Quotes About Complexity

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing

The method of science depends upon our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable , even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification–the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

It's not that simple." "Ah! That phrase is Male for 'I'm afraid to.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

She is like a dark plum, he thought. She might be sweet when you bit into her, but it was just as likely she'd be bitter. He liked not knowing which side he'd taste.

Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that's just peanuts to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn't blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it's so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns.

You can't talk to a jury about the technical details of your specialty and make any sense. The jury won't know what you're talking about, and that is precisely why you were hired.

Clarity attracts and confusion repels.

Gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.

Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Trauma or no, I would have been trans no matter what body I'd been born with. Tell the doctors that we exist for the health of humanity, which needs to find wholeness and belief in complexity. Girl in boy's body or boy inside a girl; call it fate or biology, will, or spiritual choice. But I was not born in the wrong body. -Scott Turner Schofield, "The Wrong Body

Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion.

The righteousness of the flawed is frightening.

Sometimes the best life is a complicated one.

There's no black and no white, just shades of grey...But the small betrayals lead to bigger ones, morality is eroded.

The workings of the male mind are twisted indeed." Winnifred Crane

problems of organised complexity, which involve a sizeable number of variables that are 'interrelated in an organic whole' to create a complex but organised system.

At the heart of systems thinking lie three deceptively simple concepts: stocks and flows, feedback loops, and delay. They sound straightforward enough, but the mind-boggling business begins when they start to interact. Out of their interplay emerge many of the surprising,

In contrast to Pareto's pyramid and Kuznets's rollercoaster ride, its essence is a distributed network whose many nodes, larger and smaller, are interconnected in a web of flows.

Behind all that thunder, you're just pure honey," is as true a statement about Pat Conroy as it is of Jack McCall in Beach Music.

Okay, he says. They both say it, all the time. I've finally started to figure out what it means. It means "yes" and "all right". It also means less than all right, and a begrudging no. It means everything, and nothing, all at once.

The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops.