Being fond of questions of human behavior as well as aspects of mathematical modeling (with a keen awareness of its assumptions and limitations), I often ponder the relationship between our behavior as individuals and the larger systems of which we are a part. While we might think that our behavior will be mirrored on a one-to-one basis in the larger world, this is not the way that things work. In fact, what we find in life is that the aggregation of individual decisions creates a larger reality that is much different than any of us really want, because small biases lead to vastly more biased realities. We might think of this as an arcane subject lacking any kind of practical relevance, but such aggregate matters, where the end result of individual choices is a reality far different than any of us would choose on our own is not all that hard to imagine at all.

A good example of this comes in the case of segregation in housing. A research named Thomas Schelling found out in the early 1970’s, in an early use of mathematical modeling, that if a person desired to have slightly more than 50% of their neighbors be like them (which is not a great deal of bias), then the end result would be near total segregation across a larger population, even though none of the people were all that racist, largely because the small bias of people would lead them to flee areas where they were in a minority until there were only uniform blocs of people across the entire population. Even very tolerant people, who only desired about a third of others to be like them (which is remarkably tolerant) would end up being in populations where about 70% of the entire population was segregated. This suggests that we are not as biased as the larger segregation of our world would suggest, but it also suggests that to create a world that is as tolerant towards others as we would wish that at least a few of us must be people of extremely high acceptance of others to overcome the barriers of age, ethnicity, or the other factors that so easily divide us.

Often aggregation models are used by computer programmers with the thought that they present aspects of self-organization. The premise is straightforward enough. We set up an initial condition with simple rules, and the end result can be incredibly complex. At the superficial level, it can appear that this sort of phenomenon represents self-organization, in that there can be complexity without a designer. Of course, this is quite false, as there is design present in several ways that are not often recognized by the intelligent designers of these supposed “self-organized” phenomenon in the first place. First of all, we need to have a field where phenomena exist and can act. Then we need to design initial conditions to set into motion. Then, we need rules (which can be simple) for these particular conditions to move forward in time. These are all aspects of design, creating realms, initial conditions, and rules of behavior. Of course, once these have been created, we can achieve certain predictable outcomes without any sort of tampering, based on predictable outcomes. If we want interesting results, then we would need some level of interdependency where our actions would depend on the actions of others, and the result of that interdependency would be apparent randomness or complexity. As many aspects of our life and world are interesting, it would appear as if many of our behaviors are interdependent on others, rather than being independent.

These sorts of phenomenon, and many like them, suggest that if we want to understand the world around us, we cannot merely ponder ourselves or others in isolation, but rather as part of larger pictures. The larger fields of which we are a part add a great deal of complexity to our lives because we act not only in response to our own internal wishes and preferences but also in response to the behaviors and expressed feelings and opinions of others. In the absence of clear knowledge of ourselves and others, we are left to make the best guesses possible on what we wish and are willing to accept, as well as how others feel and what they are willing to permit. It is little wonder in such situations that we bungle as much as we do, and a wonder indeed if we ever get matters right at all to begin with, when there are so many ways to go wrong.