural understanding; a prediction process often encourages cultural and ideological imperialism by demanding fealty to a particular worldview.

Well, no. Scenarios are always used as predictions. Period. The assertion that "A scenario, properly used, is a stimulus to conceptualizing potential future paths, and building robust option spaces within which to respond to various alternatives and contingencies" is false, marketing-speak, a sales pitch telling prospective customers what they need to hear to make the purchase. Or, as Einstein once said, theory defines what we can see.

The desperation to find some theory, some mechanism or practice that justifies elite decision making, comes from the repeated failures of elite decision making and the growing realization that this is always so, perhaps even necessarily so. It's another symptom of the SNAFU principle, information cascades, and the knowledge problem as well as a growing appreciation for non-linearity. These theoretic limits to the utility of elite decision making, though well supported by observation, may be peripheral to the real problem. Cognition is necessarily distributed.

. . . it is worth rereading Edwin Hutchins' classic Cognition in the Wild. Rather than begin with hypothesized first principles such as the Cartesian worldview, Hutchins studies the ways in which a navigation team on a naval vessel, composed of four or more individuals, actually navigates or, more broadly, thinks. He explores the way that certain relatively arbitrary models of the world are embedded in the artifacts that have developed over centuries to enable Western-style navigation (as compared to, say, Micronesian navigation, which is founded on a different, but equally competent, worldview). In doing so, he finds a “cognitive ecology” rather than a controlled, centrally directed function understood and structured by a key individual. In this system, cognition is not a function of individuals, but an emergent property of the data, tools, individuals, and relationships that characterize the system: “thinking” is done just as much by the navigation chart as by the quartermaster. The tools do not simply amplify the existing cognitive powers of the individuals involved in the process, but transform the task itself, reallocating cognitive functionality between artifacts and individuals.

The implications of this analysis of socially distributed cognition for industrial ecologists, environmental researchers, and policymakers are obvious. To begin with, many of the issues and systems such communities engage with are clearly complex: non-linear, rapidly changing, reflexive, unpredictable, data intense, and characterized by emergent properties. Moreover, the institutional and governance structures that are frequently encountered, from private firms to NGOs to governments, are also complex. Under such circumstances, it is highly unlikely that single individuals, no matter how well placed, either completely understand, or control, systems response.

It isn't just single individuals, it's the whole management structure. No one knows what they are doing or what the results of their actions will be. They are components of a thinking machine that includes not just the other people but the intelligence embodied in their tools and processes, many of which are "black boxes" to those who use them. The machine computes its next state based on the current state and inputs, but no one understands the algorithm. This severely constrains the possibility of developing useful policy for any but the most trivial and immediate objectives. To do more is an act of faith.

This isn't an argument for doing nothing or for random acts, it is an argument for letting go of the idea of navigation. You simply can't do it reliably. If the ship of state happens to go somewhere near your fantasy location it is mostly luck - good luck for you perhaps and bad luck for others. What you can do, what everyone can do, is to grok that all of the people and all of their things collectively compute state changes. Since you can't predict the consequences of your lies you ought to tell truths. You can't predict the consequences of truths either, but they don't mung up the thinking machine and waste time or energy. The ride will be quicker and more pleasant no matter where we are going. New or selected processes and institutional structures that enhance distributed cognition are bound to be more effective, though there's some risk since the effects are unpredictable.

Those who have power now will never go for it. Those who seek power won't cooperate either. But it seems inevitable to me that as society becomes ever more integrated and networked there will be increased desire to shrug off the power elites. This isn't populism or mob rule, just the opposite since there would be no elections, no leaders, no representatives, and no shared agendas. It's anarchy, but without the negative implications of old fashioned bomb throwers.