Reading Reality Switch technologies by Andrew Gallimore, I'm amazed by many things (and reading this book induces very interesting meditative states when I contemplate the ideas), but I would like to share one.

He understands and can explain properly the nature of complex systems. This understanding contradicts the sadly common practice of native interventionism.

In short (but read the book!), complex systems cannot be easily controlled, because the complex behavior is emergent from the interactions of parts. Aggregate statistics (see econometrics, or even blood tests) often miss the whole picture, because they do not see the complex interactions. Optimizing something measured could change the measurement, but it does not mean that the resulting behavior will be what we want. There are many types of interactions that can affect the measurement in a particular way.

Complex systems are not predictable - it is not a matter of technology, or knowledge, but the nature of how these systems compute the next state (in this case you can say that complex systems are those that can't be reduced to a small number of parameters). In order to compute or predict the next state, you need to play it out - all the interactions have to happen. (S. Wolfram says that the nature is computationally irreducible - it does not behave like newtonian physics).

To make matters more complicated (but also more beautiful!) these complex systems are hierarchical. Each neuron is a complex system with many interactions, neural columns are then also complex systems, all the way to the cortical level. We can't predict what will a human do and thus we can't predict what humanity will do.

A beautiful consequence of this is that central planning does not work. Most conspiracies relying on secrecy and/or cooperation of many people will be unpredictable. The plans of the central planners have very low chance of actually working. Geopolitical chess moves seven steps ahead are impossible.

Austrian economy does not look at aggregates, it looks at what is happening at each level. Demonstrated preferences (exchanges) rather then what people talk about.

This applies to biology, human consciousness, AI, medicine, societies, ecosystems. Most shortcuts don't survive the test of the time.

But... We can all experience it by ourselves. We are computing the future!