Los peligros del orden – The Perils Of Order

“Hay ventajas en el desorden – tanto en política interior como exterior” remarca David H. Freedman, un periodista al parecer interesado en fenómenos sociales y sistemas complejos, en un artículo que jamás pensé encontrar en Newsweek ( Ed. 5 de marzo de 2007) sobre los peligros de buscar la estabilidad en un mundo regido por la inestabilidad.

The Perils Of Order – Los peligros de orden

Being messy, both at home and in foreign policy, may have its own advantages
“In a small room at the University of British Columbia, students wearing headphones are listening to noise. No, it’s not an indie band’s shred solo blasting through an iPod. The students are participating in an experiment at the school’s Psychophysics and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and the noise consists of random static generated by a computer. The question at hand: how badly does a scratchy cacophony interfere with thought?

The researchers are finding, in fact, that the noise improves the workings of the students’ brains. And that’s a result backed up by dozens of studies. It may seem counterintuitive, but the human mind–and a lot of other things, as it turns out–often work better not when they’re neat and highly ordered, but rather when they operate in a messier fashion. That principle may apply not only to how we live and work, but also to how people around the world deal with regional instability, terrorism and natural disasters.

(…)Science backs up the notion that mess has gotten a bad rap, starting with something you learned in high-school physics: anything you do increases the universe’s entropy–that is, disorder. In other words, messiness isn’t the sorry wage of weak character or neglect, it’s the inseparable companion of constructive action. There are only two ways to minimize disorder: don’t do much, or spend lots of energy constantly restoring order instead of spending it on something potentially much more useful.”

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The Perils Of Order