[wellpast]

> The Entanglement is a term from the computer scientist Danny Hillis, referring to a new era of technology that we find ourselves in, where no single individual can possibly understand what we ourselves have constructed. In other words, when even the experts are unable to fully grasp a system that they might have been themselves involved in the construction of, we are in a new era of incomprehensibility.

This is not a phenomenon of just cities or other large societal systems. In my experience, this is already true for many a single company.

[jandrese]

It's true for life in general. It is a rare luxury to have and understand all of the information before being asked to make a decision. This is why fields like economics have traditionally been poor predictors of actual human activity, they assume an ideal that is rarely true.

[NTDF9]

Reminds me of the trope that the choice should ALWAYS be left with consumers. Every consumer is a 'rational actor'. Reality is most humans have too many things going on, too many choices with not adequate info and are emotional actors.

[devereaux]

Yet solutions emerge, even if individual agents have zero intelligence

http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Gode%20and%20Sunder-JP...

Your lack of belief in the force of the free hand is troubling, especially when it can be proved by computer models and reality.

[coddingtonbear]

To clarify for the person you've responded to: the problem with humans isn't exactly that we individually have _too little_ intelligence, it's that the heuristics we have evolved to use for compensating for missing information include a great deal of bias. This results in the very-well-documented lack of rational actors in the real world.

[scsilver]

Not to mention the distortion of rationality created by advertising.

[tdy721]

That is a great term. I believe it can also be extended to devices like modern computers. They are now complex enough that no single person can understand all the parts of the system. Now I have a word for it, thanks!