Disorder was my chronic condition. Not only my desk and bookcase but also my closet and sink, even the gallery on my phone, were left unsorted, tangled up in big lumps. Even when I worked at a company, I was always surrounded by teetering piles of books and materials on the verge of collapse. Not even clean desk campaigns could reform me.
With randomness as the default, daily life barely held together. I would finally empty out a drawer as a season drew to a close, or grudgingly buy extra storage only when my computer kept sending warning messages. For me, tossing everything and moving was far easier than sorting things neatly by category.
The problem was the emotion. The discomfort or anxiety of "I can't control this." A household with snarled cords exposed in clumps, an adolescent child I couldn't control, a future I couldn't plan, scattered interests and relationships I couldn't thread together, words… It was a wonder that even in that chaos I still, however loosely, met deadlines and regularly published books.
But long ago, Lee O-ryeong also confessed. "My desk is a mess. But I'm not ashamed of chaos. I like reading books haphazardly, and I enjoy finding my own cosmos within it."
It was a stroke of luck that around this time I encountered chaos economist Tim Harford. Reading his book "on the imperfections that make humans human," I shed my long-held misunderstandings about disorder, chaos, ambiguity and imperfection, and felt a great sense of liberation.
The book brims with "gem-like moments of chaos" we never knew. Why, even as AI automation sweeps in, humans must never fully surrender the share of mistakes and mastery; why children who set loose plans outperform those with tightly woven schedules; how a messy office became a core technology of Google's creativity; and further, why bold people who ignore rules and appropriate confusion thrive even more.
As you live, experience tells you the truth: the world opens kinder, newer paths to those who are open to randomness, disorder and the unpredictable.
So it was with my interview conversations. The more I left them open—borderless and vague—the more people would find and share richer truths out of the chaos.
Openness that accepts the situation as it is, without fixed ideas, was the highest form of a chaos strategy. It struck me that the next paradigm in evolution after the once-trendy "kindness" is "imperfection." If the essence of evolution is that the imperfect survive, I somehow feel more at ease.
With hegemonic and technology wars driving the world's entropy toward a peak, I interviewed Tim Harford, the gentle economist who argues that a dose of disorder favors survival.
-Not long ago, a famous Korean novelist said the difference between humans and AI lies in "hesitation." I like the word "waiting" in a similar sense. What about you? What do you think is the substance of the "imperfections that make humans human"?
"First, 'hesitation' is a wonderful insight. That feeling of 'not knowing' how to proceed in an uncertain world! Large language models (LLMs) rarely show doubt. But I think we should doubt a bit. The word I focus on is 'listening.' Listening is an attitude that acknowledges you can never control a 'conversation.' Unfortunately, in daily life we burn immense energy trying to control the uncontrollable.
What happens when you let go of the urge to control and listen to what's happening now? The more you act spontaneously and make more mistakes, the closer you get to 'human-ness.' The more you pay attention and respond honestly, the more mistakes leap attractively. In any situation, isn't acknowledging imperfection more powerful than merely reciting perfect lines?"
-How does the explosive power of imperfection manifest specifically?
"Let me share an anecdote about pianist Keith Jarrett regarding the power that emerges when we accept imperfection. Jarrett couldn't refuse a girl's heartfelt plea and had to take the stage with a piano well below standard. After acknowledging the imperfect situation, Jarrett performed using the midrange as much as possible instead of the screechy treble so the audience would notice the flaws less. To compensate for the lack of resonance, he hammered out a repetitive left-hand bass riff.
"And then something astonishing happened. The audience cheered and thrilled to his unconventional performance that defied convention. An uncontrollable piano ended up producing 'The Köln Concert,' the most popular live album in history. Randomness frees us from fixed states."
-In the book, after "The Köln Concert" and Keith Jarrett, you present the case of a "plane crash" and pilots. It was a gripping opening. What did you want to convey with those contrasting cases?
"While Keith Jarrett is a model of someone who kept pushing himself to reach an astonishing technical peak, the pilots of Air France Flight 447 are an example of people who lost their skills by relying too much on autopilot. One story ends in triumph, the other in tragedy. It's a stark contrast that gives readers something to ponder.
As I said about listening earlier, the Air France pilots failed to 'hear' the situation. The alarm blared loudly and urgently, signaling a stall, but they didn't hear or didn't believe the warning."
-Why couldn't the pilots hear such loud and clear warnings?
"Automation undermines our ability to listen. That aircraft, equipped with a state-of-the-art navigation system, had not had a single crash in the 15 years since 1994. Because the system worked almost perfectly, pilots hardly had opportunities to practice even basic flying skills. Pilot Bonin, too, had flown 346 hours in the six months before the accident, but only four of those hours were hand-flown.
I suspect Bonin didn't know what he was doing. With the words, "So what's happening now?" the plane struck the Atlantic Ocean, and all 228 people on board died instantly."
Thanks to digital devices, the odds of making small mistakes have fallen, but the odds of making big ones have grown. During the U.S.-Iran war, there was even a horrific misfire in which an Iranian girls' school was blown up by a missile. The message "to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer" felt weightier than ever.
In general, when algorithms make decisions, people tend to stop trying to exercise better judgment—like drivers who trust their navigation and plunge into the sea without hesitation. That's why we need contrarian thinking. Tim Harford cited an intersection where applying the "magic of chaos" reduced accident risk.
The Netherlands' "Squareabout," designed with the belief that "uncertainty makes us safer." There are no crosswalks, traffic signs or signals there.
-I'm always amazed when I see a busy intersection without traffic lights run smoothly. What is "useful confusion"?
"It's a stimulus that helps people find their own way. In the deliberately ambiguous Squareabout, drivers can't sit there blankly as if in an Autonomous Driving car. Chaos forces them to focus, to navigate complexity on their own, to look out for others. That's the benefit of confusion.
In fact, traffic at the Squareabout flows very smoothly. Cars glide out at low speeds, and accidents have fallen by half compared with when there were lights. Strictly speaking, because it feels like there are too many hazards, it becomes a safer intersection."
-May I call you a "chaos economist"? While lamenting the difficulty of raising adolescents, I passed your teachings to parents and introduced you as a "master of chaos economics."
"Oh! I like the phrase 'chaos economist'! I also have three children. If there's a lesson I've learned as a parent, it's that we can help our kids, but we can't control their fate. Children must make their own mistakes and glean their own lessons—even if watching that is quite painful.
The "disempowered office" study I described in the book was also heavily influenced by parenting. Do you know the lesson of that experiment? How a workspace looks and how tidy it is hardly matters. Whether adult or child, the key is that people intensely dislike having their "autonomy" taken away. My kids' rooms are pretty messy… but well, they're their rooms."
-I must confess my room is no better. My desk is piled with materials and mail, and my email is about to explode. Your point that even within that disorder a practical system is operating was truly comforting.
"It's true. Many scholars have studied the efficiency of 'organizing' versus 'piling.' Sorting items into categories versus leaving them stacked. The result was that pilers got things done much faster. The reason is that categorization itself is imperfect, and over time you struggle more to file and find things.
If you look closely, even a messy desk runs a practical system that keeps useful items on top. Email is also much faster to dump into 'Archive' and search by keywords than to file into folders. There are so many people who thank me for their jam-packed inboxes or messy desks. It's astonishing. Many of them were respected CEOs with elite backgrounds and high salaries."
-I suppose your "it's okay to make a mess" line set them free?
"If making a mess were truly a problem, they wouldn't have succeeded. Humans are imperfect and messy beings. That's why we seem to feel excessive guilt about disorder. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most extraordinary figures in human history, also disliked tidying up.
Until he died, he berated himself, thinking that if only he had organized better, he would have been more respected, more successful and more productive. That's a huge misconception. For the record, my email inbox is clean, but my desk is a mess!"
-The correlation between planning and grades was unexpected.
"Students who planned by the month saw their grades steadily improve, but those who planned by the day saw their academic performance steadily decline. Students who didn't plan at all stayed flat. Why is that?
If you plan every day, the plan itself takes too much time and effort. If you fail to study daily as scheduled, your motivation drops. The planner is neat, but the world is disorderly. It's not good to rigidify situations with an overly tight plan. You need to be flexible."
-What's the real meaning of "getting work done takes priority over organizing"?
"We often use 'organizing' or 'planning' as an excuse to avoid work. But if you deal with tasks immediately—or decide not to do them at all—you can make astonishing progress. David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" proposes the two-minute rule.
If it can be done in two minutes, don't write it on a tidy, pretty to-do list—just do it now!"
-Would you talk about producer Brian Eno, who once threw David Bowie into confusion?
"When David Bowie fell into mannerism, Brian Eno brought in a deck of cards called "Oblique Strategies" and urged him to draw randomly and execute. The cards carried odd prompts and constraints like "Change the role of the instruments," "Bend the skeleton," and so on. The cards drove the band members to the brink of madness, but out of that extreme chaos came Low, the greatest album of the '80s.
Eno delivered "arbitrary shocks" to help musicians break from stale habits. He used deliberate disruption to draw out chaos and imperfection. Today, Eno's Oblique Strategies are used effectively as creativity prompts. Brian Eno lived as a distractible, ADHD-leaning artist whose interests leapt constantly, but that allowed him to work across genres and collaborate widely."
I found great comfort in the idea that being distractible means you're good at the "random leaps" essential to creativity.
-What's the secret of people who keep getting smarter?
"Intellectual openness. They connect new knowledge with other knowledge and become "bridging social capital" themselves. Take the Hungarian mathematician Erdős. He collaborated more than anyone in the history of science. He worked with over 500 mathematicians. Starting a collaboration with a new partner means reviewing yet another scientific paper together.
In the 1960s, without the internet, he roamed from the homes of Eastern and Western mathematicians, living as a human hub carrying insights in set theory, number theory and beyond from across the world of mathematics. The way of the genius wanderer Erdős can also be seen as a "random leapfrogging strategy.""
-Is this also related to the idea that diversity beats talent?
"'Diversity beats talent' means this: if you already have a good knife, you're far better off adding a slightly inferior 'screwdriver' than a superior 'spare knife.' Your toolkit should be filled not with top knives, but with things like screwdrivers, wrenches and drills. If you want to raise your tennis game, you'll get far better results by hiring a coach, a nutritionist and a fitness trainer than by hiring three great coaches.
But companies hiring employees or pro sports teams recruiting players often make a mistake. After hiring the "best talent" they can find, they hire another person with the same profile, and another, and keep repeating. What we really need are diverse people with different skills and experiences."
A diverse pool is itself an engine of chaos and friction that breaks stereotypes and permits random leaps, yet in reality many people claim to network with new people while meeting the same types over and over, he lamented.
-The warning that perfect order produces perfect extinction is chilling.
"In nature, disorder is healthy. For example, if you design a forest neatly with a single species for timber production, the trees are devastated by fungi and invasive species. Cities are the same. Successful cities are dazzling chaos itself. Old and new, homes and shops, workplaces are interwoven, and rich and poor are mixed together. A moderate state of chaos boosts safety, innovation and resilience.
There's also experimental evidence that teams with a single unfamiliar student outperform teams of friends in problem solving. People assume more immigrants mean only higher crime rates, but over time cities where diverse ethnicities mesh have flourished far more. Societies that pursue tidy order alone may be convenient for now, but they only grow more fragile."
-Among those who didn't fear chaos and disorder, whom would you rank at the top? Steve Jobs? Ed Catmull? Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos?
"Jeff Bezos was the most fascinating. In Amazon's early days, he fully grasped the 'competitive edge of imperfection.' Knowing that slow, lumbering rivals were giving chase, he would launch new products or services early, without being ready. Items often vanished in distribution and databases froze all the time. But by keeping things moving, making snap judgments and unleashing vast confusion, he beat the competition.
Go player Carlsen was also striking. When facing Carlsen, opponents couldn't perform to their ability. His moves weren't brilliant for his strength, but each move threw his rivals into confusion. You don't need to be perfect to win. It's enough to rattle the opponent so they can't perform to their level."
-With AI advancing and wars unending, as global entropy surges toward the extreme, we can't avoid talking about Trump, a "master of chaos." What do you think about the influence of Silicon Valley power players like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and figures like Trump?
"It's indeed vexing. Through smartphones and social media we've removed countless petty inconveniences, while creating very large risks. That includes not only political risks but also the social risks confronting the young generation.
Trump is an interesting case to me. He instinctively knows how to use chaos to gain power. That may not mean a comfortable world for others, but at least it's a world where, in that chaos, he becomes the 'top dog.'"
-As you organized the idea that the world exists amid such dazzling chaos and chance, was there a moment when you cried "eureka"?
"The story of Keith Jarrett, which I think is the perfect opening to explain this book's ideas, actually languished near the back for a long time. Only when the writing process was nearly over did I realize, "Ah, this has to go right up front!""
-Can you tell us about the most valuable period of chaos in your life?
"I remember a moment on stage when I was a student. I entered a speech contest where the rules required a 15-minute script and allowed only a small cue card. Terrified of speaking without a script, I crammed every word onto that card in tiny letters, even color-highlighting, and practiced intensely.
But despite all the practice, in the middle of the contest, during the speech, I lost my place on that little script! I just couldn't find the next sentence. I couldn't exactly whip out a magnifying glass to find it. So I just kept talking, making sense as I went. The audience responded far more to the speech when I spoke naturally than when I read the script. I learned a big lesson there."
-Writing a book is also a grueling balancing act between chaos and cosmos. How do you manage it?
"My first book was The Undercover Economist. I had no idea what I was doing, and it was really hard. I just dug into whatever looked interesting, and it became the most successful global bestseller. I think readers like that simple, guileless stance of inquiry itself.
These days I go hunting for interesting stories. Rather than trying to explain an idea, I follow the story and think about what we can learn from what happened next."
-What are your thoughts on routines?
"If you have routines that suit you, use them actively. That's a fine approach. But sometimes it's better to break the routine boldly and do something different. I have routines, too. I run, work out and have a favorite coffee shop I frequent. But I try to mix these habits on purpose—so I don't settle into being too comfortable."
-If you look closely, humans like order but the world defaults to chaos and randomness. So everyone strains to build their own patterns and processes. But as automation gathers force, humanity's labor pattern of "mastery through mistakes and repetition" seems to be growing rarer—along with individual potentials like "deviation, variation and integration." Lastly, can we imperfect humans navigate the age of AI omnipotence well?
"We can neither control nor predict the future. It's better to accept that, even if it's scary and uncomfortable. AI is certainly threatening, but I see many people I respect playing with AI and making new things. Whatever happens, let's not lose to AI when it comes to 'listening and knowing how to enjoy.'
Move forward with optimism. If we have even a little hope that there is music for us to play, conversations to share and messes to make that we still must create, then imperfect humans like us can get through today just fine."