Quotes About Complexity

In illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organised into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions.

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can't play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can't enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.

Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.

any attempt to define the characteristics of modern society is akin to defining the color of a chameleon.

How can we act morally when we have no way of knowing all the relevant facts?

People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.

humains ont toujours excellé à inventer des outils, beaucoup moins à en faire un usage avisé. Il est plus facile de manipuler un fleuve en construisant un barrage qu'il ne l'est de prédire toutes les conséquences complexes que cela aura pour le système écologique plus large. De même sera-t-il plus facile de rediriger le flux de nos esprits que d'en deviner l'impact sur notre psychologie personnelle ou nos systèmes sociaux.

The system may push us in that direction, because it usually rewards us for the decisions we make rather than for our doubts. Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions.

Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point.

De ahí que, paradójicamente, a medida que acumulamos más datos y aumentamos la potencia de nuestros ordenadores, los acontecimientos se tornan más erráticos e inesperados.

The more we know, the less we can predict

Hardly anyone has just one identity. Nobody is just a Muslim, or just an Italian, or just a capitalist.

If cooperation is the key, how come the ants and bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb even though they learned to cooperate en masse millions of years before us? Because their cooperation lacks flexibility. Bees cooperate in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight. If a hive faces a new threat or a new opportunity, the bees cannot, for example, guillotine the queen and establish a republic.

A diferencia de las leyes de la física, que carecen de inconsistencias, todo orden creado por el hombre está repleto de contradicciones internas.

The world of thought, belief and feeling is by definition far more difficult to decipher.

That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space programme. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?

Los humanos pensamos más en relatos que en hechos, números o ecuaciones, y cuanto más sencillo es el relato, mejor.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is.

scientific complex and technological wizardry. All successful late modern empires cultivated scientific research in the hope of harvesting technological innovations, and many scientists spent most of their time working on arms, medicines and machines for their imperial masters.

Nigeria is too large to manage.....

No knowledge can summarize humans in one premise."

One can only describe the human but can never define it because humans are complex in their nature."

There is bad in good and there is no good in bad."

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.