A few posts down, I wrote about the herd instinct – how it’s a rational response to limited knowledge. I would like to write a little now about how that intersects with chaos.
What I mean here is chaos in the mathematical sense – which is different from randomness. Randomness means that things aren’t predictable. Chaos (in the mathematical sense) is predictable on the micro scale – each subsequent event can be predicted from previous events. But unpredictable on the macro scale – you can’t predict the future by making generalizations about the past. Chaos occurs when “small” events have “big” results.
Life is chaotic. I met my wife at a lecture – if I hadn’t gone, and I almost didn’t go, I might never have met her, and my whole life would be different.
The blogosphere is also chaotic. There are a lot of great blogs out there, but I don’t know about their existence. There are a lot of great blogs that I know about, but I don’t have time to visit them. As you can see, the blogs I read most are USS Clueless and Amaravati: Abode of Amritas. Why is that? It’s not that I think they are the best, rather that for whatever reason they are the ones that I most want to read. (I could spend another few posts analyzing the reasons for that.) But up until a few months ago, I didn’t know about either one of them. In fact, I discovered Amritas only a couple of weeks after I discovered Steven Den Beste, when he linked to him.
Which brings me to the chaos-herd intersection that I wanted to talk about. I entered the non-professional blogosphere quite randomly. My first discovery was Jon’s Radio, a technical blog about the computer industry. I found that through a Google search, when I was looking for the answer to a technical question. Jon frequently links to other technical bloggers, and somehow through them I entered the blogosphere. I wandered around aimlessly for a while without a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, until I discovered the Instapundit. I became an immediate fan of Glenn Reynolds, and started to come to him as a news filter. Somewhere along the line he linked to Steven Den Beste, and that’s when I really entered the blogosphere. Evidently, Steven’s tastes are similar enough to my own that I’m very often interested in things that he links to. He doesn’t link to much, but it was enough – three or four a day. I quickly found Amritas, and many more.
Why am I telling this story? Because I think it’s about a lot more than blogging. It’s a parable for life. Along the way it also demonstrates the importance of freedom in finding the truth. The path I followed in getting to my current blogging habits is a kind of Newton’s method – not exact directions for getting from here to there, but an heuristic algorithm for getting closer to your destination with each step. (Since it is heuristic, it doesn’t necessarily work all the time, but because it is repeated with each step, it only has to work most of the time.)
What are the characteristics of the system? It’s an organic system with three rules:
1. Each blog entry is linked to related entries. How are they related? It doesn’t matter, as long as some of those relationships are important to me.2. I sometimes follow the links.
3. When I find a blog that I like I remember it and go back to it.
That’s it! Substitute people for blogs, and friends for links and you get the same sort of system. Or substitute businesses and customers. Or even ideas and associations. Following the herd isn’t such a bad system after all, as long as the herds overlap, giving you the chance to switch – that’s when you get to be free.
UPDATE: Evolution works the same way.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 25, 2004 12:53 AM