Quotes About Complexity

'Complicated' is good, in my opinion.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

It's more complex than just slapping up a wall. We have got to take a look at all the complexities in terms of eliminating the incentives for illegal immigration.

We're very, very flawed, myself included.

I am kind of an undecipherable commodity to a lot of people, including myself.

No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

The medicine increases the disease.

The complexity increases exponentially when you try and combine two companies that both need to be restructured in their own right.

That's what's so cool about 'Once:' There is a layer of darker stuff, but it's balanced by this incredible light.

Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

Regardless, one cannot help but marvel that the movement of security prices, the motion of molecules, and the diffusion of heat could all be of the same mathematical species. As will be seen, it is one of many such strange liaisons in nature.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

The cost estimate of the prospectus turned out to be a best possible outcome based on the unlikely assumption that everything would go according to plan with no delays, no changes in performance specifications, no management problems, no problems with contractual arrangements or new technologies or geology, no major conflicts, no political promises not kept, and so on.

Markets are complex systems. Energy production and distribution are complex systems. Manufacturing and transportation are complex systems. Debt is a complex system. So are viruses. And climate change. And globalization. On and on the list goes. If your project is ambitious and depends on other people and many parts, it is all but certain that your project is embedded in complex systems.

I know from experience that people sometimes struggle with this, not because it's complicated but because it's simple. It's too simple. Their project is special, after all, or so they think, and this process doesn't emphasize that, so they complicate the process.

By now you know the solution to the puzzle I discussed at the end of the previous chapter: Only five project types—solar power, wind power, fossil thermal power, electricity transmission, and roads—are not fat-tailed, meaning that they, unlike all the rest, do not have a considerable risk of going disastrously wrong. So what sets the fortunate five apart? They are all modular to a considerable degree, some extremely so.

And that translates into slow and complex. Nuclear power plants, for one, are the products of a staggering number of bespoke parts and systems that must all work, and work together, for the plant as a whole to work.

First, you can't build a nuclear power plant quickly, run it for a while, see what works and what doesn't, then change the design to incorporate the lessons learned.

Second, there's a problem with experience—the other half of experiri. If you are building a nuclear power plant, chances are that you haven't done much of that before for the simple reason that few have been built and each takes many years to complete, so opportunities to develop experience are scarce.

Look for it in the world, and you'll see it everywhere. A brick wall is made of hundreds of bricks. A flock of starlings, which moves as if it were a unitary organism, may be composed of hundreds or thousands of birds. Even our bodies are modular, composed of trillions of cells that are themselves modular. There's an evolutionary reason for this ubiquity: In survival of the fittest, the "fittest" is often a module that is particularly successful in reproducing itself.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

The infirmity of human nature renders all plans precarious in the execution in proportion as they are extensive in design.