I attended a local theater production of Beauty and the Beast a couple days ago. The musical was excellent, with surprisingly high production values, a very talented cast with excellent singing voices, and a live orchestra providing the music. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as what you’d see on Broadway, but it’s in the same ballpark. I was very impressed. 1
Three weeks ago, I had no idea that the local theater existed, let alone was capable of such a high quality production. I found out through my friend, who’s a theater nerd and plugged into the local theater scene. And as I exited the theater, I started thinking about how this was a great example of a complex system at work, and how complex systems are beyond any single individual’s ability to fully appreciate and understand.
For those of you unfortunate enough to take college level physics courses, you might have come across problems in Newtonian physics or electromagnetism in which the textbook tells you to assume that the object in question occupies a single, volume-less point in space that contains all of the mass or charge of that object. These things are called point masses and point charges, and they only exist in physics textbooks and tests.
In real life, there’s no such thing as a point mass or a point charge. Objects take up space and have their charge or mass distributed throughout that space. The reason why they exist in physics textbooks is because they simplify the equations needed to describe the phenomenon to a high school or undergraduate level student. In other words, they’re vastly condensing a real world phenomenon with a near infinite number of factors to consider, to a simplistic system that only has a few factors worth noting.
This happens everywhere. In just about everything we do, we turn something complex into something simple for the sake of comprehensibility. The theories and formulas that you read in a textbook are necessarily simplified and condensed versions of what exists in real life. Real life is messy and complex. Textbooks are elegant and simple. And this happens in every discipline. Doesn’t matter whether it’s physics, biology, economics, engineering, music, or sociology. Anything that you can read, hear, or experience, is a vast simplification of what’s actually happening.
Everything is Ruthlessly Funneled
The previous sentence is important because it’s not just about what you read in a textbook or are taught in a classroom. Everything you experience is also a simplification. What you can see is limited by human biology. Our eyes are only capable of perceiving light within a range of wavelength (usually between 380 to 700 nanometers). So things like UV radiation, microwaves, radio waves, etc are all types of light that we cannot see.
The same goes for sound. Our eyes are only capable of hearing within a certain sound wavelength, which is why dog whistles exist and can drive them crazy even though we can’t hear anything. Same thing goes for your remaining senses of touch, smell, and taste. There’s a limited range of what can be perceived by humans. But all those other things are still out there in nature, and they matter just as much as the things that we can actually perceive.
There’s a reason why we can only perceive a certain range of phenomena. Our bodies simply cannot perceive everything as it is. Through tens of thousands of years of human behavior and countless years of general biological evolution, our bodies have adapted to funnel only the most important information to the brain for perception as required for the propagation of the species. Or in simpler terms, why should we bother our brain with the nuisance of UV light, when a lion is seconds away from mauling us for its next meal?
Not only does this apply to every other form of life on Earth, but it also applies to our individual lives. When we’re kids, our education is very basic and generalized. As we mature, we then have to choose to specialize into a certain discipline or profession. Because there is no such thing as unlimited resources. We can’t be a master of all trades, even if we had all the time and money in the world. We have to pick a path and travel down it, at the expense of countless other paths we could have taken.
No Man is an Island
This specialization is generally a good thing, but it comes with tradeoffs. A person living two centuries ago would be capable of many things that many of us have no idea how to do (sewing, carpentry, forestry, farming, masonry, etc). But the society they lived in was much more rudimentary and poorer than the society we live in now. By specializing in all these various trades and disciplines, we can build buildings thousands of feet above ground, airplanes that can move people anywhere around the world in less than 24 hours, and computers that can solve problems in a minute that would take a thousand trained mathematicians years to do by hand.
But all that specialization increases each person’s dependency on the person next to them. And harnessing that dependency into something useful requires both trust and humility. I have to trust that the construction worker who built the building I live in knows what he’s doing. He has to trust that the architect and engineers who designed the building know what they’re doing. And on and on it goes until it reaches every single person and profession in the world.
What I’ve described is society. And society is one complex system. The reason why people are so bad at predicting the future is because consistent, reliable prediction of the future requires knowing every single facet of the complex system, how each facet interacts with each other, and then being able to extrapolate all of that through the passage of time. The United States is 335 million people, each with various thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams and they have to interact with each other on a daily basis. How can you ever hope to know how 335 million people will interact with each other in the next hour, let alone be able to predict what they will do a year from now? And then consider that the US is not a hermit nation. We are a country of 335 million interacting with a world of 8 billion people. That’s complexity upon complexity.
We Don’t Even Know if Eggs Are Good For Us Or Not
Of course, complex systems exist everywhere. Your body is a complex system, formed of tens of trillions of cells all interacting with each other. And when you think about all the various ways we try and condense and simplify the interactions of tens of trillions of cells, it suddenly makes sense why we can be so bad at managing our health.
When you visit the doctor for your annual checkup and have your blood pressure, weight, height, and heart rate measured, you’re having 4 factors recorded (at a specific yet arbitrary point in time). Your doctor might then ask you a few questions and maybe draw your blood to measure a few dozen biological markers, and that’s it. That’s the visit.
How much can your doctor really help you manage your health in that moment in time? There’s really not much they can do to give you useful, individualized advice. What really happens is that they compare your height, weight, heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, etc against other people similar to you and then read studies about how people with similar levels are either more or less likely to live longer than the average person.
And then we get to your diet. People aren’t the same, and some people have dietary allergies and some don’t. Some people can metabolize gluten well, and some can’t. And because we can’t possibly consider every factor that goes into health and nutrition, we have decades of contradictory studies on whether or not eggs are good for you. Only, we’re not actually deciding whether eggs are good for you. We’re trying to decide whether it’s good for people in general.
Epistemic Humility is so Hot Right Now
To bring this all back to my experience watching Beauty and the Beast, I had no idea that an excellent local theater existed. My friend did, and she invited her friends to experience it. In that moment, a handful of participants within the complex system of Atlanta society came together and shared a moment of joy.
The realization that everything is a complex system and that complex systems are beyond individual comprehension is the reason why Einstein’s quote “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” resonates with so many people. As people grow older, wiser and more experienced, they realize that basic truth. To internalize that is to gain epistemic humility.
Alternatively, you can go down another route and have an existential crisis, which leads to things like nihilism (Nietzsche), solipsism (Descartes), absurdism (Camus). But I prefer epistemic humility, because it opens up the individual to be constantly amazed, entertained, and edified by vast miracle that is life.
By no means am I a theater critic or a theater nerd, but I’ve seen shows on Broadway and the traveling national productions of shows currently on Broadway. I do appreciate a good musical and I’ve seen high quality productions.