Quotes About Complexity

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Não pense em se entender comigo. Não sei porque o ser humano se esforça tanto em se entender um com o outro. Mas lembre-se. Duas pessoas Jamais se entenderão por completo. Pois o ser humano... é um bicho triste assim.

Making stuff - that's easy. Supply chain, now that is hard.

How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man!... Midway from nothing to the Deity!

Sometimes honesty can be incredibly messy.

Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

It's only the desire to live as long as possible that makes everything seem complicated and mysterious.

Lo bello siempre me intimida. Y eso no es todo, porque en ocasiones me envilece.

China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world and think in absolute terms:

Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the educational system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What's written on your form is far more important.

A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality: statistics.

Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less.

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what's going on.

The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.

hence few try to understand what they have signed up for. Like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract that consists of dozens of pages of legalese—you take one look at it, immediately scroll down to the last page, tick 'I agree' and forget about it. Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.

Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. Today

Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the education system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What's written on your form is far more important.

Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected.