Scott P. Johnson on Nostr: It’s ok to acknowledge and accept that you don’t know the causes of complex ...
It’s ok to acknowledge and accept that you don’t know the causes of complex system failures, and that they might have more complexity than anyone could possibly get to the root of in the moments immediately following a crisis. This means we have to be comfortable with uncertainty, with not knowing, with not being able to predict.
One of the failure modes of sense-making in crisis situations is to jump to conclusions and blame one particular causal narrative as being “definitely” the cause. Picking out and blaming one specific agent-driven narrative as the cause of crises and complex systems failures is a type of magical thinking that leads to various unhealthy and outright dangerous epistemic failure modes, commonly including traumatic cognitive distortions, conspiracy theorization, and hate-based extremism.
In reality every complex system (and everything in reality is a complex system, outside of high school physics equations) has a plethora of multiple interdependent causes, and it’s ok to be uncertain.
One of the failure modes of sense-making in crisis situations is to jump to conclusions and blame one particular causal narrative as being “definitely” the cause. Picking out and blaming one specific agent-driven narrative as the cause of crises and complex systems failures is a type of magical thinking that leads to various unhealthy and outright dangerous epistemic failure modes, commonly including traumatic cognitive distortions, conspiracy theorization, and hate-based extremism.
In reality every complex system (and everything in reality is a complex system, outside of high school physics equations) has a plethora of multiple interdependent causes, and it’s ok to be uncertain.