Wretchard,

Your blog post reminded me of the comment years ago by Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer who said “the problem I have with all these recent seminary graduates is not that they don’t have all the answers but that they don’t even know what the questions are.” The casual confidence of the greenies and the Obamatrons that they are more competent and more virtuous reminds me of nothing so much as the old Mickey Mouse cartoon “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in which Mickey dabbled in things about which he had no understanding.

The calm, casual, confident (not to say “cool”) demeanor projected by the current majority party and its leaders was probably not bluff but ignorance.

The problem with complex distributed systems, as you point out, is that the visible phenomena they exhibit are very often hard to understand. I once gave a lecture to the Amazon.com engineering organization called “Superstitious Architectures: How to avoid them”. The point of the lecture was that for any system that is large and complex, human nature strongly tempts us to form superstitious views of the underlying cause of visible pathologies. And we’re strongly tempted to react based on our superstition because that is often easier than undertaking the painstaking work of diagnosing the root causes. But the results of such superstitious approaches “fixing” things are almost always “unexpected”.

There may be no more complex distributed systems than economies or eco-systems but we seem to be led (ruled?) by people who have no idea what the questions are, blithely assuming their very limited understanding is comprehensive.

What we seem to have during our time is an alarming lack of the humility that embraces the learnings of the past and recognizes the urgent need for learning going forward.

We have a President and Congress who are flailing in their superstitions, lashing out at ghosts and goblins and being astonished by the unexpected.