Some extracts from Murray Gell Mann, and how it aligns with some of the themes we’re exploring as part of this community and how, as a community, we can actually thrive in a complex system.
‘Those who study complex adaptive systems are beginning to find some general principles that underlie all such systems, and seeking out those principles requires intensive discussions and collaborations among specialists in a great many fields. Of course the careful and inspired study of each specialty remains as vital as ever. But integration of those specialities is urgently needed as well. Important contributions are made by the handful of scholars and scientists who are transforming themselves from specialists into students of simplicity and complexity or of complex adaptive systems in general…
Key theme: patterns, heuristics (i.e. pattern recognition for decision making)
‘[There is] the distinction (made famous by Nietzsche) between “Apollonians”, who favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of the evidence, and “Dionysians”‘, who lean more toward intuition, synthesis, and passion… But some of us seem to belong to another category: the “Odysseans”, who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas… We need to celebrate the contribution of those who dare take what I call “a crude look at the whole”…
Key theme: synthesis and meaning
Given the immense complexity of the numerous interlocking issues facing humanity, foresight demands the ability to identify and gather great quantities of relevant information; the ability to catch glimpses, using that information, of the choices offered by the branching alternative histories of the future, and the wisdom to select simplifications and approximations that do not sacrifice the representation of critical qualitative issues, especially issues of values…
Key themes: wisdom, separating signal and noise
I also heard a really interesting interpretation of wisdom. Vervaeke in a recent interview with Lex Friedman. What’s wisdom?
“Intelligence is what you use to solve your problems. Because I was just describing rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self deception that emerge when you’re trying to solve your problems. So it’s a meta problem. And then the issue is do you have just one kind of knowing? I think you have multiple ways of knowing and therefore you have multiple rationalities. And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other. So in that way wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality.”