Adults taught me a lot of things, when I was a kid, but I’ve forgotten most of it.
A few things I remember, almost accidentally. In fourth grade, my teacher had me draw a detailed diagram of a jet engine, and I remember there was a low pressure compressor and a high pressure compressor, and a high pressure turbine and a low pressure turbine. And a lot of super hot gas coming out the end.
The rest of my year in fourth grade is kind of foggy.
Of course, no one mentioned, at the time, that jet fuel poisons the atmosphere, so that was something I had to learn on my own. And maybe, because I learned it on my own, I haven’t forgotten it?
Nowadays, you can easily find a drawing of a jet engine online.
If you’re lucky, it will be animated.
So your fourth grade teacher would probably just tell you to Google it, and not waste your time drawing it.
There’s another thing they didn’t teach me in school, and I had to learn on my own. How to think.
This morning, I’m thinking about disorganized complexity.
We’ve been hearing quite a bit about science these days, on a daily basis… even from people who should know better… and the science is different, depending upon if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.
I mean, really different. Not even close to the same.
That’s not a new development, though. Science has always been pretty accommodating for different folks. Like, back in the 1600s, when almost every scientist in Europe — except for Galileo and a couple of his wacky friends — knew that the sun rotated around the earth, and not vice versa.
And Jupiter definitely did not have moons.
Later on, some people wondered if maybe Galileo wasn’t crazy after all. But in the meantime, he was banned from Facebook, or whatever they called it back then.
From what I can gather, Galileo didn’t know about disorganized complexity because, back in the 1600s, people tried to keep science on the straight and narrow. You looked at real things, and measured them, and watched how they acted, and wrote scientific papers. Science was pretty simple.
But around 1900, scientists grew tired of discovering Jupiter’s moons and such things, and wanted to get into more complex thinking. So they invented the science of disorganized complexity.
This was around the same time they had invented atoms. They didn’t invent just a few atoms, though. There were atoms literally everywhere. Billions of them; trillions; gazillions, running here and there in a very disorganized fashion. And you couldn’t see an atom, running around; it was too small. But you could see how the atoms behaved in large groups.
That is, you could measure how atoms behaved statistically.
If you were trying to follow one particular atom around town… well, you couldn’t. But you could watch a whole bunch of them, and then figure out what they were doing on average.
Although the atoms were constantly running off in different directions, in their complex and disorganized way, a person who had studied calculus and algebra could create an equation that could accurately predict where, in town, the ‘average atom’ would be found at, say, 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon.
This system worked precisely because the complex group being studied was very large and very disorganized, and couldn’t be analyzed using the simple, straighforward way science had always analyzed things, up until then.
Of course, there is no such thing as an “average atom”, and everyone knows it. But scientists didn’t care about any particular atom — the color of his hair, his height, or what he ate for breakfast. They wanted to study statistical groups, because that was more fun.
And besides, you couldn’t study an individual atom. Impossible.
This new study of disorganized complexity pretty much turned science on its head. Up until that point, scientists had been studying real things, and real events. But when they realized they could make up complicated equations and make surprisingly accurate predictions about things that didn’t actually exist, it was like someone had turned on the lights.
Naturally, for the scientists who had been studying people — the psychologists and sociologists, who’d been having a devil of a time making any sense of how people think and act — this new ‘statistical science’ of disorganized complexity was like pennies from heaven. You no longer needed to understand a real person. You only needed to understand the “average person”, who doesn’t actually exist. Which made science so much easier, and at the same time, more impressive.
And who’s to tell, if you’re wrong?
It’s science via statistics. People who were once people became lines on a graph. Anyone can understand a line on a graph, right?
Understanding an actual person, as we all know, is impossible. Especially if you’re married to her.
Another thing they never taught me in school.
Or else, I forgot.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.