Savant or Saboteur?

 Savant or Saboteur?

Audio version of Savant or Saboteur?

Have you ever donated blood? If yes, are you dead? Why not?

No really, explain to me why taking a significant percentage of your blood did not kill you. Feel free to pause your reading right here and explain in comments why that didn't kill you. I'll wait here.

If I were to speak of the breadbasket of the USA, what picture comes to mind? For many of us, it is the Mississippi River valley and plains. Apparently areas the Mississippi River floods into are really good for human agriculture.

In CPR training years ago, we were taught that our exhaled breath contained enough oxygen to justify sharing that breath with someone in desperate need for whatever reason.

There are certainly other examples you can think of on your own but I'm just gonna start here. If your body was a truly efficient machine, it would have exactly as much blood as it needed. Any loss of blood would be fatal. If your body was a truly efficient machine, you would metabolize all of the oxygen taken in with each breath. Since we know that flood plains are good for agriculture, farming there would be more efficient than constructing reservoirs that keep that prime property under water.

There is much to like about a simple process or machine that is as efficient as possible. But that simplicity is key. As a process or machine grows in complexity, the most efficient points are frequently also known as SPOFs or Single Point Of Failure.  Recently, there have been several news stories about “Ransom Attacks” wherein a network of computers is hacked to deny access to the rightful owners until a ransom is paid.  Business, government and hospitals have been attacked making the network or elements of the network, SPOFs.

I probably don't need to explain why it would be a bad thing to have a paper cut's amount of lost blood to be fatal. (there would be very few female humans past the age of puberty). I like being able to swim under water for a couple of minutes with no ill effects. There are obvious reasons why there are places that efficiency simply isn't desirable. As a general rule, it is reasonable to say that as an entity becomes more complex, we must be very judicious in our pursuit of efficiency.

A human liver is a pretty complex entity. Other human organs are not noticeably less complex. So humans are complex collections of complex entities. Collections of humans, whether family, community, county, city, state, nation or geographic region, cannot be less complex than the entities that are their constituent parts. Governance of those collections of collections of collections of complex entities, cannot help but be complex. An effort to make government efficient, is the process of determining where one wants to place the SPOF.

Now, I am not telling you secrets here. What I am saying is what almost any intelligent and/or educated individual would know - if they cared to. The existence of "savants" in human culture has been known for centuries or longer. They are those folk with an extreme knowledge or awareness of just one thing. They are not generalists and if they were, the word would mean nothing.

So, are they savants or saboteurs? Elon and Vivek are allegedly very highly educated. They have clearly shown a savant level of ability to make money. Can they both really be so clueless as to not understand Complex Systems Analysis? Because I have trouble seeing an option other than they really are ignorant of most everything outside their areas of education OR they have the goal of sabotaging the USA.

I like having my government be robust. Robustness always comes at the cost of efficiency - always. I do not wish for there to be a Single Point Of Failure in my government. I have nothing but antipathy and disgust for those who through ignorance or intent are attempting to ensure the government of the USA has an accessible SPOF. In the old days, we called such people traitors.