Quotes About Systems

Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

Security in human systems we're told will always, always last. Emotions are the sail, and blind faith is the mast. Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

These people are stuck in the one-disease, one-drug model of thinking. It is an example of reductionistic thinking that misses the whole point of how systems work—of how the body works.

The closest thing to the human immunodeficiency viruses, Hahn explained, are the simian equivalents, SIVs. But "simian immunodeficiency virus" is a huge misnomer. The virus doesn't harm the immune systems of these natural hosts; they don't even seem to get sick. "If we could figure out how simian immune systems deal with the viruses, we might have a clue to controlling AIDS," she said. "That very hope drives my work.

I am claiming that the making of life for the oppressed is a love of the enemy in the sense that the enemy is challenged to come out of prevailing systems of death to embrace, support, and enter into what makes for life and justice for the oppressed and ultimately for all.

Although it's possible to emulate true access controls in Python classes, this is rarely done in practice, even for large systems.

I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

Systems are made by players rather than players making systems

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

In the future, human rights will be increasingly a universal criterion for designing ethical systems.

The overall goal [of counseling] is to help family members become 'systems experts' who could know [their] family system so well that the family could readjust itself without the help of an expert.

Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

If I use empathy to liberate people to be less depressed, to get along better with their family, and at the same time not inspire them to use their energy to rapidly transform systems in the world, then I am part of the problem. I am essentially calming people down, making them happier to live in the systems as they are, and I am using empathy as a narcotic.

There was a big huge deal about it, and Security was all "but what if it takes over the station's systems and kills everybody" and Pin-Lee told them "if it wanted to do that it would have done it by now," which in hindsight was probably not the best response.

The systems of constructs are inherently inferior to advanced bots, but you aren't stupid. Yeah, well, fuck you, too, I thought, and initiated a shutdown sequence.

It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This

The biggest cause of failure in software-intensive systems is not technical failure; it's building the wrong thing.

I would later discover this was one of the key problems humans had with numerical understanding—their nervous systems simply weren't up to it.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.