Quotes About Complexity

Inaccessibility Theorem: THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU WANT. THE INFORMATION YOU WANT IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU NEED. THE INFORMATION YOU NEED IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU CAN OBTAIN. Rule

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system

AS SYSTEMS GROW IN SIZE AND COMPLEXITY, THEY TEND TO LOSE BASIC FUNCTIONS

SYSTEMS TEND TO MALFUNCTION CONSPICUOUSLY JUST AFTER THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH. Fully

WHEN BIG SYSTEMS FAIL, THE FAILURE IS OFTEN BIG

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED. A

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

Mankind is not a race of noble savages - but primitive monsters hide inside us, elusive as Sasquatch...

cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters...

What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person.

My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Lacey shrugged bashfully. "Do you think I'm superficial?" "Well, yeah." I thought of myself standing outside Becca's bedroom, hoping she'd take off her shirt. "But so am I," I added. "So is everyone."

Ther are so many people. It is easy to forget how full th world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistantly misimagined.

In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

As I understood it, what really mattered was simply that some systems ('system' is just a jargon word for anything, like a swinging pendulum, or the Solar System, or water dripping from a tap) are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial 'push' you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its own behaviour.

The lack of solutions to the Three-Body Problem is not caused by our human deficiencies as mathematicians, it is build into the laws of mathematics.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind.7 Bateson

to see her not merely as a bundle of stereotypes or as a convenient and tenuously linked series of myths, but as a whole woman whose choices added up and whose decisions made sense.

The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom.

You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It's the stuff we can understand. It's cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.

Analysing complexity Analysis of complex systems almost always turns on finding recurring patterns in the system's ever-changing configurations. The game of chess provides a useful analogy: a dozen rules determine