Why Government by Intuition is Bound to Fail
Donald Trump is following a dangerous path
Part of the group of scientists who published their findings in “The Limits to Growth,” (1972). From left to right: Jørgen Randers, Jay Forrester, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, William Behrens. Photo from The Club of Rome.
Guest post by David Packer
Old and new media are overflowing with opinions regarding the tsunami of executive orders and actions undertaken in recent weeks by the new US administration in Washington. In the New York Times from Sunday, February 2nd, for example, Ezra Klein quoted Steve Bannon as saying "The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done.” To which Mr. Klein responded "Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point." There are two sides to this coin. As Mr. Klein himself implies, there are not enough fingers to plug up the dike when these events are experienced one at a time. Although court challenges have no choice but to proceed on this basis, there are broader systems principles that may help us to understand and navigate the flood waters.
The flood of information is part of a process in which the facts we know or accept are assembled to form mental models of the world, or what we sometimes call intuition. What most distinguishes Trump and his closest advisors is the extraordinary confidence they place in their own intuitive grasp of the complex issues facing society. Trump stated that "common sense" (a.k.a. intuition) allowed him to claim recently, without evidence, that so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at the Federal Aviation Administration caused the tragic plane crash near Reagan Airport in Washington, DC. Trump also claims that tariffs are a “common sense” response to his perception of inequities in international trade. New facts fit existing mental models or are discarded and replaced. Today’s political elite appear to earn the people’s trust and the extraordinary power they wield by virtue of understanding the system well enough to get or stay rich. But does wealth acquisition promise good government policy?
The late Jay W. Forrester (MIT) founded a field called “System Dynamics,” which was also expanded as a management tool principally by Peter Senge. System Dynamics is still grounded in one of Forrester’s key insights: “Complex social systems are counterintuitive,” with the corollary that government policies based on human judgment and intuition only rarely produce the desired outcomes. System Dynamics recognizes that mental modeling is a poor method of understanding the world since the human mind can manage only a small number of parameters, and is overwhelmed when trying to keep track of their interactions as the system evolves with time. Computer models can enhance the modeling power of the human mind by managing the low-level task of keeping track of the evolution of the variables, while the modeler observes the behavior of the system as a function of changing external inputs or internal correlations. And if you understand the behavior of a complex system, you can often gently steer it by avoiding what Forrester called “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.”
How does this help us to avoid being swept away in the flood waters? Midterm elections in the US are notorious for turning the tables on the party in power. “Swing voters” at least almost always become disenchanted with the party in power when it fails to live up to campaign promises. While journalists can report and analyze, and lawyers can challenge in court, a host of “proximate causes” that may lead to midterm reversals, ultimate causes from systems behavior are key to understanding this historical pattern.
When faced with the counterintuitive in a complex, highly interconnected world, humility is the watchword. Commentators such as David Brooks have appealed for humility in a similar context. Humility is conspicuously missing in the actions of the Trump administration from the president, vice president, and Elon Musk on down. When one man practices policy by intuition or “common sense” to such an unprecedented degree, systems thinking tells us that there is hope for the opposition in the next US federal election cycle in 2026. However, one caveat is required. A simultaneous attack on the veracity of traditional media, and growing competition from oligarch-controlled social media platforms, means that we cannot fully predict the outcome resulting from these changing and interacting system inputs. Humility applies to everyone.
David Packer is a former Executive Editor at Springer Nature
"Computer models can enhance the modeling power of the human mind by managing the low-level task of keeping track of the evolution of the variables, while the modeler observes the behavior of the system as a function of changing external inputs or internal correlations."
Is there a public access website utilizing a computer model to analyze and present these changing external inputs and internal correlations in a dashboard format so that we, the public, can better understand the predicted results of public policy actions taken by our elected (and unelected) officials? If not, this would be an extremely useful tool for those of us with humility to apply rational thinking and discourse to counter the irrational "common sense" too often at play in our politics.
The implicit fallacy here is that this has not been planned in detail ahead of time, like the German armored assaults, which swept across Europe from 1939 into 1942.
The perception of overwhelm by civilians of various ranks is not at the core of the process.
Media is not at the core of the process.
There is vast institutional corruption, protected from the outside, but not really protected from the inside, and Team-Trump is inside the system with forensic-audit AI and young male Geek-Commando teams camping in government offices, eating pizza.
There is, in any battle, intuition in the battle-space, the operational initiative which was the Prussian inheritance of German battlefield commanders of tank and armored combined-forces. All of the preparation and coordination is the strategy. The tactics can be adjusted in the moment, like Trump calling the insubordinate Zelensky a "dictator" and demanding "where's my $300 billion?"