Aug 08, 2009 19:42
I often say "things are too complicated, "this is too complicated to talk about," etc.
I think this is sometimes misunderstood as a statement about the subject of discourse. It really isn't. If anything, it's a statement about me.
See, I just don't like to talk about things that I judge to be too complicated to make any reasonable progress on within the course of a conversation.
It's one thing to talk about a topic like "consciousness" or "love" in an exploratory, casual manner. It's good to throw around theories, anecdotes, notions, whatever.
E.g. Love
It's another thing entirely to try to discuss a very specific theory of "love," to talk about "love itself." The concept of love is WILDLY complicated. The word has basically infinite meanings derived from the diversity of its roles within the lives of people/cultures.
Let me state this again. The _word_ has various roles. I am not asserting the existence of "essential love," here. In fact, there is no such thing as "love." If there were, and we could all see it, then conversation on the topic would cease to be interesting.
This is not to say that two people cannot come to consensus on a definition. What it is to say is that a consensus would correspond to an acknowledgement of the intersections and differences of the definitions of those people. A consensus would then be posed not in terms of an actual agreement about an external thing or external things, but about the natures of the people involved.
To actually attempt to derive a consensus on the nature of Love in society is wildly beyond the scope of pretty much any conversation. A failure to see this corresponds to naivety, a lack of imagination, or both.
E.g. The Future
A lot of times, people will want to discuss the future as if we have any grasp on it.
Nassim Taleb talks a lot about this (if in a slack-jawed, strawman-slaughtering manner) when he goes on about "Black Swans." If we can't predict disruptive events (e.g. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Oil Shortage, Internet, etc.) on the level of society then this effectively makes discussion of society-level planning moot. It is Too Complicated to try to figure out how we should all live together if we try to include in our discussion the possibility of singular, context-changing events. It is Too Stupid to try to discuss how we should live together if our discussions are making the implicit assumption that these events won't occur.
This came up recently in a discussion that I was having with Jen. We were trying to talk about our financial futures and how they would interact, but I claimed that any discussion on this subject dropped the subject of whether or not something ridiculous would happen, financially. What if the stock I (will) have in my company ends up becoming worth millions? What if I want to quit my job? What if I suffer some major injury which prevents me from working? Any of these events would disrupt any scheme that we agreed upon regarding how we should interact, monetarily.
E.g. Politics
I think that a major source of tension when I discuss politics with people is that I understand the relationship between the ideal and the concrete, whereas they do not.
Discussion regarding the "correct" form of government or whether a given law if "just" has this potential to skirt the line between the ideal and the concrete. We can think about government as a game-theoretic construct and talk about rational interactions of the players (citizens) as much as we want. We can talk about policies or rules and how they would change the behaviors of these ideal players. But at the end of the day laws are not made for reasons at all, and people react to them in ways beyond our comprehension or knowledge.
It is really hard to talk about how the US government "should be" because this tries to apply ideology to a concrete situation.
To talk about how "a government" ought to be, however, makes sense.
E.g. Knowledge
As soon as two people start talking about a topic on which they have incomplete knowledge their conversation is straying into the land of the Too Complex.
It is very, very, very difficult to talk about things that you have incomplete knowledge of. Incomplete information is -one thing-. Incomplete knowledge is an entirely different thing all together.
Incomplete information, or uncertainty, is bounded. Incomplete knowledge is not.
To state that I have incomplete information on a subject, for instance how many bicycles are in the next room, is to make a deeper assertion about an upper bound on the number of bicycles, about the sort of states that these bicycles can be in.
To state that I have incomplete knowledge on a subject, for instance how many bicycles will be made in the next 1000 years, is to make the assertion that I have -no fucking clue- how to even think about this question. How do I know what will happen in 1000 years?
The question of how many bikes are in the next room is not Too Complicated.
The question of how many bikes will ever be produced is Too Complicated.
What People Try To Do
People try to treat incomplete knowledge as if it is incomplete information. They assert assumptions, often implicitly, often ones that they can't even recognize as inhering in what they're saying, which are really crappy.
Whenever I see that someone is trying to turn a problem of incomplete knowledge into one of incomplete information I say "This is too complicated" and walk away.