Sublime

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total

emergent phenomena, ergodicity, radical uncertainty, and computational irreducibility.

non-equilibrium physics).

It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

As a new point of view we turn to bounded rationality, a departure from the mainstream tradition. We no longer can assume that every agent is a perfect calculator. This point of view is given a great deal of emphasis by Herbert Simon. Simon argued that people do not maximize. When they’re forecasting the future, they do not perform the task of

Surface areas of possible out-of-syncness.

Third, we are fearful creatures and go to great lengths to preserve a sense of certainty, even when we know it to be false.

But occasionally some would find forecasts that would change their behavior enough to perturb the overall price pattern, causing other investors to change their forecasts to re-adapt. Cascades of mutual adjustment would then ripple through the system. The result was periods of tranquility followed randomly by periods of spontaneously generated