O animal adaptativo

Já não me recordo como foi, mas por causa do meu costume de pesquisar as fontes bibliográficas cheguei a um livro interessante “The social atom – Why the rich get richer, cheaters get caught, and your neighbor usually looks like you” de Mark Buchanan.
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Uma vez que prego a descrença nos acasos e a crença na necessidade de mergulhar e procurar os padrões de comportamento que se escondem abaixo da superfície da realidade, foi com gosto que apreciei a designação do primeiro capítulo “Think Patterns, Not People”. Quem me conhece sabe o quanto comungo da máxima “A culpa é do sistema”
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“The central idea of this book is that the only way to understand a sudden explosion of ethnic nationalism, a peculiar link between women’s education and birth control, entrenched racial segregation, and a host of other important or just plain interesting social phenomena – in financial markets, in politics, in the world of fashion – is to think of patterns, not people.”
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O livro faz referência ao artigo “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem), por W. Brian Arthur.
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Alguns trechos do livro, tendo em conta o artigo, são:
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“… the way people make most decisions has little to do with logic, and a lot to do with using simple rules and learning by trial and error. In particular, people try to recognize patterns in the world and use them to predict what might come next.”
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“… people tend to hold a number of hypotheses in their heads at once, and to act on whichever seems to be making the most sense at the time.”
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Agora vem uma citação que parece retirada de Karl Weick: “One of the best ways to go about a task, anything from putting up some shelves to finding a job, is often to just get started, even if you have no clear idea of the best way to proceed. You try something, then you learn and adapt. “The world,” as Jacob Bronowski once put it, “can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.” Following this way of thinking, Arthur replaced rationality with a view of people as acting on the basis of simple theories, while adapting along the way.”
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“… we’re adaptive rule followers, rather than rational automatons. But the model is surprisingly realistic.”
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“We are alive today because our ancestors had hardwired into their behavior a set of simple rules for making decisions that gave pretty good results – enough for their survival – but have little to do with rational calculation.”
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Capítulo após capítulo deste livro, dou comigo a repetir a frase “I love this game”.
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Aprecio esta flexibilidade mental. Cada vez mais acredito que o mundo é composto por paisagens adaptativas (fitness landscapes, business landscapes), que se movimentam cada vez mais rapidamente e que são implacáveis com estruturas lentas, ultrapassadas e agarradas a direitos adquiridos.