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Watched this tonight and – against my preconceptions – found it to be an excellent film. I can understand why it’s phenomenal success may have caused mixed feelings in India but that underscores the universality of the film’s appeal. Some plot contrivance but impressed nonetheless.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, had an op-ed in FT.com entitled “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world” (Hat tip to John Robb and Pundita). Taleb was addressing the global economic crisis, but I was particularly drawn to Taleb’s fifth principle, which has a more general implication:

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Taleb has encapsulated many important concepts very well here. Up to a certain point, increasing complexity represents a advantage for an evolving system (biological, financial, physical etc.) by increasing efficiency through adding specialization, interconnection, diversification, redundancy and checks for mitigation of risks. Complexity, in the earlier part of a development curve can add to a system’s overall resiliency – to a point.

Superfluous complexity, that which goes beyond the minimum required for additional gains in systemic efficiency or productivity, is a net drag on the system, an economic waste, a source of friction, a cancer,  a useless eater of resources and the earliest sign of the system’s inevitable decay. Worse, excess complexity represents an increasing probability of systemic failure by multiplying the number of variables involved in the normal process of the system. There are more things that can go wrong and more choke points where a catastrophic failure can occur. Increasing the degree of complexity moves the system away from simplicity and reliability and toward chaos and the creativity of emergent properties, but like an ice skater seeking ever greater range, go too far and the ice will crack under one’s feet.

This is an effect familiar to engineers and scientists but one that appears to escape the majority of politicians, corporate executives and economists. My co-blogger at Chicago Boyz, Shannon Love,  took GE to task for trying to get on the Federal dole by advocating needlessly complicating the nation’s power grid:

If Your Grid Had a Brain

GE is advertising to build political support for Obama’s plan to purchase billions of dollars of GE tech in order to make the power grid “smart”.  After all, who would want a “dumb” anything when they could have a “smart” something? 

The reason we should keep things dumb is that in engineering the word “dumb” has a different connotation. In engineering, “dumb” means simple and reliable. 

Increasing complexity in any networked system increases possible points of failure. Worse, the more interconnected the system, i.e., the more any single component affects any other randomly selected component in the system, the faster point-failures spread to the entire system. Power grids are massively interconnected. Every blackout starts with a seemingly trivial problem that, like a pebble failing on a mountain side, triggers an avalanche of failure. 

In the social and political domain, back in the 1990’s Philip K. Howard wrote a book called The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America in which he detailed example after example of how the overlawyering of regulatory systems in America by an emerging and hyper-aggressive legal class was producing neither restraint on government abuses nor fine-tuned social outcomes but instead created a state of paralyzed rigidity, risk aversion, perverse incentives and general dysfunction; in other words, chaos instead of order.

The Obama-ites in the White House are not “socialists” ( at least not most of them) but there is a great love of liberal-minded technocracy there, and a seemingly boundless self-confidence in the ability of high-minded, upper-middle class, progressive, wonks and lawyers from the “good schools” (or investment houses – in some cases, both) to micromanage not just our lives for us, or even the United States of America but the global economy itself. Sort of a Superempowered Oligarchy of Good Feelings.

The ancient Greeks had a word for that: hubris. More importantly, the Obama-ites are wrong here – adding endless amounts of regulatory complexity is not going to give them the kind of granular control or positive returns that they seek to obtain from the system. Counterintuitively, they should be radically simplifying where and to the degree they safely can instead.

Bill van Horn puts the COIN vs. Big Army debate into the larger context of the evolution of the U.S. Army since the Civil War, identifying structural changes that created a personnel system that emphasized individual military careers rather than long-term unit service:

The So-Called COIN Debate and Institutional Memory

…Small wars will not go away. They have always been a part of the international landscape, and show no signs of abating. While the Army should not abandon its conventional ability, it likewise cannot afford to shelve COIN/small wars/low intensity conflict again. As a succession of presidents have shown, overseas commitments will not decline just because the Army does not like them. In fact, they seem to become more common under idealistic administrations (Wilson, Clinton, G.W. Bush). Since the personnel system no longer allows the formation and retention of the Regular cadre that used to be the Army’s backbone for such operations, a conscious effort must be made on the part of the institution to preserve the hard-won lessons of our current small wars for future leaders and decision-makers.

….An Army that maintains and values its institutional COIN knowledge is well-placed to offer credible advice on the subject. War is war, but warfare has many shades, tones, and levels. Commanders who showed great battlefield ability and skill during the Civil War often foundered on the Frontier, and with disastrous results for the men under their command. Others performed with skill against one tribal group, only to fail when facing another. But those who built their reputations in the Civil War and then showed ability on the Frontier found themselves leading troops in the Philippines or providing advice to successive administrations prior to 1900. The Army cannot afford to lose that capability again.

Read the whole thing here:

Due to a combination of good fortune, review copies sent by publishers and exercising wide-ranging discretion over a budget account at work, I’ve added an eclectic mix of tomes to the ever rising Antilibrary book pile.  Some of these are recommendations from readers left in my comment section last January ( working on improving my traditionally lame following -up skills)

   Alexander II The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky

    Engaging the Muslim World  by Juan Cole

    The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader by Peter Bergen

      The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato

                          and  The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx by Karl Popper

      Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

and   Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

            How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

    Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets 

                                 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality  

                                by Charles Murray

   Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations 

                                by Clay Shirky

   The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age 

                                  by Joseph Turow & Lokman Tsui

  Islands in the Clickstream: Reflections on Life in a Virtual World 

                                   by Richard Thieme

Engaging the Muslim World is not long for the Antilibrary, as I have already begun reading it and will review it here soon. Some of these books can be read relatively quickly, a day or two but others, like The two volume The Open Society, I expect will require a greater investment of time and thought. It pays rich dividends though.

Note, Richard Thieme, despite his past as a scholar-clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, is not t be confused with the historicist, fundamentalist, theologian, Colonel R.B. Thieme.

UPDATED!:

Ha! A good one arrived today, courtesy of Columbia University Press:

   The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity

                                        by Antoine Bousquet

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Rock on Mr. Secretary !

“One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you’re going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go.” [Boyd] raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised the other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something–something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do some thing, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”

                                                          – Colonel John Boyd