We greatly over-estimate our abilities to shape the world to our desires

From Can democracy work? by Dan Williams.  The subheading is In "Public Opinion" (1922), Walter Lippmann argued that the vastness, complexity, and invisibility of the modern world make democracy impossible. He got a lot right.

He notes that 

Public Opinion is one of the most important works of political theory ever written. It’s also one of the most underrated.

I agree.

A long and interesting essay.  I especially liked.

Lippmann is right that our naive realism is profoundly harmful. Because we instinctively treat the truth—even about complex political matters—as self-evident, we greatly over-estimate our abilities to shape the world to our desires. Moreover, if the truth is self-evident, there must be something wrong with those who fail to acknowledge the truth. They must be liars, victims of lies, or insane. Even setting aside bias and tribalism, this seems to shape how many people approach political disagreement in ways that generate unnecessary hostility and conflict.

I model the issue as our living on a continuum of complex processes.

At one end are the simplest of problems - processes with few inputs, few actions, few outputs, few users, and highly stable (not especially subject to exogenous events and pressures.)  These problems lend themselves to deterministic solutions.

From simple problems through reasonably complicated processes, our progress over the past 250 years of the Age of Enlightenment has essentially been the application of Rational Empiricism and the Scientific Method to low hanging fruit from solving problems related to simple actions, complicated actions, simple processes and complicated processes.  We have made enormous strides in productivity and well-being through these approaches.  There remains plenty of fruit to be picked, but we have solved many of the most obvious of problems.  

And we are encountering an epistemic frontier where the limitations of knowledge and wisdom are becoming more manifest.  What do we really want?  And what are the trade-offs we are willing to make to achieve those wants?  It becomes ever more critical to abide ever more closely to the values of Classical Liberalism and Scientific method empirical rationalism.  

What remains are problems arising from complex, chaotic, power law driven, evolving, dynamic, processes.  We are bounded by not knowing what we don't know.  And sometimes, can't know.  Our inadequacy of comprehending the trade-offs we need to make binds us.  Our unfamiliarity of dealing with the probabilistic nature of uncertainty harms us.  

It is in that context which I read Williams's word.  

We have the accumulated hubris arising from success at dealing with the low hanging fruit.  We can see we have been successful without fully acknowledging that part of our success has been due to dealing with the easiest problems.  But what worked with actions and simple processes will not be adequate for complex, chaotic, power law driven, evolving, dynamic, processes.  

But I had not really considered that our hubris in solving simple actions and processes might also incidentally encourage us to moralize problem solving.  

Williams is pointing us subtly to an important lesson.  As we increasingly engage with complex, chaotic, power law driven, evolving, dynamic, processes, we must become more humble.  Humility will be a necessary value because we inherently do not fully comprehend complex, chaotic, power law driven, evolving, dynamic, processes and the probability of our making things worse than better is significant.