Quotes About Complexity

Veronique and Dylan having the mother of all arguments. I mean, it had a plot and a subplot and several walk-on parts....

It's so stupid how someone touching you - just their skin on your skin - can make you feel all sorts of things you don't want to feel.

What you look like is just one part of who you are - but it's not all you are.

I don't know why it so happens in life that one absolutely can't do something simple but important.

Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?

My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." Whoever said that may well have been thinking about Matthew 5 or even our specific passage.

Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones. But that's O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.

Two primary criticisms have been raised of postmodernism.16 The first is to insist that just because one sees the world through a particular set of lenses (or biases), it does not mean that he or she is incapable of rationality or objectivity. It may make being rational and objective more difficult, but it does not make it impossible.

Males and females have never seemed to fully understand each other. It will probably continue this way, but I think that's part of the magic of it all.

The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.

But the problem isn't functionality. Functionality means a piece of software is capable of doing something. Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.

Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.

Projects are complex non-linear systems and have significant inertia. If you wait to see acute problems before taking action, you will be too late and may make things worse.

the more complex performance reviews become, the less effective they are.

Things that are less fun to do are usually harder to do, which means the pile isn't ordinary work but a pile of unloved, unwanted, complex work: 1. We do things we like first. 2. We do things we don't like last. 3. The things we don't like tend to be harder. 4. Late changes have cascading effects.

we're what you call heterogenous. That means we're everywhere, everybody at once. We're both good and bad, right and wrong. We're the great resolvers of conflict. We're like octopuses--because we'll swallow anything. Even men. Even battling and forlorn men like you and your dad. You guys try so hard to be subjects, characters, things, you forget us women are the whole story. We embrace you all. What you really want to destroy is women, that story of yourself you can't control.

Thirty to 40 years ago, most financial decisions were fairly simple.

Often, scholars distinguish between complex systems—systems in which the entities follow fixed rules—and complex adaptive systems—systems in which the entities adapt. If the entities adapt, then the system has a greater capacity to respond to changes in the environment.

importance, essence, and averaging. The importance of diversity in complex systems is the central theme of this book. Why does diversity matter? What roles does it play? I show that diversity has many roles and effects. Diversity can provide insurance, improve productivity, spur innovation, enhance robustness, produce collective knowledge,

creates synergies. It allows the whole to be more than the parts. And diversity between communities provides robustness to major changes.

diverse, connected, interdependent entities whose behavior is determined by rules, which may adapt, but need not. The interactions of these entities often produce phenomena that are more than the parts. These phenomena are called emergent.

When taking actions, wise people apply multiple models like a doctor's set of diagnostic tests. They use models to rule out some actions and privilege others. Wise people and teams construct a dialogue across models, exploring their overlaps and differences.