Comparison of Medicine and Economics, Both Open, Evolving, Complex Systems.

We in the world of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering know quite a lot about control systems. We have a lot of serious theory and, having produced control systems for everything from airliners and Alaskan Pipelines to internet toasters, a lot of practical experience and understanding.

We know what kind of entities we can produce Control Systems for, and Alaskan Pipelines and airliners and driverless cars are up at the top end of that complexity, but they are all mechanisms, definitely not the open, evolving, complex systems we live within.

To remind everyone :
    'open' == subject to influences from outside of the system itself,
    'evolving' == changes in the internal state of the system cause changes
        in the state transition tables themselves (or the equations defining
        the state transitions),
    'complex system' implying emergent properties, e.g. the market has
        properties that do not exist in individual trades.

This short essay compares the most complex system that human minds have partially mastered to the economy, which human minds have definitely not mastered.

That system is the human body. It is open, affected by everything from sunlight through food, drugs, bears and bullets. It is evolving, as it ages at the gross level and at levels clear down to the DNA. It is certainly a complex system, containing a couple of hundred different cell types in its subsytems, none of whose properties contain the slightest humanness.

I said above this kind of system can't be controlled, yet MDs routinely prescribe drugs that fix problems. So there is a contradiction.

The explanation is that :
    A) The human body has evolved a property called 'homeostasis' which
    allows more predictability than systems without this property.
    Homeostasis describes the control systems of physiology which
    act to keep blood pressure. temperature, blood ions, blood sugar,
    ...concentrations with a range. Teasing out these control mechanisms
    and their interactions is not complete.
    B) The human body is part of an evolved eco-system, and most of the
    external threats to human health have evolved in concert with humans
    and their predecessors.
    C) There are a 7B replicas of human physiologies and many animals
    are excellent models of subsets of the human systems. Thus we have
    a lot of different examples of problems with human physiologies that
    we can categorize and study and also we can do experiments, which isn't
    possible with most open, evolving, complex systems.

These are huge advantages, but it has nevertheless taken 100 years to reach current Medical expertise. The beginning of 'scientific medicine' was about the same time that Progressive ideology was borrowing the prestige of science, the 1920s. For medicine, that was the combination of statistics and the accumulating physiological knowledge, the serious study of which began in the mid 1800s.

Further, medical expertise, the ability to diagnose and predict, is not nearly as far along as we might think. Patients who are scheduled for heart transplants too often fail to die when they don't ever match a
donor heart. Every 25 years or so, one of the major teaching hospitals here in the US does autopsies on 1000 successive deaths. Routinely, 25% of patients have died of undiagnosed causes.

Now compare that to our economy. Obviously economics would be ecstatic with a 75% correct prediction rate. The reason it doesn't have predictive ability is that there is no possibility of doing experiments on an economy. Experiments require holding all factors constant except
the independent variable, and recording the values of dependent variables as the independent variable's value is changed. There are 1000s of 1000s of possible independent variables in the economy. There

is no possibility of holding anything constant enough to do that kind of measurements.

Also, we only have one economy, connected throughout the world, not 7B+ animal models to experiment with.

Further, I don't believe that the economics profession has begun an age of 'scientific economics'. It uses statistics, lots of math, but there is no foundation science that it rests upon, no body of theoretical knowledge external to itself that it can draw upon.

Economics produces the same kind of information as does history, facts about the past. One may discern patterns that may or may not apply to the present to predict the future, but that doesn't produce accuracy in predicting either the event or the timing of the event.

Economics, in fact, doesn't predict much.

If you can't predict any future, how can you guide yourself to a desired

future?

Beginnings : My Basic Understandings

!!! Warning : this is mid-thought, come back in a week or so and I might have it right.

This begins a list of topics and my initial positions.  Each of these will be expanded in other posts which will be the first stage of the process of melding the understandings conveyed by comments.

0)  We live within open, evolving, complex systems.
1)  System stability must be the major design goal for governments.
2)  There are no perfect systems, natural or designed by humans.
3)  Humans are far from perfect in many dimensions, and these imperfections limit the kinds of governments that can be stable.
4)  The fundamental problem facing any civilization is finding more-optimal futures.
5)  Those more-optimal futures may produce system instability.

'Process'

!!! Warning : this is mid-thought, come back in a week or so and I might have it right.

Melding the input from many people into a coherent unit that can instruct our next sets of Founding Fathers as they write Constitutions and implement governments is a non-trivial effort.  I believe it is very important, as we can accelerate civilization's process by better understandings.

I don't know how to do that, will have to learn on the job.

Suggestions are welcome in this as in everything else associated with this project.

Until a better approach is suggested, found, presented, I will  keep updating posts presenting everyone's best understandings, best citations, best explanations.  At intervals, these will become new posts with the associated new set of comments.  They may also be split as topics become too large for focused discussion, and perhaps moved to a wiki with editors for each section.

However accomplished, we will iterate until we have agreed that each represents the best understandings that we are capable of, but new comments can always continue.

Some people may disagree about this process or the rules.  If any aspect of this blog becomes too uncomfortable for anyone, please feel free to begin a blog on the same or any subset of topics.  Our civilization needs this effort, and there cannot be too many minds applied to it.  Feel free to incorporate ideas from this blog and its comments, we will do likewise.

Rules

Any cooperative venture, which I hope to make this blog, needs some structure.

Structure determines function, at least partially.  The goals of this cooperative venture are open-ended, so we want the minimum structure consistent with progress.

There may well be a good set of rules that someone can bring to our attention, so we want these to be sufficiently malleable to incorporate improvements or a complete replacement.

This is an attempt to bring the precision of thinking in science and engineering to the problem of government.  Thus, we will apply the best scientific and engineering analysis criteria.

We judge the worth of comments by their accuracy and depth of citations, by the quality of their fundamental data and the kinds of inferences that can be made from that data, by their logic and adherence to rules of evidence for scientific, technological and historical disciplines.

Similar to other Open Source projects, I am writer, editor, benevolent dictator.  Until I find cooperators and learn to trust them, I do the merges from email and comments into posts in this blog.  I will endeavor to be as open in this as I can be, but will fail at that, please remind me.

I will not tolerate ideology of any kind.  Ideology == 'ideas and words before reality'.  This is the antithesis of everything that has produced our very wonderful civilization : we have not achieved progress in any of the areas that make our lives so wonderful by better sermons or speeches in the senate or even lectures by our best philosophers.  These are not, from the historical record, much improved over the last 200 years, yet improvements in individual lives have been dramatic in many ways.

We achieved our civilization by accumulating information about that very large and very complex reality that we all share, which we call knowledge.

We achieved our civilization by intellectual progress in comprehending and systematizing knowledge, which we call science, and by learning to apply those systematic understandings to better ourselves.  This is applied science in its many manifestations : medicine, engineering, management of organizations, military arts, government arts, advertising, ...

We achieved our modern life by disciplining our thinking and actions so that we better control the large-scale and further-distant future, which we call wisdom.  As individuals and organizations, we both choose and achieve our goals more wisely in our current civilization.

Very importantly, we achieved our civilization in the face of the huge limitation that we each can only understand a very small portion of humanity's accumulated knowledge, understanding and wisdom.  Thus, our civilization and its progress depend on coordinating individuals, and the scale of the interactions and the flows of information between entities that create and process information is both the challenge for the next stage of progress and the opportunity for new dimensions of civilization and new progress on all fronts.

Civility is useful, but we assume that all of us are flawed humans and sometimes are not as kind to others as we would desire them to be to us.  We all know that intellectual passion is a requirement for progress in understanding, and that all kinds of talents are unevenly distributed, and so we must expect that some major contributors to this effort will be ranging from moderate to extreme.  We forgive them in advance.