Think Patterns, Not People

"Think Patterns, Not People"--When I opened the Table of Contents of <The Social Atom>, this is the first thing I saw, and then I bought the book without any hesitation...This is exactly what I've been thinking, following, and trying to develop for the past 10 years!!!

When I think back, I feel truly thankful to 3 people: my physics teacher in middle school, my maths teacher in high school, and my tutor of Physics Olympic (PhO) competition in high school.  They not only taught me maths and physics, but also taught me the way of logic thinking.  Sometimes I feel regret that I didn't continue my study in physics at that time, but as they said, what I have learned by studying maths and physics is really the way of thinking that can apply to anything I do.  Even if I became a business major when I get into college, I never stopped reading--from natural science, to complex science, to human science...Unlike most of the pure business people, I look at our society, business and people's behavior in a scientific way. 

I'm not a religious person, though sometimes I can be superstitious, I do believe something is controlling this whole world--not limited to the world we are living in and we observe, but the whole universe and anything outside of this universe, if any--that's the underlying order scientists are looking for.  I always thinking everything works the same way, and there's for sure a way to explain everything with scientific theories, the fundamentals.  

While reading <The Social Atom>, when Mark Buchanan was talking about how human individuals make everything so complicated that it is almost impossible to explain human behavior in the scientific way.  But imagine, if we could jump out the universe, to observe the world from some point outside the existing universe, with full information, maybe everything will be much simpler to understand.  However, according to the recent quantum gravity theory, nothing exists outside of the universe, which means we cannot jump out of the universe to observe the whole thing, which means nobody can get complete information, and that is what I think the main reason that caused the uncertainty--incomplete information for everyone, and people all have different assumptions and thinking process based on the information they have, and thus create the complexity of human world.  Though it's not possible to eliminated all the uncertainty to create the risk-free environment all the time, we can always reduce the uncertainty to make the bet has better chance to win--I usually use my "Black Box Theory" to think about the complicated problems, seems it works well so far.  

When I think more about my past, from my childhood to now, I figured one thing--I have changed a lot over all those years, but deeply done, I still do things with the same pattern again and again, that's the real me, the fixed pattern that exists when I was born, which will never change.  I believe everyone has such a pattern that makes their life cycle goes over and over again--different time, different things, different places, different people, everything seems different, but essentially the same pattern.  As I believe, people don't change fundamentally, all changes are incremental.  Though we may not be able to change that pattern, as long as we know about it, there are always ways to make it better use instead of use it against ourselves. 

THINK PATTERNS, NOT PEOPLE!as Mark Buchanan wrote, as I always believed... Just started reading the book actually, I will write more when I finish the book I guess...:)