It's more like following than leading...

My wife tells me I think too much. After thinking about that for a bit, it's not thinking that goes on in my head most of the time. A good deal of the things that come through my mind (and occasionally end up here) just pop in there on their own accord. these random thoughts are usually echoes of whatever I happen to be reading at the time. To illustrate what I mean, here's the course of my neural pyrotechnics over the last hour or so.

I've been reading a novel, Red Mars, that uses the colonization of Mars to explore human nature. While reading this book, it occurred to me that pushing against systems that want to return to some kind of equilibrium in order to prevent catastrophe will only result in greater catastrophe. It's kind of funny that I'm reading a book that is set in the future seeing that I read a review of a book that attempts to predict the future in a free issue of Science that was sent to my house with some marketing to join the AAAS. The book, 2052, is built on the expertise of all kinds of insiders and intellectual movers and shakers. That expert insight is supposed to make the book more credible or some such thing.

Having just read Antifragile, a book premised on the fact that prediction is pure fiction, I am primed to see this 2052 book as something comparable to Red Mars. Both books are works of fiction built on credible science and well within the bounds of reasonable thinking. Connecting one train of thought with Antifragile reminds me that fragile systems, according to Taleb, fail against the relentless grind of time. Fragile systems breakdown as the circumstances that led to their optimum state for growth and proliferation pass and new systems that are a better fit to the current arrangement of economic/social/political factors emerge. (We typically attribute this matching between circumstance and a particular business model to the visionary insight of one or two key managers, but it's usually just luck. That thought may be mine, or I could just be stealing from Taleb, although I sometimes felt like he was stealing from me.) Big bureaucratic systems with rigid rules and the big wigs at the top calling the shots fail quickly. Centralization is a predecessor for failure.

Where does this take me? If you want to predict the future, look for things that are emerging through the collected actions of a few loosely associated individuals. The fact that I can share my thoughts with the rest of world by writing a blog was not one person's vision. This platform emerged from the furious actions of a community racing to see what they could do with powerful new networks and users pushing the limits and boundaries of those networks. The visionary leaders, the idea that one person had an idea or could see where the future is going is simply post-action narrative built to make people feel like they have some kind of power over the randomness of our world.

I didn't sit down and try to arrive at this conclusion. It's just the random connecting of one thought with another. That actually reminds me of something that I read about in this book...