A complex, coupled, self-organizing, chaotic system

I have finished Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival:Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. A terrific exercise in story-telling and chock-a-block full of interesting insights and useful information. Gonzales becomes almost mystical in a couple of areas but it is rather the nature of the beast when trying to find some sort of rational, empirical explanation for outcomes that seem to be inherently "lucky".

The subject is rather the inverse of the work on which I have been focusing lately. Where Gonzales is addressing the outcomes of situations that have gone bad, I have been trying to identify what are the characteristics of superior outcomes. They are somewhat the mirror image of one another and viewing from the opposite angle is informative.

While he does not pull it together in a single description, Gonzales alludes in different places to the heart of the issue. Our difficulty in forecasting anything human is that we are stuck in the rut of thinking linearly (input is directly proportional to output) and mechanistically (cause leads directly to effect). We view the world through Newtonian lenses where consequences can obviously be linked to causes and where inputs are linearly related to outputs.

The challenge is that that model of the world holds true for only a limited portion of the world as we experience it. We are ignoring the nature of the human system - we are a social animal in a complex environment with many extraneous shocks (economy, war, disease, etc.) to our well-being and a huge number of moderating factors (childhood experience, familial structure, religious beliefs, national culture, etc.) and high variance among individuals (knowledge, skills, experience, decision-making capacity, values, motivation, etc.). To put it more formally we live in, and reading takes place in the context of, a coupled (multiple systems with few variables in common, mutually influential), complex (heterogeneous components that interact non-linearly), self-organizing (unpredictable self-adjustments), chaotic system (sensitive to initial conditions). In such an environment, most simple measures have little predictive power and it is often the case that it is difficult to track an outcome back to its causes.

We will continue to struggle badly as long as the model with which we are working is inadequate in its description. The outcomes we want will not emerge well if we are using a linear, mechanistic model to shape our actions when in fact the world is complex, coupled, self-organizing, and chaotic.