The Complexity Explosion in Society

Society as technology advances is becoming increasingly more complex. We can measure this by observing certain trends which elevate the rate of society change and by doing so generate additional layers of complexity. First we can take a look at the trend toward hyper connectivity. The original mission of Facebook was to connect the world. The mission of Google is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Facebook recently changed their mission in recognition that hyperconnectivity alone isn't good enough. The new mission of Facebook is to bring the world closer together.

In my opinion none of these missions are good enough. A hyper connected has clear benefits but by itself just being hyper connected doesn't make the world a better place to live in. Facebook wants to transition toward giving people the power to build communities which is noble but it faces similar challenges to what Steem is likely to face trying to implement communities. Communities in the natural sense are small while the world itself is very big and diverse. If the community is exclusive, small, tight knit, less than 1000 people, then for the most part humans are good at navigating these. According to the neuroscience we know from Dunbar's number the hard cap on what humans can manage that only measures relationships, managing the expectations of others in a community is computationally expensive.

Society is becoming more complex not just because humans are expected to manage the expectations of a lot more people in a global community which is hyper connected but also because of many other trends. The trends are contine both positives and negatives but as technologies emerge they dramatically change how humans interact socially. For instance the camera phone has permanently changed how people interact since the time when it was invented. The smart phone in general has changed how humans Internet as well and now humans do not even memorize phone numbers for the most part. Google has changed how people think in specific, in that now people can search just by saying what they are looking for.

The general trend is that society is evolving toward complexity. As technology allows for new forms of communication, new forms of interaction, which will go on to include AR (augmented reality) on top of what we have now with smart phones, including the trends we see with crypto, the complexity increases.

To put this into context, the idea of a complexity explosion is based on the mathematics behind a combinatorial explosion which if you play chess you may be familiar with. In chess depending on the size of the board (how many squares) determines how many possible moves can exist and within those possible moves let's say the objective is to find the best moves? Well as you add more squares to the board the combinatorial complexity increases because new squares (and chess pieces) introduce new possible moves, positions, etc. This example highlights and exemplifies what combinatorial complexity is. By using this chess analogy perhaps we can understand how it plays out on the societal level or on the social network.

As social networks connect the world, as life becomes increasingly transparent, as big data is collected, as more knowledge is generated and applied, as we get a new technology, it is like adding another square and piece to the chess board. As the board grows, the possible positions anyone can find themselves in becomes increasingly unpredictable. In other words if you do not know how society will evolve (due to not knowing the impact of future technologies) then you cannot predict the position your future self my wind up in.

Wisdom asymmetry is the key problem not information asymmetry

Dan Larimer identified the problem of information asymmetry. It is true that there is an information asymmetry in some areas of life but is this really the problem? I think the actual problem is not that our neighbors lack the information because there is more information out there than ever in human history with social media. The current problem seems to be that more information isn't actually making things better. This is because at this time now everyone is in a sense drowning in information, more information than we can hope to process, more information than we know what to do with. The problem now seems to be wisdom asymmetry and I'll illustrate that point below.

It is my current understanding that the difference between the individual who consistently makes bad decisions which leads to negative consequences vs the individual who consistently made good decisions which leads to positive consequences is specifically attributed to wisdom asymmetry. Some people are wiser than other people with the same information because they have a greater capacity to make use of the information they have access to.

To illustrate if John and Dave both are twin brothers who get their genomes sequenced and both have access to this information, but let's say John has a greater level of genetic literacy so John can read his genetic code well enough to find out that he has the gene for alcoholism. Let's now say Dave has a lower level of genetic literacy and cannot ead any information from the results of the test. As a result John makes a promise to himself to never drink alcohol, but because Dave could not make use of the information due to inability to interpret the information, he goes on and drinks.

In this case the end result could be that John ends up being the successful brother who stayed sober while Dave may have gone on to become an alcoholic and as a consequence ruined his life. This illustrates the example that when you have two rational individuals, with equal access to information, it is wisdom which not just informs the individual how to interpret the information, but how to act on it with a deep level of understanding. Remember, John made a promise to himself to never drink which in his case was wise because he knew himself. It is possible that Dave could have discovered the same information but lacked the wisdom necessary to make the self promise so as to avoid the worst outcome.

Of course there are many other examples of this but the point being that mere access to information does not transcend lack of wisdom. Which means you can have an unwise individual who gains access to a lot of information which they'll not have the wisdom to deal with. It is a process to take information in it's raw form, compare it to previous knowledge, and apply wisdom which could be for example the very process by which knowledge is generated. For example the scientific method is used to produce new pieces of knowledge. We can say applying the scientific method is wise, but to just give someone the knowledge or worse the information without the ability to be wise is what can lead to potential disaster.

Summarization

Wisdom asymmetry expresses itself by the recognition that some businesses may know you better than you know yourself. What does this actually mean? Well the fact that a company has a terabyte of data on you and has the ability to process that data for analysis but most important of all they know mathematics and the methods of science? This entity, this business, is going to gain insights, true wisdom, from the data which even if you were given you may not be able to extract the same insight from. Wisdom asymmetry is the risk factor.

In my opinion we may never enter a state of perfect symmetry in any area so it's not to imply that. The point is to suggest that for people who really do want to be wise there should always be a means of pursuing it. If a means of pursuing wisdom is not provided then people will ultimately fall back on belief rather than knowledge, on superstition, on feelings rather than facts, or if they do have facts then on confirmation bias or many of the other kinds of bias so that the facts align with feelings.

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