Quotes About System

members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. Then

A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.

They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

Transportation didn't get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why

loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.

A system with skin-in-the-game requirements holds together through the notion of a sacrifice in order to protect the collective or entities higher in the hierarchy that are required to survive.

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.

In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

robust" is certainly not good enough. In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time—yet our planet has been around for perhaps four billion years and, convincingly, robustness can't just be it: you need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system.

The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

We can mistake the antifragility of the system for that of the individual, when in fact it takes place at the expense of the individual

Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" (so they can start again) and minimize the long-term damage to the system.

Siempre es preferible optar por aquellas cosas que funcionan desde hace mucho tiempo, pues es más probable que ya hayan alcanzado su estado ergódico. Y, de todos modos, en el peor de los casos, el problema sería que no sabemos cuánto durarán.* Recordemos que la carga de la prueba recae en quien perturba un sistema complejo y no en la persona que protege el statu quo.

People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody's fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later