The complication I was addressing is based on the need to make a policy
decision based on many conflicting possibilities. The number of these
possibilities is increasing, as it always the case in every country,
from classical Greek times to Germany under Hitler. A country or
civilization fails when rational decisions for growth and survival
become to difficult for leaders to comprehend and implement. A democracy
suffers from the added ignorance and irrationally of the population. At
some point, irrational decisions are made and the country sinks into
destruction. The issue I'm raising is that we in the US seem to be
approaching a level of irrationally that always proceeds death of a
country. The irrationally can be seen in the approach being applied to
energy policy, to terrorism, to the economy and to a growing
irrationally based on religion. These issues are so important that
failure to properly respond can have consequences much more serious than
when such failures are applied to "normal" problems. For example, Hitler
murdered Jews, which made him popular, but by invading Russia, he doomed
his nation. Without making the point too fine, Bush is claiming to kill
terrorists in Iraq before they kill us here, which makes him popular,
but by not dealing with the energy problem he will doom the US. What
should we do about this?
Ed
Jed Rothwell wrote:
Edmund Storms wrote:
I suggest we are seeing the the effects produced by a society and its
technical problems becoming too complex for the average person to
properly comprehend. The energy problem is one example of an issue
that is only properly understood by people having either technical
training or the intelligence and interest to understand the complex
relationships.
Naturally, I am strongly in favor of more education for everyone,
especially Congressman and newspaper editors!
Things do seem to be getting more complicated, and sometimes this does
hurt society's ability to make rational decisions. But I have thought
about this carefully, and I conclude that the problem may not be as bad
as it looks. It is complicated. Here are some of my reasons.
First, as I said, my mother and other older people said that things are
no worse now than they were back in 1925. Most people back then had no
clue how electricity, telephones or wind-up Victrola record players
worked, and today people have no idea how cell phones or iPods work. An
IPods is more complicated than a Victrola, but it is hard to see why
this matters to an ordinary person, or why it would help him to
understand either one. In 1925 most people had only indistinct notions
about how much coal was being mined, what it was doing to the
atmosphere, or who was profiting from it. The same is true today. But
people did not say that democracy was ungovernable in 1925 just because
folks had no clue how technologies worked. In 1935 people *did* begin to
say that. A utopian "technologist" movement arose. Proponents said that
engineers should be put in charge of society. I doubt it would have
helped. Herbert Hoover was the only engineer ever elected US president,
and his record on the economy was not good. (He was a brilliant
engineer, without doubt, and a superb organizer. Before he became
president he did excellent work in mining engineering, industrial
standardization in the US, and he did such a magnificent job organizing
food relief after the First World War that in some parts of Europe his
name literally became a byword for charity.)
Second, I question whether the key aspects of technology that have a
major social or political impact really are more complicated. Outwardly,
they seem simpler. The inner mechanisms that have become more complex
are hidden, and have no impact on society. An iPod might be a million
times more complex than Victrola measured by standards such as the cost
of the machinery needed to manufacture the iPod, or the scale and
precision of the components, or the clean room standards required to
assemble the machine. But is an iPod fundamentally more complicated,
from the user's point of view? Does it require more highly educated
factory workers to assemble than a Victrola did? Is the social impact a
million times greater? Is the impact on society more profound, and
should lawmakers know more about the technology before they legislate
intellectual-property laws? I do not see why. In the 1920s, with the
advent of radio, intellectual-property and the recording and
broadcasting of music was a major social concern. The laws and customs
devised back then still serve us well today, even though our technology
is far beyond analog recording and AM broadcasting.
Today's energy sources such as coal, nuclear energy and ethanol do not
seem substantially more complicated than the energy systems of 1925.
Nuclear fission is scientifically inscrutable to most people, but so was
combustion until 1800, and I doubt many people in 1925 really understood
the role of oxygen in combustion.
A computer-controlled hybrid automobile is much more complicated than
any automobile made in 1975. But it is easier to drive. All of the
safety regulations, traffic signals, highway construction, driver
education, and so on we put in place to support automobiles works just
as well with a hybrid as with the older, simpler models. Lawmakers and
the engineers who devise safety standards can deal with hybrid
automobiles as well as they deal with conventional automobiles. The
increased complexity does not seem to impair our ability to cope with
this technology, and handle it responsibly. Consumers can judge whether
these cars are cost-effective or not, and insurance company underwriters
can determine whether the cars are safe and how much they should charge
to cover the cost of accident repairs (which are likely to be somewhat
more expensive).
Reading books and watching movies from the past, I do not get the sense
that people knew more back then, or understood their own world better
than we understand ours. James Thurber's wrote hilarious descriptions of
his own ineptitude with machines. People have never been observant. In
the 1930s, my aunt spent the summer working on a turkey farm. That
Christmas she was making a decoration for the mantelpiece: a turkey made
out of paper, an apple, raisins and toothpicks. After putting two legs
on the bird, she looked at it with a puzzled expression and said, "Where
do the other two legs go?" To take another vivid example, consider a
scene from the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still." A crowd of people
are standing around on the Mall looking at the flying saucer. The alien
spaceman, disguised as a human, is in the crowd along with a boy he has
befriended. The boy asks him how do spaceships work, and the alien tells
him, outlining some basic Newtonian physics -- action and reaction, etc.
The crowd of people standing nearby listens in and begins to snicker and
poke fun at the alien. An old man says to the boy, "he had you going
there; he really pulled your leg, didn't he?" Now this is only a movie,
but I sense that the audience watching this movie back in 1951 probably
did not realize that what the alien was saying was perfectly correct and
elementary. It probably sounded like complicated, advanced scientific
doubletalk, and the dramatic point was supposed to be that this alien is
so far advanced compared to the humans in the crowd, they ridicule him
instead of realizing he must be the flying saucer pilot. When you know
that the alien's explanation is straight out of the textbooks, the scene
seems weird, not dramatic or convincing.
Most of the science portrayed in movies today, and in documentaries on
the History Channel and Discovery Channel, is more sophisticated and
accurate than it was in 1950s or '60s (except for the movie "2001.") It
seems the audience has become more knowledgeable. Then again, maybe not.
This may only be surface knowledge, or empty "book learning" as it used
to be called. Some (but not all) ancient people had deep technical
knowledge compared to modern people. Operating a sailing ship was far
more difficult than operating today's vessels. Building a Coliseum in
ancient Rome was more difficult than building a modern concrete
structure. For that matter, programming a computer in 1975 was harder
than programming today's machines. It called for more knowledge of the
machinery, clever techniques, do-it-yourself assembly language
programming and so on. Yet I do not get the sense that programmers from
1975 (including me) are somehow more capable of judging the in's and
out's of computers than today's young experts are, or knowing the future
of computers, or running a computer company. It seems to me that Ed's
hypothesis predicts that the more you know about computer fundamentals,
the better you should be at running IBM or Dell. That is not in
evidence. Ken Olsen of DEC helped invent the modern computer as a grad
student at MIT, and he was one of the most knowledgeable computer
company executives of all time, but his disastrous performance as
president rivaled that of Herbert Hoover. You might say he knew too much
about the technology and not enough about customers or markets.
Having said all that, I agree that in many cases our judgment regarding
technology and social policy has become impaired. Ed is right; the trend
is worrisome. There is a growing disconnect between people and hands-on
commonsense knowledge of technology and nature. People nowadays do not
know how to light a fire. A few years ago, parents at a county fair near
Atlanta were outraged when a farmer told the children that milk comes
from cows; they thought the farmer was telling their children disgusting
sexual fantasies. In pre-modern Japan, the mark of an aristocratic young
woman was that she did not know where rice comes from. Even if she did
know, she would beguile a wealthy young man by saying, "oh goodness how
pretty the farmland looks, but pray tell, what tree do they grow rice
on?" * This sort of ignorance is now widespread, because we can afford
to be ignorant. Indeed living close to nature has become a luxury. I
expect this will only grow worse in the future.
- Jed
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Footnote
* The technique is still with us. There is even a word for this kind of
woman in Japanese: "kamatoto," which is shorthand for the question, "Do
they make fish paste out of fish?" A kamatoto is "(n) a kind of woman
who pretends to be all sweet and innocent and naive" (wwwjdic.com) Now
*there's* something I'll bet you readers did not know, and you probably
would not read it on Ludwik's mail list, either.
