Stability and humility

The current political insanity tempts mathematicians, scientists and engineers to advocate well-reasoned, quantitative solutions to human problems trivial, crucial and existential.

My unhappiness with politics lead me to the tautology:

• A stable political system will not change.

This explains a system I find objectively horrible and irrational. Enough elements contribute to its survival and few enough elements pressure it to change. (Certainly my discontent is too small to shift society.) This tautology is dangerously analogous to Newton's first law: an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by an outside force. There are a variety of physical analogs: phase change, crystal fracture, etc., and mathematical models: finite automata, game theory, etc., which could be plausibly applied to studying how humans organize and how they should organize.

Mathematicians, scientists and engineers should squash the urge to shape society rationally like a bug.

Scientifically directed political movements have a horrible history: eugenics and communism are two shining examples. Our models are marginally sufficient to describe physics, overwhelmed by biology and completely inadequate for understanding human complexity. Giving approximations and analogies the force of law is a recipe for disaster.

Yet I cannot argue that we should direct human affairs by random intuition. Clearly, careful deliberation, precedence and structure form a successful society's basis. However, there must be room for intuition, dissent and clemency in any pleasant society.

I find the intuitive nature of traditional medicine disturbing. Evidence-based medicine appeals to me, but data is not available in sufficient quantities to guide every decision that a doctor makes. I have also found medical school and residency to be pointlessly cruel and counter to creative inquiry. A friend of mine argued against this view. The point of medical training is to expose doctors to a huge variety of conditions, diseases, treatments and outcome. The hope is that 15 years later when a patient presents with a puzzling symptom, your memory will be jogged back to a case and treatment that you witnessed as a student. As another friend told me, "You are creating a human neural net." The human capacity to do some tasks better than machines is astounding.

I suspect successful politicians are another human neural net. They have learned how to read humanity and to direct it toward an objective. Mathematicians, scientists and engineers don't have the same expert knowledge, and that is likely why our political solutions fail.