The Illinois Model

My wife and I love to travel. It's common for us to arrive in a strange country or new city with little more than hotel reservations for the first and last nights of our trip. We approach travel by doing extensive planning, but making few plans. Rather than being pinned down to a single, specific timeline or route, we prefer to stay as flexible, adaptable as possible. 

There seems to be a general feeling in complex adaptive systems community that complexity is a negative thing. Maybe I am biased in my sensing this, as I do associate with a narrow sub-culture in the greater complex adaptive system community. Maybe I am reading it all wrong. But I perceive a theme where adaptability relates to a preoccupation with failure, pessimism, and hardship. 

Adaptability seems to be often discussed in the context of how to handle problems or hardships. The bulk of conversations revolve around making adjustments when solutions or interventions aren't "working" and being resilient i…

Question everything! Unless it originated in academia - in which case it’s a protected, off-limits, sacred, golden calf. 
Has society gone mad in demanding “evidence” or “proof” at such a rate and intensity? 
The world is infinitely complex, unpredictable, unstable, unknowable. There are limitless, emergent variables, with so much interplay, tension, and interdependence between them, that research can, at best, only identify loose clusters and relationships between them. In this realm, science may be able to give us a broad, fuzzy, incomplete image of the landscape. 
This isn’t to say everything is volatile, dynamic, and complex. Certain aspects do have a tighter/closed-loopedness, linearity, complication, measurability, finiteness to them. (Consider pharmaceutical trials in the medical field or interview & interrogation psychology - working within the constraints of the human body and mind.) This is where science and research give us not only a terrain map, but suggestive routes alo…