Quotes About Complexity

No one is all good or all bad. You can love your father because he clothed and fed you, but you can hate him because he's a man and tragically flawed.

Policymakers have demonstrated a predilection for giving the greatest amount of deference to state and other elite actors, rather than to their users. Increased complexity has led to a greater propensity for inconsistency and error, as the following chapters illustrate. This, combined with ever-increasing scale, has created a crisis of legitimacy and, for many individuals for whom these platforms constitute a vital tool, an untenable situation.

Censorship is, as I hope this book makes clear, inherently political, and the more complex the rules, the more difficult they are to apply at scale. On top of that, as the past few months have demonstrated, the individual right to free expression is inherently in tension with public health and freedom from harm. These are not easy problems, and we must be wary of anyone who claims to have easy solutions.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

Caring about someone isn't complicated. It isn't easy. But it isn't complicated, either. Kinda like lifting the engine block out of a car.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It's at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason.

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.

rinciples, or "rules" in complexity theory terminology, affect how tools and practices are implemented. Practices are how principles are acted out. Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used. Although the use of agile practices may vary from team to team, the principles are constant. Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems.

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

A human can be a real prick but maintain the capacity for good and a good hearted soul is capable of great evil. Never judge a person as absolutely one way or another because you sell the human race short when you do.

The objective of the scenario approach is not to decide which scenario is right…. There is no 'right' answer.

Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It's a basic fact of life that many things "everybody knows" turn out to be wrong.

I think it's a mistake to treat different realms of knowledge as if they are some how fundamentally the same.

What makes us human is so simple. What we choose to do with it is so complex.

It's the books I love best that are the hardest to write about. I don't want to take one angle on them, I want to dive into them and quote huge chunks and tell you everything about them, and it just isn't possible.

What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.)

Writers are not nice people. We can't be.

I'm only fifteen. I'm not sure I ever want to get married. I'm neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some "real thing". What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody to talk about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I'm not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?

O senhor por ora mal me entende, se é que no fim me entenderá. Mas a vida não é entendível.

Certo, per quello che Zé Bebelo aveva fatto; ma sbagliato per quello che Zé Bebelo era e non era. Chi sa davvero quello che è una persona? E piuttosto: ogni processo è sempre difettoso, perché quello che la gente giudica è il passato.

Todos estão loucos, neste mundo? Porque a cabeça da gente é uma só, e as coisas que há e as que estão para haver são demais de muitas, muito maiores diferentes, e a gente tem de necessitar de aumentar a cabeça, para o total.

Todos estão loucos, neste mundo? Porque a cabeça da gente é uma só, e as coisas que há e que estão para haver são demais de muitas, muito maiores diferentes, e a gente tem de necessitar de aumentar a cabeça, para o total.

Some things go too deep for words.