Quotes About Complexity

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.

the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.

Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off.

Brink Lindsey has pointed out. 'Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet's decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of "complexity" and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos.

Ä°ki prion uzman?n yazd??? gibi, ''kiÅŸisel trajedilerin, etnik felaketlerin ve ekonomik y?k?mlar?n asl?, küçük bir molekülün haylazca yanl?? katlanmas?nda aranabilir.

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

If a car can represent something, this one represents contradiction. For most of his life, my dad has been able to have any woman he wants. In response, he's gone through as many as possible, betraying each for someone younger and more absurd. Conversely, for most of his life he's been able to have any car he wants, too. In response, he's remained married to this, a 1982 Porsche with a tricky clutch.

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.

I am a mass of contradictions.

I like you because you were mad. And you're pretty. And pretty sane for a mad person.

There is no normal. I've never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to be, and that can't possible be true. Human experience is far too varied.

I know no one is perfect, that behind every facade of perfection is a writhing mess of subterfuge and secret sorrows... but even taking that into account, Noah was pretty much perfect.

Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.

I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns—just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?

A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom"—this