On complexity and chaos

This is going to be a bit of a philosophical post, but I hope that for someone this will be a valuable insight into how intellectual-minded people often think.

Having spent over a decade in academia, the primary "breeding ground" of intellectuals, in multiple very different countries, I have noticed some interesting patterns in how people produced in that environment tend to think. One of the interesting patterns which, in my opinion, explains largely why intellectuals tend to be so authoritarian and state-loving in their political views, is their adoration of sophistication. They do not like simple solutions, simple systems, simple rules. They tend to believe that, to achieve a great outcome in something, a very complicated system must be manually developed, with difficult and enormously numerous rules, with mechanisms only the best engineers can craft, etc.

The idea to just leave people alone, to let the market do its thing, to put the government out of most areas of human life - does not appeal to them due to its inherent simplicity. Standing up and walking out sounds much simpler than trying to control everything, to prescribe rules for everything. It is so different from what people in academia typically do, developing sophisticated theories, writing large equations, trying to understand and control the finest elements of any system.

Yet there is a certain contradiction here: in a way, the goal of science is provide as simple a description of everything around us as possible. It is not the most complicated physics theories, for example, that survive; it is those that have the lowest number of assumptions, that have the cleanest and the shortest explanation. Fully according with Occam's Razor principle, scientists seek to simplify everything down to the smallest number of simplest concepts, from which everything else derives. I have always found it puzzling why they do not want to apply the same principle to the political, economical and social systems at large. Why the design of the Large Hadron Collider should be simple enough that any engineer, given enough time, can figure its basic elements out - but the design of the, say, economical system must include countless regulations and restrictions in order to provide the "best outcome".

What I think many intellectuals do not appreciate is that simple systems may lead to complex outcomes. If someone is into anime, I recommend that you watch Beatless, where this theme is explored very well. Closer to the end in one of the scenes the main character ponders on the fact that his (girl)friend, a robot, functions on very simple principles based on responding to her owner in a way that makes him like her, and he, in turn, responds to her in a way that his beliefs tell him is right - and this simple dynamic leads to an incredibly deep relationship. Much like in the Game of Life (check it out; it is a great one you can spend hundreds hours playing around with) one can write a simple algorithm generating the initial conditions, and each step of the game is governed by a single rule any child can understand - yet the arising systems hundreds steps after the game has been launched can be mindboggingly complicated.

This is exactly what happens on a free market. There may be only one rule: no coercion allowed. That is it. Simple, right? Yet millions and billions of individuals interacting in this fundamentally simple and chaotic environment, each pursuing his own goals and interests, create very sophisticated structures and deep order. No government initiative created the stock market, for example; it arose spontaneously from large numbers of people trying to simplify the investing process - yet nowadays the most brilliant minds of this planet try their best at predicting the outcomes on the stock market and usually fail miserably.

There is incredible beauty in order arising from chaos, in complexity arising from simplicity. This is exactly what initially drew me into science: I adored it how seemingly simple axioms in mathematics or elementary observations in physics led to theories that require decades of hard work to only begin scratching surface of. The Great Fermat's Theorem can be formulated in a couple of sentences, and any middle school student can give a shot to proving it - yet it took over 300 years since its formulation for it to be rigorously proven by anyone, and the proof contained on the order of 100 pages.

Intellectuals like to dismiss simple ideas as "naive", as "idealistic". How many times have you said that you believe that market regulation by the government should not be a thing, only to be accused of wanting an unrealistic utopia, of not dealing with reality, of thinking that everyone is saint and no one will try to exploit such a system? I think that one of the ways we can respond to this criticism is pointing out exactly this: that simple systems can lead to complex outcomes. Someone will try to exploit the free market; the free market will come up with a solution to that attempt; someone else will try to exploit this solution; the market will generate another solution... A complex web of market patterns will be created, and, just like a system intelligently designed from the ground up, it will be a fascinating object of study, with unbelievable levels of complexity - the difference, however, is that web has been created by free individuals based on their needs, not by a central committee pursuing goals shrouded in mystery and, ultimately, trying to maximize its own well-being at the expense of everything else.

I don't know if this post has been helpful to anyone or interesting, but I hope that it shed some light on how intellectual thinks and why. Next time you are discussing something with an intellectual begging the state to interfere in everything, you may better understand their motivation and, perhaps, be able to respond in a way that they can resonate with.

Merry Christmas, friends!