Post #3786345

2026-07-13 13:45 UTC

and to use real-time feedback to optimize production and distribution. Unfortunately, an economy is not a servomechanism. The feedback loops in a national economy involve millions of adaptive agents with private information, conflicting goals, and a tendency to evolve their preferences. The seduction of applying cybernetic methods to complex systems is described beautifully by my Santa Fe Institute colleague, the writer Francis Spufford, in his novel Red Plenty: “The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason.” A simple behavioral intervention, such as adjusting a price, changing a regulation, or God forbid, simply asking people what they need,

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@anna_lillith@mas.to 2026-07-13 13:47

could often have achieved in an afternoon what the cybernetic apparatus was struggling to model in weeks. The intelligence of the cybernetics as a framework for control of simple systems is unquestionable, but its application to the economy inflated the difficulty of the problem it was meant to solve. The Austrian novelist and essayist, Robert Musil, in a 1937 lecture, “On Stupidity,” described what may be the most important distinction in the whole literature of stupidity. He separated “honorable stupidity,” which is a simple cognitive limitation, or the inability to grasp a difficult argument, from “intelligent stupidity,” which he considered far more dangerous. This insight is the central concern of my favorite novel of Musil’s, The Man Without Qualities. Intelligent stupidity marshals all the resources of the intellect in the service of an error. It is not the failure to think; it is thinking flamboyantly and systematically in the wrong direction.

Open ##3786344