👋 Hello friends,

Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring:

Small Changes, Big Consequences in Complex Systems

Key Question: Given the world’s complexities, how do inputs into the system affect the system?

Thesis: A small change introduced into any layer of the hierarchy of the world can produce outsized and often unpredictable results. Although most of these small changes have a negligible impact within the systems they are introduced into, through a volume effect, a handful of these small changes can randomly lead to large consequences.

Credit Wild Iris Marketing

Before we begin: Brainwaves arrives in your inbox every other Wednesday, exploring venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and beyond. I write as a curious explorer rather than an expert, and I value your insights and perspectives on each subject.

Time to Read: 25 minutes.

Let’s dive in!

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- Anonymous (1629)

The future actively shapes our lives. Historically, the way humans have thought about and approached the future has been flawed. Futures Thinking is a modern approach to the future, rethinking how humans think about and approach the future.

Rather than trying to predict specific future events, Futures Thinking encourages a shift in how we conceptualize the future itself—drawing on diverse cultural perspectives, foundational world characteristics, deep modern literature reviews, and recognizing that our present actions and narratives significantly influence future outcomes. Since most major life decisions are essentially bets on the future, adopting this framework could transform how we approach education, careers, relationships, and other essential aspects of life.

Today, our discussion revolves around how our world is set up and how these underlying characteristics shape everything that goes on in the world, specifically focusing on Futures Thinking Tenet #2: In complex systems, small changes can cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseeable outcomes.

Credit ACUPFUL

DINOSAUR KILLING ASTEROIDS - VOLCANOS FIT UNDERLYING CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORLD - BLACK SWANS AND UNSEEN SWANS

Liking dinosaurs never goes out of style—from toy figures when you were young to the prehistoric history of dinosaurs in school to Jurassic Park movies when you’re older—dinosaurs are cool no matter what age you are.

Long ago, archeological digs uncovered massive skeletons hidden in the earth, many of which now adorn natural history museums, providing viewers with awe and wonder. I recently saw the dinosaur pictured above during spring break—inspiring thoughts of curiosity and a slight bit of fear.

Despite some scientists’ best efforts, dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, succumbing to what most characterize as a “mass extinction.”

For the first ~175 million years of their existence, dinosaurs properly evolved to fit their environments (and any environmental changes). In this system, dinosaurs that failed to adapt to changes in their environment went extinct. But 66 million years ago, over a relatively short time, all dinosaurs, except for birds, went extinct.

Around this time, the number of dinosaur species was already declining, but many scientists estimate that some “catastrophic” event—something that caused rapid negative changes to the environment more quickly than dinosaurs could adapt—was the cause of this extinction. Scientists estimate that around 75% of life on Earth went extinct during this time.

Possibility #1: Asteroid/Meteor

Also known as the Alvarez hypothesis (named after Luis Alvarez and Walter Alvarez), in 1980, these scientists proposed the theory that a meteor the size of a large mountain hit Earth, filling the atmosphere with gas, dust, and debris that dramatically altered the climate.

A high amount of iridium in the sedimentary layer during this period provides some evidence for this theory, as iridium is rare in Earth’s crust but abundant in meteorites. In addition, scientists found a huge impact crater on the coast of Mexico, around 93 miles wide, which is about the right size and age to account for the extinction of dinosaurs.

Possibility #2: Volcano

Other scientists say that the evidence for a massive meteor impact is still inconclusive, instead favoring an Earth-based explanation. Ancient lava flows in India have matched nicely with this period, with massive outpourings of lava spewing around 60-65 million years ago. Today, the volcanic rock covers around 200,000 square miles in layers that are up to 6,000 feet thick.

These eruptions would have filled the skies with carbon dioxide and other gases, which would have dramatically changed Earth’s climate. Furthermore, evidence suggests that the Earth’s temperature was changing before the proposed meteor impact, leading to increased volcanic activity.

These two theories (an asteroid vs. volcanic eruptions), along with many other less popular explanations, discuss one of the biggest anomalies in the history of the world.

I use the word anomaly not because this event was unpredicted and had a massive impact (although those both could be argued to be true) but because it contradicts in part what I would consider one of the foundational principles for how our world works.

Futures Thinking Tenet #2 states:

In complex systems, small changes can cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseeable outcomes.

In How to Teach Your Kids About the World, discussing Futures Thinking Tenet #1, we established that our world is an incredibly complex system full of interconnected and interdependent factors.

Given those characteristics of the world, small changes introduced into the world can cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseen outcomes.

How do dinosaurs play into all of this?

The first major explanation for their extinction, a large meteor causing major debris to be in the air, is an exception to this tenet’s theory. As theorized, a large change introduced into the world (here meaning a meteorite) caused disproportionate and unforeseen outcomes.

This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with this theory—it’s a discussion of how this is an exception (once in about ~100 million years) and isn’t the rule for how our world traditionally works.

Instead, the other major explanation for the dinosaurs’ extinction—a large series of volcanic eruptions—aligns more with the fundamental properties of the world.

To remind everyone who may have slept through their introductory science classes, tectonic plate movements invite the ideal circumstances for volcanoes to form. These shifts are imperceptible over a human lifetime (1-6 inches per year), but over millions of years, they become very significant.

The borders between tectonic plates form fault lines. It’s along these fault lines that convenient pathways are formed for magma to reach the surface.

Small changes, in this case, inches, potentially caused a disproportionate and massive outcome—the elimination of 75% of life on Earth.

These contrasting explanations for the extinction of dinosaurs offer a valuable lens through which to examine Tenet #2. The asteroid theory, while compelling, posits a relatively singular, massive input leading to dramatic and unforeseen outcomes.

In contrast, the volcanic eruption theory elegantly demonstrates how seemingly insignificant, continuous changes—here, the slow creep of tectonic plates—can accumulate over time to trigger events with disproportionate impacts.

This highlights a critical insight for Futures Thinking (which we’ll touch on in later articles): while we often focus on identifying potential “black swan” events (asteroids), it is equally vital to recognize the power of gradual, interconnected changes that can build towards significant and often unpredictable tipping points.

Credit One Tree Planted

THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE BIGGEST RAINFOREST - ECOLOGICAL NESTED HIERARCHIES - REVISITING THE PACE LAYERS FRAMEWORK THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE

When most people think about the Amazon rainforest, they think of the National Geographic pictures and videos with vast green forests, monkeys, colorful birds, predators, and many other species (similar to the picture above).

The Rainforest Foundation states:

For centuries, many people in the Western world believed the Amazon to be an unpopulated and untouched forest. This has never been entirely true. Recent research reveals that the Amazon has been managed by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

Scientists estimate that the first human settlements in the Amazon rainforest developed around 32,000 to 39,000 years ago.

These early nomads were primarily hunter-gatherers, living on local game such as fish, turtles, capybara, and crocodiles, using blowguns, poison arrows, and spears to hunt.

While much of the soil in the Amazon has low nutrient density (and as such isn’t great for agriculture), the hunter-gatherers found they could deliberately cultivate nutrient-rich dark earths across generations to maintain their nutrient capacity for centuries. This began the start of early agrarian societies in the Amazon.

Studies have shown that many of the dominant tree species in the Amazon—cassava, sweet potato, cocoa, pineapple, and some other species—are the result of selective cultivation over thousands of years.

Indigenous peoples not only shaped the forest through biodiversity and soil fertility but also built structures such as roads, canals, and platforms. Contrary to previous belief, the Amazon was a center of technological innovation.

When early European explorers first arrived in South America, about 6-8 million indigenous people were living throughout the Amazon rainforest. Unfortunately, this European contact brought devastating epidemics (smallpox), which spread rapidly across the rainforest, far outpacing the settlers’ advances throughout the region.

Communities living close to the rivers were the first to be affected, as colonists used these routes to travel throughout the region. Indigenous people living inside the forests were initially spared much of the worst aspects of this European onslaught.

In the late 1600s and early 1700s, gold deposits were found in Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony at that point. As soon as word got back to the coast that vast deposits of gold had been discovered, a wave of people of all types descended upon inland Brazil, including around 400,000 Portuguese transplants and 500,000 African slaves.

The shift from agricultural production to mining led to widespread disruption in Brazil. Between 1697 and 1701, Brazil experienced two famines, prices rose everywhere, and the whole country felt the effects of the gold rush.

Portuguese explorers tried to find gold far and wide, leading to thousands (and maybe millions) of acres of land being cleared via digging, dredging, and washing away soil. In addition, areas around the gold rush were cleared to create farmland to provide enough food for the famines and the additional settlers in the region.

Similarly, in the 1880s and beyond, there was a rubber boom in Brazil, leading to very similar conditions. The popularization of bicycles in the 1870s and the invention of the automobile in the late 1880s drastically increased demand.

Until the 1970s, access to the interior of the forest was largely challenging due to the lack of established roads. In 1972, the Trans-Amazonian Highway was built, 4,000 km of road, the third longest highway in Brazil.

A military dictatorship in the 1960s started the project because they wanted to guarantee control over the remote regions of the rainforest while encouraging economic growth using the natural resources in the region.

This infrastructure development, while beneficial for travel and transport in the region, also dramatically escalated deforestation activities.

Credit ResearchGate

Colonists began establishing farms within the forest in the 1960s (and later continued to do so - aided by the highway). Their farming practices relied on the slash and burn method, but the infertile soil prevented them from achieving long-term success, leaving many patches of forest bare.

After a brief decrease, illegal deforestation efforts increased in 2015 as the demand for products like palm oil and soy dramatically increased.

Throughout more modern history, it seems like every century in Brazil, the settlers continued to follow new trends (gold, rubber, palm oil, etc.). Unfortunately, the environment took a heavy toll with each new wave.

Reports estimate that Brazil has lost 20% of its rainforest to deforestation. When trees are cut down, tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Due to the mass deforestation, Brazil has been one of the world’s biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Besides being a tragic set of events, what can we learn from the Amazon’s complicated history? How does this have anything to do with Futures Thinking?

Firstly, as you can see, small changes introduced into the Amazon environment produced an outsized impact: introducing new people and their diseases, finding a small gold deposit, developing new technologies for rubber, building a road, etc. Each one of these small changes led to an unforeseen direct impact in that time (famines, wealth inequality, slavery), not to mention the long-term impact of their actions (climate change - we’ll discuss more below).

In the discussion of Tenet #1, we talked about how nature is an incredibly complex, interconnected web of factors:

Nature, as witnessed throughout the above, is a great example of nested hierarchies.

Nested hierarchies describe systems where smaller components are contained within larger ones, creating a series of levels (a series of groups within groups). Along the nature theme, you probably learned about classification and taxonomy systems in your biology class (pictured below):

Credit Wikipedia

In nature, the forest ecosystem has many nested levels, individual plants and animals, populations, communities, and the overall forest. Similarly, in the example above of the Amazon rainforest, you can see how indigenous peoples had their own tiny systems, which bundled up into regional and then a forest-wide system.

Bringing us full circle, when a small change was introduced into the Amazon (finding a gold deposit or introducing a new disease), the resulting impacts affected each layer of the nested hierarchy.

Similarly, as we’ve seen in many regions of the world, the introduction of an invasive species (insect, fish, etc.) can have cascading effects throughout the entire system.

This concept of nested hierarchies is very similar to our discussion of Pace Layers, where nature is the base layer, then culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce, and finally fashion.

In the Pace Layer framework, each layer influences the layers around it (above and below), forming a complex up-and-down nested hierarchy.

When I wrote the Tenet #1 article about Pace Layers, all I could think about was how climate change fit into all of that, but it didn’t fit into the conversation we were having—but it does here.

Climate change, in my opinion, is the perfect example of how small changes can cause a large impact in complex systems.

It’s highly debated, but most scientists think that the start of climate change began sometime in the 1800s. When human society began to industrialize (via the Industrial Revolution), the chemistry of the atmosphere began to change through the addition of CO2.

Granted, some amount of climate change can be attributed to natural phenomena. Volcanic eruptions (as previously discussed), fluctuations in solar radiation, tectonic shifts, and even small changes in our orbits have had observable effects on planetary warming and cooling patterns.

However, today’s global warming is happening much faster than before. Natural causes are still at play, but their influence is too small, or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades.

The current climate change is a mix of many human causes—all summing up to create the chaos that we’re currently dealing with. Below is a summary of some of the smaller systems that come together to form the larger system of climate change:

1) The invention and popularization of fossil-fuel-powered cars, trucks, ships, and planes have led to a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions.

2) As of 2021, 60% of the electricity used in the U.S. comes from burning fossil fuels.

3) The factories and facilities producing our goods, specifically a small set of carbon-intensive products such as basic chemicals, iron, steel, cement, aluminum, glass, and paper—all products which are incredibly widespread today.

4) Modern agricultural practices give off large amounts of nitrous oxide and methane, expanded through the adoption of chemical fertilizers and poor crop management practices.

5) As touched on in the Amazon example above, deforestation efforts reduce the amount of trees present to remove CO2 and simultaneously cause carbon dioxide from the decay.

6) Even the systems in our homes and buildings (heating, cooling, cooking, appliances, etc.) account for a large amount of carbon emissions.

Even though climate change is technically just a nature layer phenomenon, its effects (via the Pace Layers framework) can be felt throughout all of the other layers.

Small changes across these smaller systems cause a large impact within them, and, worse, these larger changes within these systems cause even bigger changes on a worldwide scale.

Climate change is forcing shifts in cultural values and beliefs. There’s a growing awareness of environmental responsibilities, leading to changes in consumption patterns and lifestyles. Cultural clashes come from the different ways each society is affected by climate change and how they respond to these effects.

Governments around the world continue to grapple with climate change through policies, regulations, and international agreements. Climate change policies on the world scale have experienced much friction as countries fail to create cohesive global views on the solution.

The infrastructure layer has had to adapt to withstand extreme weather changes with higher highs and lower lows. This includes reinforcing coastal defenses, upgrading energy grids, and developing resilient transportation systems. Often, the infrastructure layer is being destroyed at a faster rate than it’s being built.

Climate change has transformed our commerce habits, with a growing demand for renewable energy devices (electric vehicles), sustainable products, and climate-resilient investment opportunities. Huge economic shocks are caused by climate change-related disasters.

Fashion has reflected the broader shift to environmental awareness with sustainable clothing practices, eco-friendly shipping practices, and an emphasis on pre-owned clothes.

Credit Britannica

MANY SMALL CHANGES ARE IMPERCEPTIBLE TO MOST PEOPLE - A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE 2008 CRASH - SMALL DOSES OF MISINFORMATION SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE

Often, we don’t notice the effects of the small changes while they’re happening. Usually, the signs are only noticeable in hindsight.

Would the Wright Brothers, after their 1903 first flight, have thought that their technology would have revolutionized the world? Probably.

Would the Wright Brothers have thought their technology would lead to the biggest world shutdown in modern history? Definitely not.

Yet, these two events are incredibly interconnected, even though they’re over a century apart.

After their initial flight in 1903, within 2 years, the Wright Brothers’ airplane was capable of fully controllable, stable flight for substantial periods. Over the next 5-10 years, other groups around the globe continued to build on the design, adding features and technological improvements.

World War I was the first war to see airplanes tested as weapons of surveillance, bombing, and dogfighting. Following the war, in 1919, Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic ocean for the first time. In the same year, the first international commercial flights took place between the United States and Canada. Instantly, the world became much more accessible.

In World War II, airplanes were present in each battle, a key portion of military strategy. Around this time, the first jet aircraft, developed by the Germans in 1939, was tested. The first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, was introduced in 1952, and the Boeing 707 began in 1958.

Large-scale mass-commercialization of popular airplane developers (Boeing, Airbus) characterized the following few decades.

The famous 2000 Concorde crash and the 2001 September 11th attacks emphasized some of the negative aspects of airplane technology. The next two decades were majorly muted in airplane developments.

Leading into the 2020s, around 4.5B passengers traveled by airplane. On average, 1 in every 2 people traveled by airplane per year (many people traveled more than once). Now, it only takes 7 hours to get from New York to London. Global travel and tourism have never been more popular.

Unfortunately, those small changes made over the preceding century proved a perfect breeding ground for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The image below shows the number of airplane passengers over time (showing the large effect of the pandemic).

Credit ICAO

Granted, this tunnel-vision fueled view of the factors leading up to and popularizing the pandemic isn’t comprehensive, as other factors such as the increase in number of cars, the development of trains and other mass transport methods, the popularization of concerts & other mass gatherings, the lack of proper preventative health protocols, and much more influenced and led to the exacerbated effects of the pandemic.

Looking back, it’s easy to understand that these factors combined to form the perfect scenario for a worldwide pandemic, but while these advancements were occurring, very few would have seen the signs of what was to come.

Relating to Tenet #2, the small change in our example would be the introduction of the COVID-19 strain into a small portion of the globe, leading to a global pandemic and a “once-in-a-lifetime” shutdown.

Another example of these majorly unobserved small changes leading to a humongous change is the 2008 stock market crash.

Most people remember many of the intricate details from their lives during the 2007-2009 stock market crash. You’ve read about it in books, on the news, in biographies, and you've even seen the crash portrayed in movies (Inside Job, Margin Call, The Big Short, Too Big to Fail, etc.).

You’ve heard people say the “cause” was sub-prime mortgages or was the collapse of Lehman Brothers or tens of other key events.

I was ~5 when these events took place, so I don’t claim to be an expert on what happened or who was to blame. However, the events leading up to the crash, during, and following the crash seem to follow our model of the world very nicely.

As you may know or could imagine, the financial system is a very complex, interconnected, interdependent entity. As such, given our Tenet #2 framework, when a small change is introduced into that framework, it could have no impact (as most small changes do), or it could cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseeable outcomes.

Was there just 1 small change introduced into the system that led to the 2008 financial crisis?

I don’t think so. I think there were probably hundreds of small changes that produced compounding effects. The Wikipedia page on the 2008 Financial Crisis lists the following factors as causes of the bubble and subsequent crash:

• Subprime lending
• Growth of the housing bubble
• Easy credit conditions
• Weak and fraudulent underwriting practices
• Predatory lending
• Deregulation and lack of regulation
• Increased debt burden or overleveraging
• Financial innovation and complexity
• Incorrect pricing of risk
• Boom and collapse of the shadow banking system
• Commodity prices
• The global savings glut
• Systemic crisis of capitalism
• Wrong banking mode: Resilience of credit unions

It’s easy to see nested hierarchies in effect here. For instance, small changes over time in global commodity prices could cause ripple effects throughout the commodity markets. Once the commodity market experienced major ripples, that caused ripples (small ripples in the grand scheme of all finance things) throughout the greater financial market, which in turn built into larger and larger ripples across the world.

In addition, network effects can increase the exponentiality of these changes, as showcased by the recent trends in social media.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the network effect refers to any situation in which the value (or perceived value) of a product, service, or platform depends on the number of buyers, sellers, consumers, or users who are leveraging it. The greater the number of these people interacting with the product/service, the greater the network effect.

This can result in a snowball effect—using the example of social media: more users lead to more content, which leads to more users, which leads to more content, and so on.

In a large network, a small change can filter across the network quickly, leading to larger outcomes more quickly than in an environment without network effects. As we’ve seen throughout social media, this rapid compounding effect can be very good or can lead to negative circumstances.

When the Titan submersible tourist vehicle imploded on its way to view the wreckage of the Titanic in 2023, the massive spectacle caught media attention from around the globe.

Unfortunately, rescue attempts failed. Only 7 days later, a video on TikTok claimed to be the screams of the passengers in their final moments. In the following 10 days, the video amassed ~5M viewers.

However, the audio was fake, coming from the video game series Five Nights at Freddy’s. But the TikTok went viral fast, and it spread much further than the fact-checked truths.

This is a perfect example of misinformation, which is defined as incorrect or misleading information. Sometimes, misinformation can be as simple as an error in reporting, a “human mistake.” Other times, misinformation content is purposefully exaggerated (like the above example), using clickbait headlines or out-of-context quotes or details to make a story more inviting.

The move towards social media as a main source of news has allowed misinformation to rapidly penetrate the online environment. As you’ve probably seen, anyone with a social media account can become a “news” source.

The goal of social media—at least for influencers and those looking to become popular/famous—is to go viral, with your content being seen by as many people as possible. Unfortunately, what trends well on social media are not fact-checked, primary sources of research and diligent reporting.

Researchers at MIT have found that fake news, combined with the network effects of social media, can be immensely powerful, spreading up to 10x faster than true reporting.

Something as small as a quick video on a potential “cure” for COVID-19 can end up going viral, potentially leading to unforeseen (and potentially large) consequences for those who follow the “cure”, thinking it was actually scientific information.

Traditional events, as you’ve seen in the above examples of the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 stock market crash, took years/months/weeks to have all of the pieces come into place before the steep part of the exponential curve was hit and the world came crashing down.

Here, with social media network effects and with other network effects, that timeline gets sped up to a matter of weeks/days/hours, or even minutes sometimes.

Credit New England Complex Systems Institute

UNPREDICTABLE CHANGES THROUGHOUT OUR WORLD - STOCK MARKET RETURN ABNORMALITIES - CONTROL AND ORGANIZATION OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan, “the world moves by large incremental random changes.”

As we’ve seen through the examples above, in most cases, the effects of these small changes are unpredictable—or as Taleb puts it, “random.” The randomness is present in the fact that we can’t determine which incremental changes will be the ones to cause these large outcomes.

Most small changes will cause a negligible impact. A select few, however, due to the properties of complex systems, could cause immense repercussions.

Similarly, Taleb discusses how “it is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks.” This has been especially prevalent in the stock market over the last 30 years. From 1995 to 2024, throughout the 7,500+ trading days, the 10 best days make up ~50% of the returns.

10 days out of 7,500!

A key to the effect of these “shocks” is a system-wide decentralized control. Decentralized control signifies a system where control and decision-making are distributed among multiple independent agents rather than being concentrated in a single central authority. In a decentralized system, interactions are primarily local, occurring between neighboring components.

There isn’t one person or even a small group of people controlling the system that is our world. You may be tempted to say the G7 leaders, to which I would say they have a semi-large effect, but they definitely do not have absolute or even major control over the worldwide system.

This decentralization is why changes are “random.” If there was just one person with control over the entire system, whenever they would make a change, we would know, we would be watching—it wouldn’t be truly random.

For instance, continuing our nature theme above, a forest ecosystem isn’t managed by a single “controller.” Instead, it’s a complex web of interactions between countless individual organisms: trees, plants, insects, fungi, mammals, etc. Each organism acts based on its own needs and local environment.

Decentralized control often facilitates self-organization. Self-organization is the process by which a system spontaneously forms patterns and structures without external direction. It arises from the interactions between the system’s components.

These interactions have 3 key characteristics:

• Emergent Behavior: Complex patterns arising from simple local interactions, to be covered in Tenet #5
• Positive and Negative Feedback: Mechanisms driving the formation of patterns
• Fluctuations: Random variations (as we’ve been discussing) can trigger the emergence of new structures

An example of self-organization within a complex system would be the activities of birds. Each bird follows simple, local rules based on its immediate neighbors: staying close to their neighbors, avoiding colliding with their neighbors, and steering in the same direction as its neighbors. The behavior of the entire group arises solely from these local interactions between individuals—no leader is dictating the overall movement.

I was reading an article by Jerry Neumann, professor at Columbia University and one of the “100 best early-stage investors” according to Business Insider, this morning and this quote by William Gaddis in his article Strategy Under Attack stuck out to me: “Inherent instability—’chaos’—within complex systems influences the behavior of the systems.”

This inherent instability is based on the fact that everything within complex systems fundamentally changes—the only constant is change. Complex systems, as we’ve already discussed at length, are characterized by a large number of interconnected components. When everything changes in a complex system, the interdependencies compound these changes, creating “chaos” within the system.

As you have seen and as we’ll discuss more in Tenet #3, many complex systems exhibit nonlinear behavior, meaning that the output is not proportional to the input. This nonlinearity is a key source of instability and unpredictability (we’ll discuss more in Tenet #5).

To summarize all of the above:

In complex systems, small changes can cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseeable outcomes, empowered by nested hierarchies, network effects, decentralized control, and the self-organizational behavior of these systems.

In my opinion, 3 key lessons drop out of this complicated discussion:

1) Harping on what I discussed in Tenet #1, understanding these cascading effects is crucial for navigating today’s interconnected world and will be a crucial foundation for our future discussions of uncertainty, prediction, and next steps.

2) There is a hidden ethical dimension to this discussion, one I haven’t touched on at all, but I’ll briefly summarize here: How does responsibility work when small actions have outsized consequences? How do ethics play into decentralized control and self-organization?

3) Lastly, there’s a complicated paradox of influence within complex systems. We simultaneously have more and less control than we imagine. Our actions can cause immense outcomes, yet someone else’s actions can exponentially impact our lives at a moment’s notice.

There’s way more to discuss here—this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Congrats, we’ve made it through Tenet #2. Hope you enjoyed it. Please give me any feedback you have—happy to clarify or elaborate further on anything discussed.

In future articles, we’re going to dive deeper into the ramifications of these complex, interconnected systems, starting with Tenet #3:

The world progresses exponentially rather than linearly.

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That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.

Thanks for reading,

Drew Jackson

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