Right. In this context, the “best” solution is not to come up with ever-more-complicated ways of managing the economy, but the (relatively) simple method of not trying to manage the economy. But that insight isn’t one that naturally springs to mind if you have the wrong assumptions going in.

Regarding the “dangerous” comment, my point was simply that if we go in with the false assumption that complicated (unpredictable, whatever) problems require complicated solutions, then knowing that a problem is complicated is dangerous. Obviously the truth isn’t dangerous absent these false assumptions, but I do think this assumption is more widespread than we’d like to admit.

if the idea is true it’s probably more dangerous not to acknowledge that truth for reasons ideological or otherwise.

Certainly, ignoring the truth for ideological reasons is a bad idea. However, the cliché that “the truth isn’t dangerous” is patently false, because it ignores the fact that knowledge is (for humans) necessarily incomplete. Certain combinations of knowledge and ignorance complement each other rather more destructively than is healthy. For example, knowing how to build an atomic bomb without the knowledge/moral awareness/whatever that killing innocent people is bad is more dangerous than having the same moral lack and not knowing how to build an atomic bomb. Replace moral ignorance with certain assumptions about the relative worth of people based on their beliefs/skin color/citizenship/etc. in the above example and the conclusion still holds. Admittedly, something of a pathological example, but I think it illustrates my point.

That all having been said, I’ve already said my post was overly-reductionist; it was intended to be thought-provoking, not definitive. I certainly agree that people are less predictable than “natural forces” (as you say, insofar as they are distinct) and, that being the case, it’s obviously going to be harder to come up with political than technological solutions. In fact, given your observation in the p.p.s., it may well be impossible to use scientific/technical techniques to solve political problems (certainly the example of the “scientific” socialists should be a cautionary one).

I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, and in any event if the idea is true it’s probably more dangerous not to acknowledge that truth for reasons ideological or otherwise. Plus, remember Hayek’s liberal position on economic management: he said, yes managing an economy, which is to say determining people’s preferences and then assigning values to them, is an enormously complicated task–so complicated that it is behind the scope of any one person to manage, which is why people need to be allowed to make their own calculations for themselves. One would hope that a similar realization would produce an similar conclusion in politics.

It’s not nice to respond to my overly-reductionist rant with thoughtful objections.

Seriously, though, there are obviously multiple causes for any complicated problem and people are obviously more complicated than, say, gravity (you’ll also note that I intentionally omitted the “politics is harder than science” option in paragraph 5, though that was basically the point of graphs 6-8). Which is to say, yes, that’s certainly part of it. Still, it’s not entirely a tenable position, since most bad politics are due to either obvious ignorance of what people are like (e.g. Communism) or blindingly unsubstantiated assumptions that people can miraculously change (pretty much every revolutionary movement ever).

Also, although it’s true, I think the “politics is hard because people are complicated” attitude is dangerous, because there’s a tendency to think that complicated problems require complicated solutions. In reality, the more complicated a problem you’re facing, the more simple the solutions you should look for, at least initially. The effects of a complicated attempted solution on a complicated problem are exponentially harder to evaluate than the effects of a simple proposed solution on a complicated problem, simply because of the vastly greater number of possible interactions of problem and solution. Obviously, simplicity, in and of itself, isn’t sufficient, but I think history generally supports the notion that simple solutions work better than complicated ones. Put it this way: I would be surprised if historians 500 years from now can objectively evaluate the EU constitution as having been more successful than the US constitution, even if they agree more with the spirit of the former.