Complexity and Silicon Valley

The path towards understanding and appreciating conservatism in Silicon Valley is through complexity. Here, let's start at the beginning. Complexity as it is understood here starts with MIT Professor Edward Lorenz and his discovery of the error amplification effects of feedback-based systems. While attending complexity conferences, one hears the team "complexity" repeated too frequently, almost like a mantra. For Lorenz though, the complex combination of nonlinearity, stock-flow (integrative), and feedback effects in his 1960s-era different equation-based models led to unexpected amplification of small initial differences.

 At approximately the same time, in 1965, Friedrich Hayek applied new notions of complexity to politics and economics. Those who have been paying attention know Hayek from two career highlights: (1) The Road to Serfdom; and (2) his becoming a Nobel laureate in Economics in 1974. Rather than running though this work, let us instead focus on the matter at hand, how does complexity impact and inform conservatism? Complexity generally, and the complexity of socio-economic systems specifically, provides hard limits to what is knowable about these systems. So as political entrepreneurs and purported innovators make claims in the  marketplace of ideas, complexity places limits on what can be said.

The problem comes in that these same entrepreneurs and innovators don't want to be constrained by what they can say. Hayek explains at length how such claims, especially as they relate to and regard socialism, have demonstrated themselves to be false. Your correspondent agrees with Hayek's conclusion but will leave that argument for a later time.

What is especially informative is how these political entrepreneurs respond to complexities  limitations: in the words of Tom Wolfe, they scream like weenies roasting over a fire. The best example I've found is Herman Finer's The Road to Reaction. It's a remarkable example of what I call an "affect storm," or what others call "argument by outrage." While purporting to be logical and rational, Finer's book is a collection of half-thought-through accusations, what Hayek called, ""a specimen of abuse and invective which is probably unique in contemporary academic discussion." It's instructive to consider the incentives behind Finer's comments, and here we need to distinguish between good reasons and real reasons. Finer, being a Fabian socialist, portrays a concern for society's poorest. Here your correspondent draws insight from Tom Wolfe who credits his prescience to a focus on status. So in your correspondent's opinion, Finer's affect-laden response to Hayek is driven by the implications and consequences of complexity: that is, he can no longer claim special insight into socio-economic systems, which would limits his status and power. This in Finer's view, is clearly unacceptable.

 But much of the politics since the 1940s has been driven by just this tension between what is knowable and what is not as limited by complexity, which is a conservative concept. And that is what we see amplified in 21st century politics: this analytic tension between what can be known, and what is not knowable. The computer revolution, and represented by Silicon Valley, has something useful and important to say about this complexity by pushing the boundaries of what is knowable. However, this can only happen if senior policy makers and those interested in policy acknowledge these limitations, which is controversial and problematic.