Overcomplicated

by Samuel Arbesman

  That being said, finding the right balance between physics thinking and biological thinking is not easy. It’s a difficult process, and one that has long played out in the history of ideas.

  Making Sense of the World: A Very Short History

  The ancient world was filled with individuals trying to make sense of their surroundings. One of the first places where this kind of thinking arose in a rigorous fashion was Ionia. Ionia was located on the Aegean Sea, on the western coast of modern Turkey, and was a collection of cities where the first philosophers of the Greek world, even before Socrates, began to ruminate on the cosmos. The ideas of these philosophers, part of the group often known as the pre-Socratics, were almost uniformly ones of wide-sweeping simplicity and generalization.

  Xenophanes, an Ionian poet-philosopher, argued one of two things, depending on what you read: that everything seemed to arise from only two sources, earth and water, or that all derived from a single source, earth. Either way, Xenophanes sought a unifying principle or two to explain the complexity of the world.

  On the other hand, Thales, another Ionian, held that all was water. Another philosopher thought everything was related to fire. Captain Planet would have liked the Ionians.

  Somewhat differently, Anaximander of Miletus, yet another Ionian, felt that everything came from a single infinite first principle. He also had numerous other precise concepts, such as that animals came from moisture “evaporated by the sun,” or that the Earth was surrounded by a circle twenty-eight times its size, from which he derived astronomical insights.

  But overall, many of these philosophers held to a small handful of general principles and fundamental materials that could explain the world. More generally, they seemed to adhere to the idea of the Greek kosmos. Unlike the English word “cosmos,” the Greeks didn’t just use this term to refer to the universe and the totality of all things. Bound up in this term is the elegance and beauty and ultimate order of the universe. The elegance of nature—and the physics mode of imposing order—is therefore implicit in this term for nature itself. These philosophers also used the term arche, which might be most clearly associated with a guiding rule or first principle that underlies the universe. It was a unifying wish, a wish for order around us.

  Jumping forward to the dawn of the modern era, we see a bit of a shift, to an increased focus on the bizarre and the unexplained. We see the miscellaneous. According to Philip Ball, anomalies and eccentricities were relatively uninteresting to the ancients and to medieval scholars because they were interested in affirming what was already known. But for those building wunderkammers on the cusp of the modern era, the anomalous and weird and strange were precisely the most exciting parts of the world. The historian of science Lorraine Daston has argued that there was a strong penchant in the early days of science—far beyond Nathanael Fairfax—for delighting in “strange facts.”

  From “Observables upon a Monstrous Head” to “On a Species of Wild Boar That Has a Hole in the Middle of Its Back, Which Foams When It Is Pursued by Hunters” or “A Narrative of Divers Odd Effects of a Dreadful Thunderclap”—all article titles from the seventeenth century quoted by Daston—we glimpse bizarre bits of information, and the scientists of the day who delighted in them. There was a desire to chronicle and ponder the unexpected and the weirdest aspects of the natural world. As Daston notes, “The first scientific facts were stubborn not because they were robust, resisting all attempts to sweep them under the rug, but rather because they were outlandish, resisting all attempts to subsume them under theory.” We don’t often think of science nowadays as a means of collecting the strangest things we can find—with no way as yet of explaining them—but that is what science was, and it still is in many ways. We learn the most when we try to actually confront the aberrations and exceptions around us, such as the physical oddities that led to discovering the nature of the atomic nucleus or the phenomenon of RNAi.

  This is the kind of biological thinking, tempered with physics thinking, that must be imported into technology. But while we can all participate in this endeavor to some extent, whose job is it to do this technological fieldwork, to cultivate the discovery of the unexpected in a complex technological edifice and foster a sense of play with the incomprehensible? In our age of specialization, it perhaps becomes the role of the generalist to recognize these details, the unexplained edge cases and rough joints of our systems.

  The Return of the Generalist

  In 2009, a team of scientists examined hundreds of millions of interactions with online scientific papers in order to discern the “clickstream” of readers, the path they take from one publication to the next. This data revealed patterns of how people moved from one subject area to another, even generating a beautiful image of connections between areas. For example, in their map, nursing is near psychology and education. Organic chemistry bridges physical chemistry and analytic chemistry, economics is connected to sociology and law, and the field of music stands somewhat distinct.

  Of course, these are oversimplifications. Music actually incorporates concepts from physics and psychology, while economics draws heavily from mathematics. But examining this clickstream is one way to explore the interconnected nature of ideas. Even though we continue to specialize in order to handle the more complicated systems we are building, seeing this web of interconnections reminds us that each domain does not stand alone; they are all part of a vast connected framework.

  Since these systems are interconnected in many different ways, we will increasingly require the ability to connect one area of knowledge to another. When constructing a computer program that can play Jeopardy!, for example, you need knowledge of everything from linguistics to computer hardware; specialization alone will not work. We need a certain breadth of knowledge. However, as noted earlier, before too long, we will bump up against the limits to what we can truly understand; we just can’t hold all the relevant knowledge in our heads.

  In response, we need to cultivate generalists, individuals who not only can see the lay of the land—the abstract physics style of thinking—but can also delight in the details of a system without necessarily understanding them all—the more miscellaneous biological style of thinking. Generalists might be the individuals most suited to acting as naturalists and field biologists for our constructed complex systems. They can jump from one piece to another, examining the parts that don’t make sense and seeing hints of what is going on in these vast technologies.

  But given the vast growth of knowledge, can we still have generalists?

  It is still possible, but it’s hard. Creating generalists who are able to serve this function well in our society first involves the construction of what have become known as T-shaped individuals, a term that appears to have first originated in computing education. T-shaped individuals have deep expertise in one area—the stem of the T shape—but breadth of knowledge as well: the bar of the T.

  What do these types of people look like? One example is the data scientist, who uses the tools of computer science and statistics to find meaning in large datasets, no matter what the discipline. Data scientists have to know a lot about many different areas in order to do their job successfully. We see something similar in applied mathematicians, who use quantitative tools to cut across disciplines and find commonalities, acting as generalists.

  Generalists can be found in such areas as consulting and book editing, and you can even find them in the world of venture capital, where there are many people who are knowledgeable in multiple different areas and can use this expertise widely. If someone wants to invest in outer space, 3-D printing, agricultural technology, tools for scientific discovery, and more, one had better be at least somewhat of a generalist.

  These individuals embody both expertise and the polymath tendency to explore many different domains. But cultivating such T-shaped individuals, who combine specialization with some measure of generalism—people who can at least begin
to handle some of the growing complexity around us—is not that simple.

  Right now, the job market rewards specialization, making it difficult to educate T-shaped people. And I think that we will not find these types of people within academia for a long time to come. As business professor David Teece has noted, it was a lot easier to be a Renaissance man during the Renaissance. But one hint of how this change might occur can be seen by looking to the Girl Scouts.

  The Girl Scouts once offered a fascinating kind of merit badge: the Dabbler badge. This allowed a young Scout who wanted to do a little bit of everything to not only generalize, but be recognized for that achievement. Don’t want to specialize in ceramics only, or just in photography, but you think some degree of expertise in a whole lot of things could be useful? Then the Dabbler badge is for you. My mother recalled that when she was in the Girl Scouts, the Dabbler badge was the only one she earned.

  Perhaps it’s time for the knowledge equivalent of the Dabbler badge: a way to acknowledge and foster those dabbling in different ideas, all the way from grade school to late in one’s career. These people can work in concert with the specialists, helping to translate from one field to another and stemming the tide of incomprehensibility. These dabblers can bring biological thinking to the massive systems we are building, searching for glitches that can guide our understanding, and cataloging the strange and amazing parts of these edifices.

  In fact, it seems that the places where generalists can thrive best are the places where we understand the least, where the systems are so complicated and interconnected that the best we can do is hope for a chronicling of the miscellaneous. What this means is that the education of generalists will involve not just learning what is known, but also learning ways of exploring the unknown, the new, and the unexpected. This will involve rigorous thinking in the liberal arts, as well as such skills as computational thinking, logic, and even data visualization. Or take the talents of the title character of Hild, a novel set in the Early Middle Ages of Britain. Hild is recognized for her ability to weave tapestries as well as for her keen intelligence. When others speak of her skill with weaving and the loom, they describe her as having a “pattern-making mind.” Her intelligence is the same way. This pattern-making mind is able to construct connections and see a web of associations, helping Hild to navigate the geopolitical intrigue that surrounds her.

  Of course, generalists alone are relatively useless. They are best when working alongside specialists, helping in the process of translation and communication, or playing other roles complementary to the still-important contributions of specialists. This can mean having a generalist working on each large project in a company or other organization, having a small team of roving generalists in a large corporation who can provide context and value for the entire company, or even having small teams of generalists-for-hire who work with specialized firms to supplement their focused expertise.

  But a generalist is more than simply a T-shaped person, someone with a bit of a broader background than is usual these days. Becoming a generalist involves a willingness to consciously stitch together authentically different fields, even at the risk of failing to do so. The best generalists pair a chronicling of details with a pattern-making mind. A pattern-making mind needn’t be one that thrives on abstraction and generalization alone, but one that makes connections and analogies. Seeing interrelationships and interactions is necessary in highly complex systems. The pattern-making mind can make sense of these systems, even if only partial sense, through a combination of intuition and biological thinking.

  • • •

  I’m a member of The Cloud Appreciation Society. I am of the opinion that a clear, burning blue sky—while beautiful—sometimes needs a bit of contrast in order to be properly appreciated. It needs clouds. When I first told my wife of my membership, she thought I was making up some bizarre organization, until the level of detail I provided—the lifetime membership, small pin, and official certificate—all mentioned with a straight face, made this seem increasingly unlikely. I really find clouds fascinating and beautiful. But I am little more than an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to understanding them.

  To the untrained eye, the variety of clouds is broad but rather unremarkable. You’ve got your storm clouds, your fun fluffy ones, the streaky ones, and so on. But this relatively childish taxonomy conceals a great deal of additional complexity and variety. There are clouds named cumulus, cirrus, nimbostratus, cumulonimbus—some of the common kinds, using the basic descriptive roots—and the specific subtypes, such as fractus, shelf cloud, lenticularis. In fact, a scientific classification of clouds was developed only in the past couple of centuries. As the science bookseller John Ptak notes, “Clouds though pretty much escaped the notice of even the greatest of all great classifiers, Aristotle, and just about everyone else, [and there was,] for two dozen centuries, no real scientific approach to them until Luke Howard first published on his cloud classifications . . . in 1803.”

  Elsewhere in the sky, we find phenomena inspiring numerous other wonderful meteorological terms. From sheet lightning to St. Elmo’s fire to ball lightning, these terms are many and weird. When it comes to weather science, we have made great strides in prediction and explanation. But throughout history we have been confronted with new and strange phenomena, which in turn have helped provide new insights into how our atmosphere goes about its business.

  Clouds and other atmospheric phenomena aren’t made by us, but how we approach them can give us a glimpse into the proper frame of mind for dealing with our complex technological systems. When we don’t understand a phenomenon or a system, or find it frightening, we shouldn’t ignore it. Even if something can’t be explained, it still has a place, the category of the yet-to-be-understood, which can then be used as a wedge for further insight.

  Furthermore, when we are confronted with something we can’t fully understand, we can focus on the details in the system, understanding specific parts of the whole. Ultimately, a biological approach to a system is an iterative and tinkering-based one, guiding us toward further understanding by using details and unexpectedness to constantly gain further insight.

  There is whimsy and beauty in the complicated and the unexpected. A glittering and shimmering technological network, with its branching gossamer web of links and interactions, is unbelievable in its complexity. And sometimes, even if we don’t understand every part and every whole, an imperfect grasp can be enough. We can walk humbly with our technology.

  Chapter 6

  WALKING HUMBLY WITH TECHNOLOGY

  Moses Maimonides was a singular individual in the history of philosophical thought. Trained as a physician and rabbi in the twelfth century, he eventually served as a court physician in Egypt. He codified Jewish law, while at the same time innovating and incorporating contemporary scientific ideas. There is a saying within Judaism that “From Moses to Moses [Maimonides], none arose like Moses.” Maimonides also wrote a philosophical text, a masterpiece called The Guide of the Perplexed. This book is a bold attempt to blend together Jewish thought with Aristotelian philosophy, which was considered some of the most advanced philosophical thinking at the time. The Guide of the Perplexed was read widely both within and outside the Jewish community.

  What, then, can we learn from this scholar, a man whose curiosity led him to examine everything from nutrition and astronomy to politics? He recognized that, despite the incredible human intellect, there was a fundamental mismatch between our curiosity and what we could actually understand, at least when it came to the infinite, which was necessarily beyond the human mind. As a man of his time, though in many ways ahead of it, he held that the only one who could actually understand such matters was God, though the God of Maimonides was a more philosophical and abstract concept than the Great Man in the Sky, the then-common conception of the divine. But Maimonides was certain of our mental limits: “. . . for man’s intellect indubitably has a limit at which it stops.
There are therefore things regarding which it has become clear to man that it is impossible to apprehend them. And he will not find that his soul longs for knowledge of them, inasmuch as he is aware of the impossibility of such knowledge and of there being no gate through which one might enter in order to attain it.”

  Hundreds of years later, a slow but steady shift in thinking occurred, the many strands of which we now bundle under the term Scientific Revolution. With the advent of modern science, scientists pioneered new fields such as astrophysics and chemistry, and some of the limits to our understanding were thought to be overcome. Of course, this shift was by no means abrupt, with luminaries such as Newton spending much of their efforts on the firmly medieval pursuits of alchemy and mysticism. Nonetheless, there was a distinct move toward the idea that, in principle, the human mind could understand all that it wishes.

  This confidence has permeated our approach to scientific insight and in contemporary times has crescendoed in a sort of triumphalism: if we try hard enough, over time we can understand everything. And indeed we have come a very long way in querying the cosmos and finding answers to our questions.

  In science, though, we have once again begun to bump up against our limits. It now seems that we would have to do the impossible and travel faster than the speed of light to answer certain questions about the nature of the universe, and we are approaching the limits of understanding certain aspects of our quantum reality. In other words, we are finding questions that we cannot answer. In the words of the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, “Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” While we shouldn’t give up on these questions, in place of answers we may end up finding more and more limitations to what we can know.