A (Belated) One Year Anniversary!
Reflecting on a year of Taming Complexity
We made our inaugural post on June 19, 2023. In it we described, mostly to friends and family at the time, our goal of contributing to a public intellectual community aimed at better coping with the awesome complexity of our world.
’s first post explored the uncertainties surrounding the timely discussion of the hazards, and potential ban of, gas stoves. then addressed what the recent news of Ocean Gate submarine disaster could teach us about balancing innovation with uncertainty and safety.We’ve come a long way. We’ve had to temper our ambitions, reducing the frequency of posts to once a week so we could better balance the demands of our lives and jobs with maintaining the kind of thoughtfulness in our writing and analysis that we expect of ourselves. We haven’t gone viral by any means, but the number of subscribers has steadily grown. We have found ourselves in a small, but thought provoking community that shares our dedication to learn and reflect on the complex challenges of our technological society. Everyone we have engaged with on this platform has pushed us to be better analysts and given us the motivation to continue on our writing journey.
In honor of having now spent over a year writing on substack, we thought it might be nice to offer the community of readers and writers we’ve found to further reflect on the work we’ve done, and to do some reflecting ourselves.
Taylor’s thoughts:
The Substack’s launch aligned with the tail end of a parental leave period for my second son and the start of a grant-funded break from teaching. My colleagues, Michael Bouchey and Colin Garvey, and I had been zooming weekly, and the idea for a Substack was born. We wanted to demonstrate the utility of our approach to tackling complex issues, and to reach people outside of the academic bubble. Academia too often incentivizes the endless coinage of new concepts, the development of ever more obscure theoretical frameworks, even as the (digital) ink has yet to dry on yesterday’s conceptual developments. Public writing, on the other hand, can quickly pull even the most talented thinkers toward increasingly superficial “takes” on whatever is a new hot-button issue. We felt that we could walk the fine line between the two (and I hope you agree that we more or less have done so).
What I’ve enjoyed most about writing for Taming Complexity is that the process has helped me refine, and even correct, some of my thinking. The demand to produce a biweekly article has been helpful, pushing me to dig deeper into issues that I had explored previously or to make connections between seemingly disparate cases, both things that I otherwise might not have had the intellectual space to do.
It’s hard to pick my favorite post from the last year, so I’m going to talk about two of them.
The first is Crisis Science, a book review of The Leak, which tells of how an mostly harmless tritium leak almost lead to the closure of Brookhaven National Labs. I find this case to be one of the important learning examples regarding how to (not) engage the public when it comes to risky science and technology. What makes this case interesting is that there was little to no scientific disagreement about the danger of the leak. As a result, it was a clear demonstration of the power of mistrust, of how science and technology come to become “politically unsafe” when those who create or manage it neglect ordinary citizens’ interests and concerns, when they fail to demonstrate that they are worthy of trust. Once we recognize how a scientifically uncontroversial reactor could become so publicly contentious, dissent over COVID, nuclear energy, or climate change becomes easier to understand.
I had the most fun writing about what the cholera epidemic could teach us about working through conflict on COVID and the climate. To begin, it’s just a great historical anecdote that the Thames was once so choked with excrement that the noxious odors forced Parliament to temporarily relocate. Shows like Bridgerton seem a lot less elegant if one remembers how terrible everything would have smelled.
But the real fascinating part was learning that the story told about John Snow and his research to trace the cholera epidemic to the Broad Street water pump tends to leave out what really prompted Parliament to act. Many of us very much want to believe a story in which science comes to the rescue for public problems, in which it creates consensus out of conflict. Yet, the history of cholera, similar to the ozone layer and countless other problems, shows that it is often technology (and supportive policy) that builds support for new ways of seeing the world, not science.
Following that insight, I think, opens up a wealth of opportunity when it comes to productively working through our conflicts. If we learn to see (partial and tentative) political agreement as not what precedes thoughtful collective action but instead as the consequence of it, we could more often pull ourselves out of endless, polarized debates about what the truth really is and set our societies upon a far more important task: more fairly and effectively experimenting with new ways of living together, despite our disagreements.
But I wonder, dear reader, what you think. What questions, counterarguments/examples, or comments do you have? What problems have you encountered professionally, or personally, where our analyses ring true (or false)? Is there a case that you think would challenge the arguments that we’ve laid out during the last year? Or add to them?
Michael’s thoughts:
When we started the substack, I was slowly working through a research article about Albuquerque Rapid Transit in my free time between teaching classes. The project was turning out to be much more deep and nuanced than I had initially thought, and consequently much more important to learning and understanding the barriers to implementing new transit in most mid-sized American cities. I was excited to work through my thinking and analysis on the substack. I thought it would give me a chance to share those ideas in writing other thoughtful people without the high stakes of academic reviews and the harsh criticism of “reviewer number 2.”
Writing my ART series for Taming Complexity did just that. It immensely refined my thinking about the role NIMBYs play in new urban projects, and also on how to address the barriers they create in a way that is still democratic. As of writing this, I have finished my draft of the journal article version of the study, and will soon be sending it off for review and, I hope, publication. Of course academia works slowly, but maybe on our two year anniversary I’ll have published peer reviewed article to share with you all, and you can know that you played an important role in its completion and publication.
But my writing on ART actually wasn’t my favorite article or series to write! That would be what ended up being a series on Japanese urbanism. It all started with the article I wrote inspired by pandemic hit show “Old Enough.” My thoughts on the show had been rattling around in my brain ever since my wife and I binged it (and the second season!). It was a great relief to put those idea out into the world!
It was supposed to be a one off article, like most of the other’s on Taming Complexity. But rather than extricate the thoughts from my head, writing them down only served to create more! I thought about how, while Japan has many lessons on good cities to teach, it also can serve as a warning about centralizing control over our cities. So I wrote about that. But then I thought about how Japan looks so different than our vision of urbanist places in the U.S. and wondered why that is. So I wrote about Japan’s unique local street design. I enjoyed writing and thinking through articles about Japanese urbanism so much, before I knew it I had a little series which I had never intended to write!
My wife spent a year Sendai, Japan living, studying, and working in a robotics lab. It was a formative experience for her, and we have gone back to visit Japan many times since then. I fell in love with the cities right away. I’ve traveled all over, but Tokyo has become my absolute favorite city. For a long time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I think one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed writing about Japan so much, is that it has helped me to figure that out! I would love to write more on the topic, so if you have any ideas or any questions you think deserve exploration please let me know!
But we also want to know, what has your journey been like reading Taming Complexity? What was your favorite article to read? Which one was the most thought provoking? With which one did you find yourself disagreeing the most? Perhaps most importantly, what would like to see us write about in the future? Is there anything seemingly not on our radar that you think could benefit from out particular form of thinking and analysis? After one year of writing, we want to hear from our readers too. Please let us know!
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