Quotes About Complexity

In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.

An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what.

Whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention.

Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

People are complicated creatures, with a nuanced set of private and public incentives, and that our behavior is enormously influenced by circumstances.

The future is far less knowable than you think.

The fact is that solving problem is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer one small question well.

As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Las conductas social y económica, añade, «son complejas, y comprender su carácter resulta mentalmente agotador.

It is easy to get seduced by complexity; but there is virtue in simplicity too.

The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer even one small question well.

When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

The more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedback. You can gather a lot of facts, and that may be helpful, but in order to reliably measure cause and effect you need to get beneath the facts. You may have to purposefully go out and create feedback through an experiment.

That may not be a simple conversation. But when you are dealing with root causes, at least you know you are fighting the real problem and not just boxing with shadows.

Every big problem has been thought about endlessly by people much smarter than we are. The fact that it remains a problem means it is too damned hard to be cracked in full.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes .

It's tiring not knowing people isn't it? Clio said later. It isn't word efficient, I agreed.

for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.