Quotes About Complexity

Humans, herself included, held no interest for her except as living machines, mind-bogglingly intricate, beautiful systems that somehow housed individuals not quite worthy of the miracle of their physical bodies.

He made her human—or as human as she was capable of being. And being human was possibly her least favorite aspect of life.

Into many lives a little irregularity must fall.

In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions.

Transparency once meant being able to "open the hood" to see how things worked. Now, with the Macintosh meaning of transparency dominant in the computer culture, it means quite the opposite: being able to use a program without knowing how it works.

Leonardo, with his profound knowledge of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination - since in his mind he frequently formed some difficult conception, so subtle and so wonderful that no hands, however excellent or able, could ever give it expression

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven.

There was something, a driving destructive thing in life, in all relationships between people.

Part of what trips us up is that we expect life and relationships to be easy. There is nothing easy about life, and relationships especially seem to stir up every hidden demon, every dusty complex, every latent unshed tear from our own life and our parents' histories hidden away in the attics of their psyches. Relationships ask us to grow in ways that nothing else does or can.

Making peace is not a simple endeavor. It is a constant struggle. But its complexity should not overshadow its purpose.

That's because they came up with an elegant classification—the periodic table of chemical elements. This allowed them to distinguish the basic building blocks. This in turn revealed that a relatively small set of elements can explain the enormously diverse range of substances and chemical properties. This basic strategy of analyzing complex phenomena into simpler elements is part of the "secret sauce" that makes science so powerful.

Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.' 'Yes.' 'And love too.' 'Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.

I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather.

When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The

When we do something with a quite simple, clear mind, we have no notion or shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex.

A Conspiracy is like an Iceberg........there is a lot more to it than what meets the eye

Underneath every simple, obvious story about 'human error,' there is a deeper, more complex story about the organization.

People do not come to work to do a bad job. Safety in complex systems is not a result of getting rid of people, of reducing their degrees of freedom. Safety in complex systems is created by people through practice—at all levels of an organization.

Arriving at the edge of chaos is a logical endpoint for drift. At the edge of chaos, systems have tuned themselves to the point of maximum capability.

Asking what is the cause, is just as bizarre as asking what is the cause of not having an accident. Accidents have their basis in the real complexity of the system, not their apparent simplicity.

A whole complex system cannot be inspected, only parts or sub-systems can be inspected.

In complex systems, after all, it is very hard to foresee or predict the consequences of presumed causes. So it is not the consequences that we should be afraid of (we might not even foresee them or believe them if we could). Rather, we should be weary of renaming things that negotiate their perceived risk down from what it was before.

Our technologies have got ahead of our theories. Our theories are still fundamentally reductionist, componential and linear. Our technologies, however, are increasingly complex, emergent and non-linear.

We are what we are, and half of what we are is what we are not.