Quotes About Systems

Weak men, indeed, are prejudiced towards rules and systems in life and government; and think if these are gone all is gone: but a man of a great soul and free spirit delights in the noble experiment of blowing up systems and dissolving governments, to mould them anew upon other principles and in another shape.

But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar systems. It had only one, function, administration; one purpose, government; and one manufactured product, law.

Control of self and society has been left to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion.

That's why the Periphery is revolting; that's why communications are breaking down; that's why petty wars are becoming eternal; that's why whole systems are losing nuclear power and going back to barbarous techniques of chemical power.

Wings was one of the first bands in the 1970s to do stadium tours, as well as Led Zeppelin. We had all the most up-to-date equipment from monitor systems to a laser light show and that was like the biggest, most awesome experience for me.

There are systems called zero discharge emission systems that would prevent any pollution from making it into the water or the air.

From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.

Only by developing a deeper understanding of AI systems as they act in the world can we ensure that this new infrastructure never turns toxic.

He had made his decision. Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick with their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they possessed.

breathing freely through both nostrils is also said to aid in harmonizing the active and passive systems of the body, and so the neti wash has been found to be a helpful practice before meditation.

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.

Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems—"progress.

It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them—even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing.

Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.

minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we see it, we fear it and overreact. Because of this fear and thirst for order, some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

that the burden of evidence is on those who disturb natural systems

True equality is equality in probability. and Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting.

my ideas on redundancy in systems.

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.