Quotes About Complexity

He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.

the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.

The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.

It took us weeks to really grasp it because it was so weird," said Charlie. "But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you can't prove it in a court of law. But it's fraud." It

It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn't working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.

For more than twenty years, the bond market's complexity had helped the Wall Street bond trader to deceive the Wall Street customer. It was now leading the bond trader to deceive himself.

Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

Paul Meehl wrote in a famous 1986 essay, "Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?

Asked to guess what it might cost the U.S. government to return Hanford to the standards now legally required of it, MacWilliams said, "A century and a hundred billion dollars." And that, he thought, might be a conservative estimate.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.

read everything he could find on the subject. One of his favorite books was actually called Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. His favorite paper to pass out was "How Complex Systems Fail," an eighteen-bullet-point summary by Richard I. Cook, now a professor of health care systems safety in Sweden. (Bullet

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. It's hard to figure this stuff out.

I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

Danny sensed already that he was very like his mother and not at all like his father. His feelings about himself were complicated.

If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more complicated one?

The public-health officer is like the garbage disposal," she said. "Whatever issue can't be filed into someone else's box or slot winds up in the health officer's.

James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term "chaos theory." The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what

I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?

He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.

I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.