(2012-03-22) Rao Can Hydras Eat Unknown Unknowns For Lunch

Venkatesh Rao: Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch? Donald Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other. Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Nassim Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility.

What has been exceptional about the 2002-2012 decade is not what happened, but our intellectual response to it. The responses go beyond the well-known ones in the timeline above. There appear to be hundreds of people thinking seriously along such lines and taking on significant projects related to such interests.

In the last year alone, I’ve been introduced to two such people in my local virtual neighborhood: Jean Russell (who coined the word thrivability as an alternative to sustainability) and Ed Beakley, who has been studying preparedness for unconventional crises through his Project White Horse since Katrina.

The first is simply the slow decline of America’s relative role in global affairs, and the corresponding rise of a chaotic political energy around the globe, at all spatial frequencies from neighborhood block to planet-wide. It feels like there’s nobody in charge. This feels both liberating and scary.

The second is related to Zakaria’s point about information dissemination. The speed and completeness of our knowledge of global affairs has done more than expand our circle of concern. The potential of the Internet to enable new forms of collective action has also convinced us that we can act on those concerns in improved ways.

Unusually visible chaos, plus an authority vacuum, plus a perceived sense of greater control equal a deep restlessness.

It is a popular restlessness, not just elitist hand-wringing

It is a social energy that swings wildly between a sense of limitless potential and deep despair, and is hungry for both meaningful perspectives and rallying cries.

In other words, the social energy sloshes violently across the four quadrants, fueling a demand for all four of the emergent narratives.

I don’t have much to say about the three older quadrants

The optimistic-synthetic quadrant is the one where the most fresh thinking has emerged: The Hydra Quadrant

*The old failure, in the Hydra narratives, is framed as both a moral failure (a case of hubris and hamartia), and a technical failure: (they didn’t understand “bottom-up, organic, open-systems, network thinking.”)

It is important to note that no believer in the resurrected social engineering narrative has any clue what “bottom-up, organic, open-systems network thinking” actually means. In fact they typically understand what they mean far less clearly than Le Corbusier understood authoritarian high modernism.*

The moral dimension of the confidence can basically be ignored. It is merely secularized religiosity and a yearning for a moral calculus to confirm an analysis-by-faith.

True believers take offense at the very idea of studying the apparently ineffably-collective.

I suppose I resonate with the idea of illegibility so much because it is so neutral with respect to the four narratives

In the bottom left quadrant, you can use the idea to understand why some grand social engineering projects fail.
In the bottom right, you can use it to understand why other projects succeed.
In the top left, it suggests design principles for resilient survival.
And in the top right, the interesting new quadrant, it suggests the right questions that need to be asked in order to test, and if possible, realize, Hydra narratives.

It is this last project that interests me.


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