... Unfortunately, we have poor intuition about such complex systems. And yet we have to come to grips with them if we ever hope to understand, with mathematical precision, such issues as cancer, climate change and, yes, the workings of the real economy. All of these are obviously far more complicated than Phillips's cartoonish caricature, with its mere handful of pipes and valves, but still, the family resemblance is unmistakable.

In an earlier time scientists were content to break problems into smaller and smaller pieces and study the individual parts. Reductionism, as the strategy is known, makes good sense. The hope was always that once you figured out how the components behave, it should be possible to put them back together to make sense of the original ensemble. But only rarely has this dream come to fruition, and in too many cases reductionism became an end in itself. ...

See it in action, click on the above image, or here is another YouTube video:

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.