(Roughly) Daily

How to live in our complex world? Samuel Arbesman on Incremental Humanism…

… there is a decent amount of contingency in the paths that technological innovation take:

…if we replayed the tape of human history, we would find that the sequence, timing, and (sometimes significant) details of inventions could be quite different, but that the main technological paradigms we discovered would also be discovered there. We would find steam power, electricity, plastics, and digital computers. But we wouldn’t find qwerty keyboards; we might not find keyboards at all. It’s tough to quantify this kind of thing in any meaningful way, and of course we can never know for sure, but my suspicion is that the technology of an alternate history of humans would look about as different from our own as the flora and fauna of Central Asia look from the flora and fauna of the central USA.

So when it comes to innovation, we forever live behind a Veil of Progress. This Veil prevents us from not only understanding the possible positive visions of the future that might win out, but even grasping how different technologies might recombine for further innovation. There is a certain fogginess towards the innovative future that we live within…

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As per Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman in their book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned… in a high-dimensional search space, aiming towards an objective will not work. Instead, it is best to develop novel stepping stones that can be productively recombined. This expanding of the adjacent possible is a much more effective strategy.

So how should we operate if we are constantly living behind the Veil of Progress? It requires humility and incremental tinkering.

The idea of humanism consists of, according to Sarah Bakewell, “free thinking, inquiry and hope.” But there are also other facets, from a sensibility of moderation, to a focus on improving the world.

I think incrementalism is also a key feature of humanism. As Adam Gopnik noted in his book A Thousand Small Sanities about liberalism: “Whenever we look at how the big problems got solved, it was rarely a big idea that solved them. It was the intercession of a thousand small sanities.”

This approach, of incremental humanism, is also a necessary part of the ideals of progress. Imagining a better future and incrementally improving towards this, even in an undirected manner, is the way of managing the veil of progress. As Rabbi Tarfon noted in the Talmud, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” We are part of a long chain of improvements, all part of a tech tree that we can’t see and which involves a balance of innovation and maintenance (for we must preserve what we already have if we hope to be able to build on what has come before us). Revolution is the quick bandage that sounds appealing, but don’t be led to think it will necessarily result in enduring change. Big ideas can be seductive, but incremental change is the only way to live under uncertainty.

Living in a complex world where one’s impact is difficult to fully know requires an incremental humanism. This means having a vision of the future, but a more gradual and piecemeal one. This also means having a certain amount of long-term humility…

How to face the future: “Living with the Veil of Progress,” from @arbesman.

* Chen Yun, via Deng Xiaoping

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As we feel our ways, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Decca Record released “I Fall to Pieces,” written by Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard and performed by the inimitable Patsy Cline. It started slow, but became Billboard‘s “Song of the Year” and has since, of course, become a classic.