Our Scientific Tools are Hardly Sophisticated

CRISPR. Nanotechnology. What else? None of these are particularly sophisticated from a control the outcome perspective. And they never will be.

If you change something in a targeted fashion on one “end” of a complex system you can reproducibly ensure an outcome.

But under complexity the 𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍 approach is neither targeted nor sophisticated.

If the central bank adjusts interest rates in a specific and targeted fashion, the outcome is highly reproducible (e.g. cooled or stimulated economy). But the overall activity is hardly targeted. Asset bubbles, income inequalities, global effects, and other broader, delayed, unpredictable and consequential outcomes slosh about the market.

The acceptance of much of today’s science is founded on the indefensible assumption that a deterministic line exists between input and output. “Accomplishments” and “breakthroughs” are propped up, far more by erroneous narrative than genuine knowledge, discovery or utility.

We don’t have sophisticated tools, we have precise tools. That precision is contained only in the input; it does not translate to the output.

If precision were sophisticated we would see precision in nature; we do not. We see wet, redundant, fantastically interconnected phenomena that do not operate via “paths” and “root causes.”

The paradigm is broken. The paradigm is irrational. The paradigm is built on falsity.

The paradigm must change.