This short essay has sparked a THREAD. One of the most formative books of my preteen years was James Gleick's "Chaos," about fractals, nonlinear systems, and other complex yet orderly systems. 1/?
Another was "Metamagical Themas" by Douglas Hofstadter, which talked about memes, strange attractors, self-referential systems, and complexity theory (among many other things). 2/ amazon.com/Metamagical-Th…
I won a science fair in 8th grade with my demonstration of software I wrote to generate strange attractors. These books are why I went into computer science.
But in a way I never could have predicted, they have deeply influenced my worldview and my policy approach today. 3/
But in a way I never could have predicted, they have deeply influenced my worldview and my policy approach today. 3/
I lacked the preteen math skills to absorb all the ideas in these books. But what I did soak up to my very core was the idea that beautifully ordered systems can & regularly do emerge from the independent actions of molecules or cells or people, WITHOUT ANYONE BEING IN CHARGE. 4/
Maybe you can already draw the lines from that to my current libertarian leanings, but it took me *decades* to figure out. I was basically politically agnostic through college, although I had an instinctual contrarian streak - I remember trying to vote for Ralph Nader in 1996. 5/
Likewise in grad school. The first conscious, considered political thought that I remember was in Con Law when I thought how silly it was that "substantive due process" was necessary only because earlier SCOTUS's had limited the protections of 9th and 10th amendments. 6/
Still, I didn't know such views lined up with others and I certainly didn't know what it was called. But as a baby telecom lawyer, I repeatedly saw very smart people seek to design rules to govern complex systems, with no humility about what success they should expect. 7/
Administrative law (like my con law class) often looked like a series of patches, each applied to correct the unintended consequences of the previous patch - and each applied with full confidence that *this time* the system was tamed and controlled. 8/
It all looked like using a deterministic Newtonian mindset to govern a non-linear system. A real mismatch. So I started looking for other answers. 9/
I found limited answers. But I did find people asking better questions, admitting that there are limits to what we can design in detail and arguing that maybe the best we can do is identify recurring patterns & principles that free up the system to progress to a better state. 10/
I am very much still on this journey. I don't know enough about law, history, economics, and esp. lately, about philosophy. But I marvel at the complexity of individuals and even more so at the systems they participate in, influence, and shape - and which shape them. 11/
People like @PeterBoettke are helping me learn more about all these things. But I thank @JamesGleick and Douglas Hofstadter for the early inspiration to be curious about the world, humble about my place in it, and aware that there are limits to what we can control. 12/12
@PeterBoettke @JamesGleick Hey @threadreaderapp can you unroll this so I can cut-and-paste it into @Medium?
