Following my previous post a colleague pointed me to Tim Harford’s talk on TED. Tim favours the trial and error approach over the “God complex” . The latter is where someone confidently proclaims they know how a complex system works, when in fact they don’t. This is similar to the fox and hedgehog analogy I wrote about. On a similar vein, good advice to foresight people from Paul Saffo [PDF] is that if you forecast, do it often and be the first to correct your forecast.
Fellow Sciblogger Shaun Hendy wrote more about Tim Harford in July in relation to how some of his ideas relate to improving innovation in New Zealand.
He is describing (ie, evolving thru trial & error) the concept of system non-equilibrium dynamics, which physicists proposed as one of the mechanism by where complexity arises in nature.
“Self-organized Criticality”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
I’ve been interested in how this concept has taken off into other branches of both sciences (biology, neuro-science, chemistry, etc,..) and humanities (as in economics & sociology).
I was surprised to come across the following, which I can assure readers and commentators here, that the author/s of the paper was not Donald Trump.
“You’re Fired! Self-Organized Criticality in Post-Merger and Acquisition Executive Turnover”
http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics/paper/show/id/ep1108.0001