<i>I try to get them to vote for someone that can inch us to the future they want to see.</i><p>I don&#x27;t mean to get too political. But I want to point out the widespread fallacy that our increasing scientific understanding of the world around us will somehow enable us to engineer a better social order.<p>Things like society and the economy are emergent phenomena. They&#x27;re incredibly complex, involving (literally) countless forces that tug at various phenomena in unforeseeable ways. Because of their distributed nature, it&#x27;s impossible for any entity to have access to the entire set of data that the system is operating on, and thus impossible to direct it with any confidence. And because of its vast interconnectivity, its also impossible for us to make changes to its infrastructure without changing the effects of those forces.<p>The complexity of these things is no less than the complexity of the human organism. It seems pretty well accepted that it would be absurd folly to engineer changes into that organism; even tweaking around the margins is fraught. We should be every bit as wary of meddling with the operation of our society or economy.