Chapter 20 on fiddling

When you're faced with any complex social system, like a city center or a hamster, and you feel like there's something in it that you're not happy with and want to fix, you can't just walk in and fix it.Doing so is unlikely to help it.Realizing this is one of the painfully depressing things about our century.This was illustrated mathematically by Joy Forrester, who used computers to simulate cities and made models to show that no matter what you suggest based on common sense, you will almost inevitably Make things worse instead of better.By tinkering with part of a complex system from the outside, you are almost certain to risk causing catastrophic events in some remote part that you did not expect.If you want to fix something, you first have to understand the whole system in detail.For very large systems, you cannot do this understanding without resorting to very large computers.Even when understood, the safest policy seems to be to stand aside and wave without touching it.

Intervention is the way to cause trouble. If so, this suggests a new approach to urban problems.This is suggested from the point of view of experimental pathology: perhaps, something went wrong, the result of someone trying to help. In this way, the problem is simplified.This means, instead of breaking in and changing things here and there, try to reach in cautiously and just drive out the intervener. Identifying, isolating and expelling troublemakers is the business of modern medicine, at least when it comes to correcting diseases caused by identifiable microorganisms.It is not too imaginative to compare a disintegrating city to a sick organism.Take syphilis, for example.In old medicine, a patient with advanced syphilis was a complex system malfunctioning before the microbial pathogenic mechanisms were identified.There isn't any single, separable cause.Back then, the medical approach was basically tinkering.Just imagine what would happen if we knew everything about modern medicine except microbial infections and spirochetes, and this comparison would be even more striking.We intervene in all kinds of things.Correction of thought disturbances due to paralysis by some group psychotherapy; heart plus aortic graft for cardiovascular syphilis; immunosuppressants prescribed to prevent autoimmune response in tabes dorsalis; removal of syphilitic tumors from liver ,etc.We may even suspect that there is tension at work in this particular "multifactorial" malaise, leading to proposals for "holistic" solutions, from changes in the family environment to White House Commission of Inquiry into the Effects of Air Pollution.If only in the past, we would be busy bleeding, cupping, and purging, as we did.Or draw amulets and chant spells, or dance to the gods in public like a shaman, and faint on the ground after a while.I can think of any method, in order to bring a glimmer of improvement to the whole body.

These are classic examples of medical intervention in the pre-science years.There is no doubt that most of these methods do more harm than good, with the possible exception of drawing amulets and reciting incantations. Of course, the problem of syphilis is now simple.Knowing for certain that spirochetes are troublemakers, all you have to do is reach across carefully and remove the microbe.If you can do this fast enough, the system will self-regulate and the problem will be solved automatically before the whole system is shaken to pieces. In social systems pathology, things are undoubtedly more complicated.There may not be just one troublemaker involved, there may be an entire group, and maybe an entire system of trouble permeating every aspect of the very system you're trying to fix.If so, then the problem is correspondingly more difficult, but there is still a solution, once you find out the fact of the intervention, it is solvable.

Some people may protest, saying that by doing this, I am compiling a new type of imaginary enemy list, assuming some external factors for some spontaneous pathological events.Don't complex social systems inherently fail spontaneously and without external causes?Consider the problem of overpopulation.Consider Calhoun's famous pattern.Those overcrowded rat populations, and their vicious sociopathy, are all a result of their own behavioral skewness.My answer is: no.You just have to find the troublemaker, in this case, Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will correct itself.The trouble with those rats is not that crowded rats have an inherent tendency to go wrong.Their trouble is the scientists who took the mice out of their vast world and put them in a box that was too small.

I don't know who the Calhouns in New York City are, but it seems to me that there's a no-brainer suggestion to find them, identify them, and get rid of them cleanly.Without them and their intervention, the system works well, maybe not perfectly, but it's okay to live in it. There is a long list of diseases that medically call "idiopathic," meaning we don't know what causes them.Now, the list is much shorter than it used to be.A hundred years ago, common infectious diseases such as typhoid fever and tuberculous encephalitis were classified as primary diseases.Originally, when the term first entered the medical language, it had a highly theoretical significance, unlike it does now.It was believed at the time that most human disease was primary, due to a defect in this or that interior, something wrong with some kind of bodily fluid. The word "primary", as the name suggests, refers to a disease that has its own roots, a disease that is primary and does not have any external cause.With the development of medical science, especially the development of medicine in this century, the number of such diseases has become less and less, so the term has lost its original dogmatic meaning.We now use the term primary to simply refer to the fact that the cause of a particular disease is not known.It is very likely that before we end our relationship with medical science, with luck, we will find that all kinds of diseases are the result of some kind of mischief, and that there will never be any primary diseases again.

With time, and with a little more luck, the same will happen in the social sciences.