The world is an open system
Why some narratives hold a tighter grip on our lives and what to do about it
New Year's resolutions have a crisp feeling. For a day or a week, we feel unbounded.
We picture exercising daily, eating healthier and journaling consistently.
While our good intentions inevitably fail, there is a reassuring truth and beauty in this feeling of openness: our world is an open system.
Every day is a new day. Every morning, we get the chance to redraw the stories of our lives within the limits of our shared canvas.
With enough new evidence, all of our best science can be invalidated. How could it be otherwise? No story is ever final. No worldview can be self-consistent and exhaustive, or we would get to a paradox when there is nothing left to know.
This is easy to believe, but hard to live by. Most of the time we feel limited. Stuck in a given game with rules we do not know. Let alone have never chosen!
If we feel this way, it may be useful to explore why some narratives hold a tighter grip on our interpersonal realities than others.
My rule of thumb is simple:
The simpler the story, the more it will self-reinforce.
By simple, I don’t mean necessarily something easy to understand. Rather I want to point to a certain intrinsic quality. Simple stories are abstract, relational. Porous, almost vague. Different people will see different things in them.
As an illustration, here are three useful analogous concepts from different scientific disciplines:
Availability cascades. Social relationships connect us. They create our shared experience. They form our inclinations and biases. The surface of our experience is bent like a sink, where ideas ripples and inflate. Across a shared medium, consensus resonates. Ideas interfere constructively. They "gain rapid currency" when they are sufficiently plausible and insightful among peers.
Decoherence. It's not unlike quantum mechanics. Stories widely entangled with their environment attain stability. This way, they loose their quantum coherence, their nuance and ambiguity. They dispel their their quantum probabilistic flavour and start to behave according to classical probability rules. The premises of their validity are diluted away.
Path-dependence. We may step in bubbles so big, we loose sight of their boundaries. Long running equilibria tend to self-reinforce. This is why breaking path-dependance from the business-as-usual economy is the hardest and loneliest task for every innovator.
Until the next cloud,
David