Complex systems are independent elements connected with each other, influencing each other, adapting to each other and to mutual behaviors. These are elements that make both uninformed and conscious choices, agents of the system. Can the complex system be still influenced when it is impossible to predict its behavior or the reaction of its individual elements that gives a measurable collective effect, a trend? If a human being, an element of a complex anthropogenic system, is consciously or subconsciously directed by the mind – nonlinear, noncommuntative, full of paradoxes perceived as irrationalities though, as behaviorists describe it, having their rational roots at some level – then maybe it is possible to change behavior of a man by using behavioral discoveries? Not of every man, but many enough and in a range significant enough to achieve lasting, tangible results, a trend, a critical mass changing the operation of the entire system?

Of course it is possible! Just use the discovery associated with one of the co-founders of behavioral economics, the Nobel Prize winner in economy for 2017, Richard Thaler. This achievement is called choice architecture. In the book Nudge, written together with Cass R. Sunstein, Thaler shows in an accessible and entertaining way how to make it difficult, even impossible, or, on the contrary, make it easier for people to take choices. Any decisions taken by people – elements of anthropogenic complex systems – are tied up with a certain order. This order is the result of how the human mind functions. Because it functions as an interaction between a conscious part and a much larger intuitive one, suggesting constantly ready solutions, estimations, operating patterns, not directly accessible to consciousness, it allows to recognize a certain, statistically repeatable and predictable architecture. Choice architecture.

Thaler, writing about choice architecture, draws attention to the mechanism of two systems described by behaviorists – intuition, an automatic analysis system suggesting approximate solutions based on the sum of life experiences and analytical and logical awareness. Intuition works immediately and without visible effort. Awareness, weighing options, analyzing possibilities and variants is hard work and an ongoing demand for a growing stream of data. The world of anthropogenic complex systems, driven by the growing amount of information (accumulation of knowledge) and the increasing speed of its dissemination (availability of knowledge) seems to enforce the number and extent of analyzes necessary to take the best – both for the individual and the system – decisions.

Using the phenomenon called choice architecture has, as always in anthropogenic complex systems, a dark side to it. Those who know how „it” works, facilitate this knowledge to their advantage

So why not help our choices? Why not improve the functioning of the components of the complex system and thus the entire system by automating the making of good choices? The default option should help here – a shortcut, weaved into the previously prepared choice architecture. If we need organs for human life-saving transplants, if fatal accidents do happen, then let us introduce the consent to organ transplantation in case of an accident, as in Austria and Sweden – as a default option. Let us not limit the availability of potential donors with the difficulty of obtaing their consent, as in Germany or Denmark. Thaler and Sunstein list in their book Nudge many situations in which the default option, the standard version, the automatic selection simplify people’s lives and allow to make good, optimal choices – like the choice of a tasting menu in the restaurant, chiseled by the chef and available faster than the dishes a la carte. The authors even suggest that the „proper” use of the behavioral choice architecture is a form of libertarian (and therefore freedom oriented) paternalism.

However, using the phenomenon called choice architecture has, as always in anthropogenic complex systems, a dark side to it. Those who know how „it” works, facilitate this knowledge to their advantage. They can cash in the potential of profits immediately, whereas we, little cogs of the complex system, are left with the loss potential. It should not be a surprise to anyone my mentioning that the awareness of how people choose has been for a long time increasingly exploited by business and politics. Choice architecture is knowledge enormously used by markets, insurance companies, banks or pharmaceutical manufacturers. The classic, though by any standards reprehensible example are parabanks, specializing in texts posted in small print, pushing unconscious people relying on everyday intuition into traps, nets, snares in which they lose, lose and lose.

Let me remind you that the human mind feels at ease in the classic world of simple relationships, repetitive, predictable choices. The world of complexity, complicated cause-and-effect relations, hidden mutual connections, feedbacks, demands more than uncritical trust for its own limited intuition. Thaler and Sunstein in Nudge propose as a defense against abuse disclosure of hidden options, algorithms, they propose transparency so that despite using knowledge of how choice architecture works, it is easy to find a common denominator between alternatives and make a conscious assessment of the profitability of the options considered. The RRSO rate (actual annual interest rate) introduced for the comparison of credit offers is, for example, intended to serve this purpose. But can you close with your fingers the gaps in a fast breaking dam that protects us from the flood of abuse?

Subsequent amendments, in the circumstances of a constant race for the benefit resulting from manipulating the minds of people, reinforced by the results of scalability, are not, must not be a lasting, good solution. They are just another link in the behavioral arms race run by economists, politicians, lawyers, marketers

The improvement of complex systems with libertarian paternalism, despite the obvious benefits described in detail in Nudge, in principle leads to a situation in which vulnerable citizens are faced with beneficiaries of knowledge how to use the fact that man is not, as Thaler specifies, an econ. Subsequent amendments, in the circumstances of a constant race for the benefit resulting from manipulating the minds of people, reinforced by the results of scalability, are not, must not be a lasting, good solution. They are just another link in the behavioral arms race run by economists, politicians, lawyers, marketers in the field of modeling the behavior of complex systems in order to maximize benefits at the expense of their weakest elements. Any modeling of the behavior of such systems, however, has, as I said, hard restrictions and unknown expiration date. And we are, and shall remain, the cannon fodder in this combat – the little cogs of anthropogenic complex systems, the system agents.

So, how to deal with complexity? How to diagnose it? What to avoid? What to bet on? It is time to take advantage of the notions of fragility and antifragility introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and to refer to the theory of constraints.