Quotes About Complexity

In complex situations, the Just Maximize Choices mantra is not enough to create good policy.

The premise of the article, and later the book, is that in our increasingly complicated world people cannot be expected to have the expertise to make anything close to optimal decisions in all the domains in which they are forced to choose.

It is usually good to provide people with lots of options, but when the question is complicated, sensible choice architecture guides people in the right directions.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

Truth is rarely simple and seldom obvious, which is why mature institutions recognise the importance of conflict and disagreement. Christianity was born in conflict, and it has been characterised by conflict ever since. The Church's obsession with heresy is witness to this fact.

Well, my mother said, and she was not exactly smiling, but as though she was wrapping a smile inside a thought.

But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much belowground as above. That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.

It's amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.

It was like so, but wasn't.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate?

lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Everyone's confusing. And everyone's confused

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.