Quotes About Complexity

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.

Furthermore, when their social contraptions fail to fly, ideologues blame not themselves but all who see through the simplifications.

Acabé dándome cuenta mientras pensaba en estas cosas de que aquello que se puede amar de verdad en una persona está indisociablemente unido a sus limitaciones.

Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.

name) is an important part of the process whereby the infinitely complex world of phenomena and fact is reduced to the functional world of value. And it is continual interaction with social institutions that makes this reduction—this specification—possible.

Chaos is where we are when we don't know where we are, and what we are doing when we don't know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand

just because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things

But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.

Jacob cut his gaze to me. I wasn't quiet sure how to convey, /I know we hate him, but based on the circumstances, it was the most logical thing to do/, with a nonverbal signal. I widened my eyes a little.

It's always been weird to imagine Jacob dating Crash, but now that Red was in the picture, maybe I could see it. We all have our types, and maybe Crash thrived best against a backdrop of self-righteousness.

You can explain it to a Congressman in six minutes and he can talk about it for six months.

Data is messy, and inference is hard.

probabilities of uncertain events can be mathematically described and manipulated—but are in fact not obvious at all. If they were, they would not have arrived so late in the history of human thought.

That's the dirty little secret of advanced geometry. It may sound impressive that we can do geometry in ten dimensions (or a hundred, or a million...), but the mental pictures we keep in our mind are two-or at most three-dimensional. That's all our brains can handle. Fortunately, this impoverished vision is usually enough.

The human body is an immensely complex system, and there are only a few of its features we can measure, let alone manipulate. Based on the correlations we can observe, there are lots of drugs that might plausibly have a desired health effect. And so you try them out in experiments, and most of them fail dismally. To work in drug development requires a resilient psyche, not to mention a vast pool of capital.

the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.

If you could pick one word in the English language to describe the universe, what would it be? Why?" Here's my response: Unfair.

Miquel soltó una bocanada de aire. Cuando era inspector solía decir que nadie es bueno ni malo, que todo depende de las circunstancias.Y decía que cada ser humano tenía luces y sombras.

Eu não entendo nada de pintura, não posso criticar. Mas o que eu gostaria de saber é que coisa o pintor quis mostrar com essa complicação... João olhou a tela mais uma vez: — Antes de tudo ele quis não mostrar a realidade. É uma das maneiras de fazer arte contra o povo. —

Tudo não, Teodoro, tu não sabes que obscuro poço é o coração da gente.

Era un asunto embrollado: el español era Topete, a quien en el cantón conocíamos como «Eligio», para no tener que decirle Eligio de Puta.

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses--clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.