On Over-Complicated Worlds and Over-Simple Audiences:

Or complexity increases over time but ironically it makes people less able to understand... pretty much anything.

“…in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.”
― Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Over the past year, I have dealt with the fact that people under- and over-read almost any statement, and then respond often with “corrections” that illustrate little evidence. This is more than an educational style problem, although there is a nonsense paradigm that “if you really understand a thing, you can explain it to a kid” that makes it appear like a mere educational problem.

No one explains complex things like thermodynamics to a statistically average child in a way in which said child could have any technical understanding of the phenomenon, although one could easily impart a gist. The idea is, itself, an avoiding of the issue of both necessary complexity as if all complexity is merely mongering jargon to keep outsiders… out. Jargon can and does often serve that function, but it also deliberately makes common language strange, cutting off alternative definitions and analogous concepts which would muddle an utterance.

There has been a lot of discussion about “anti-intellectualism,” often ironically stated in absolute and incurious ways, which sees it as a moral failure or a political conspiracy. What is rarely dealt with is a side effect of complexity, and one of the things I think pushes people towards simpler expressions of what could be complex ideas.

This happens as concepts multiply, interpretations multiply, but tolerance for the complexity one is experiencing decreases. This is particularly bad in sectarian views of history, where people are given to assert counter-factuals or even psychologize the belief in historical facts without much evidence other than what is effectively hearsay. The complexity of the situation is reduced, and often to strawmen and counter-strawmen.

This leaves me with a hostility to segments of my audience who don’t just seem to have the Dunning-Krueger effect but cannot also engage in a way to do anything about it. Lately, I have been cutting up my 15-minute to 1-hour into small 1-to-2-minute clips. This is suboptimal and leads to understandable misreadings because clips lack context. But it also leads to a lot of younger and most male responders who literally respond by calling the points stupid without even understanding the basic claims. The fact that more of this happens on the clips indicates that a lot of the commenters have neither the executive function nor the curiosity to get the context.

One of the ironies of an over-complex material world is that people cannot parse the complexity in general. They don’t have the cognitive load capacity. This is not a sign of “idiocy”—it is a sign of the breakdown of the comprehensibility of the world as various subjects. One or two obscurantists or know-nothings, that is, on them. But a culture of it, one should expect to have materially substantive explanations, and over-complexity is about the best I have.

Cognitive load is not the same as general intelligence. If general intelligence is processing power, then cognitive load is like the computer’s RAM. The more complex the information, the more the need to simplify so one can hold things in one’s head.

So this leads me to a paradox with parts of my audience whose first reaction is to “correct” without counter-evidence, or just reactionaries just calling everyone who doesn’t confirm a relatively simplistic worldview, “stupid.” They are products of an overcomplex and thus decadent society, so one can explain them without psychologizing the “rabble” or just implying they are anti-intellectuals (as a flaw of character). They are incentivized to be anti-intellectual, and that is often backed up by the failure of educated elites to understand things outside of a narrow range of their specialization, despite often speaking to general phenomena.

The temptation to shame one’s audience for not understanding is always there, and it is usually the wrong thing to do. That said, it also makes trying to articulate what would be needed for people to build a better society a lot harder for people to imagine. It would take a lot more than “Medicare for all” and “universal free college education” or pretending that desk work isn’t skilled or that everyone can be a welder without dropping the value of the labor on the labor market to nothing. An overly complex society isn’t fixed by tweaks like those proposed now.

Who do we get out of it? I don’t know, but I will leave with another quote from Joseph Tainter: “Personally, I feel that when your narrative about the future includes the phrase ‘and then a miracle happens,’ you’re in trouble”