Complex to perplex

I don't want to claim anything new in comparing and contrasting complex and perplex states. However, because for many of us the world feels like it is becoming ever more complex, this does beg the question, 'when will it be so complex as to turn perplex?' Answering that might not be as hard as it sounds, and certainly feels important. Yes, it is difficult to come up with a definition of complex that everyone is happy with, but lurking in the background somewhere is always the promise that some clever person should be able to understand how that complex thing works. Certainly those working on complex systems get a lot of their funding on that basis. This holds out the secondary promise, that these clever people might be able to offer advice on what to do next in a given situation. Contrast that with a state of perplexity, where we might safely assume that is not possible.

For sure, as we learn stuff and become more skilled at understanding how things work, the number of systems classed as perplex could diminish. More importantly though, as the technosphere evolves it too likely becomes more and more complex until elements of it, or indeed all of it, transition from complex to perplex. Rather than say where the threshold between complex and perplex sits, we could instead look for the symptoms. Although crowds can be deeply ignorant beasts, they can also express emergent wisdom, especially if they are immersed within the system they are being asked to reflect on. If there is information to be gleaned, then crowds of gleaners distributed through systems are likely to be better informed than any particular individual, even if they hold that information implicitly. If this is so, when we offer very large crowds simple binary choices, any information should be expressed as a preference one way or the other.

On the 23rd of June, 2016, 46.5 million people in the UK were asked 'should we stay or should we go?'. 72.2 percent chose to exercise that right, with 48.1 percent choosing to stay and 51.9 to leave the EU. This result is cast as the British people electing to leave the EU. However, I would argue that the result is close enough to a 50:50 split that if there was any widom for this crowd to mine, then it appears close to marginal. On the one hand, this could be seen as somewhat surprising for such an apparently simple question. On the other, it can be seen as unsurprising if we believe Britain is approaching a state of perplexity. We could make similar arguments for the outcomes of recent US federal elections, which also appear to be trending towards ever marginal outcomes. For both these examples, voices on either side of the debate will no doubt prefer to suggest alternative, more specific causes for each result. For sure, more shady actors can see opportunities to misdirect as perplexity expands.

If perplexity is growing within the technosphere, then it would not be surprising to also see the emergence of more-than-human intelligence as an attempt to keep some controlability within reach. Unfortunately, although people might learn to trust that third part intelligence, they can't escape the feeling that it is only there because things have evolved beyond their collective capacity to grasp what's going on.

Andrew Jarvis, September 2023