On the "most important issue"

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing things with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century.... You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand ... the whole system ... Intervening is a way of causing trouble. (Lewis Thomas, 1974)

An earlier post on "magic dice" showed an example where each
one of four dice could generally beat another one, and yet there
was no overall "best" one.

Strange as it seems, the concept "best" only really works where
things have a single dimension, such as cost, for comparison.

Where things are much more multi-dimensional, there often
is no "best", even though, taken two at a time, it is clear which
one is "better".

That is, a whole series of "betters" does not have to add up to
having a "best" at one end. Instead of a "stack" of betters, there
can be a necklace, or loop of "betters, as in the dice example.
The staircase below, by M.C. Escher, is such a loop.

Any 2 or 3 stairs next to each other make perfect sense, and yet,
somehow, the overall sense of "above" and "below" fails. The
"error" is extremely subtle and hard to point to.

Here's another example of such a loop: We know water flows "downhill",
right? Trace out the water flow as far as you can and find the lowest spot.







So in real life, even though you may be able to tell which
house / date / candidate / investment is "better" than
another, you may still not be able to conclude which one
is "best" because, in reality, there is no such thing as "best".

This partly explains why there is so much trouble picking
the "Most Important" problems to work on, even when the
problems are disconnected from each other.

Sadly, in the real world, the problems are more like parts
of a huge mobile, and even touching one to work on it shifts
all the others around crazily.

These interlocked problems do not yield to the typical
"scientific" approach of "divide and conquer". There is
no "most important part" of such a "system."

Like 200 holes in the bottom of the boat, there are
no "three best" to plug. Solving 3 of 200 doesn't
actually ward off disaster.



(Image above, Ascending and Descending, 1960 M.C. Escher )