Science, math and logic are potent tools for dealing with the more easily identified characteristics of the world, but when we strip away those quantifiable parts we are still left with a core of complexity which ever more strongly resists similar analysis. (Networked complexity emerged and evolved across deep time without any magical creative step.)

One noteworthy example is the way religions have resisted the rise of science because they live within the anthropocentric world and its perceived problems, dealing practically with what they can and deflecting the scientifically minded's favourite mysteries to magical agency. Taleb's empiricist message (The Black Swan) similarly contextualises Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.

But atheism is not religion and so those of us who would like to promote the former a lot more successfully have largely failed because we have paid no real attention to the social glue which organised religions are in the business of delivering. In practice many of us have directed our charitable efforts down the secular route which offers no effective resistance to the overplaying of creation myths, let alone to the exaggerated self-importance of humanity.

In those critical swathes of complex reality that are inaccessible not only to those opposite poles of mathematical and statistical analysis but even to Wolfram's overplayed "universal" computation, recursive human language finds fertile ground ... but as easily for insidious lies as for anything that approximates truth.

Yet somehow supposedly modern society still manages to grant the Word in the Book extraordinary privilege, albeit just moving the problem from many stories to many interpretations. In the spirit of Reconciliation I am again reminded that reading the land shares a lot with reading texts and that those who can read the land are those we must pay attention to as the consequences of unrestrained industrial harvesting of the global commons come home to roost.

At least island universes of conservative physics emerge naturally from a background of chaotic expansion, just as the (economic) growth imperative has accelerated creative complexification of our social fabric. But we are constrained for the immediate future to one tiny ball of conservative physics (plus the input of one part in two billion of the output of our local thermonuclear reactor) so we are going to need our oft over-rated intelligence to earn its keep and quickly. Life itself has hit similar self-made hurdles previously, but maybe never as fast nor as hard. 3% p.a. is never sustainable.