Quotes About Complexity

'Bleak House' is like the best soap you could ever hope to watch.

We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them.

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

Green Arrow has gone through so many changes; he's been right-wing, he's been left-wing, he's been rich, he's been poor, he's been a social justice guy, then when I got him, he was a rich playboy guy. So it was a lot harder to get into a character that has so many personas in the past, and I just looked at his anger.

The reason people need advice on using social media is that they're a much more complex and nuanced way to communicate than a conversation or email.

BitCoin is actually an exploit against network complexity. Not financial networks, or computer networks, or social networks. Networks themselves.

Social Security is an extremely complicated program.

Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.

I'm drawn to projects where I play these really complicated characters, but also where I can have some type of influence on affecting what we see as societal norms.

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

When I speak about 'we,' it gets very complex very quickly. Having grown up in the United States, but also being very much a member of Nigerian societies and also different parts of Nigerian societies, I understand that we construct particular 'we's.'

There's no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can't work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

No human quality belongs to only one class of person. We all get to be both aggressive and loving. We all get to delight in our careers and revel in our children. We're all kind and brave, soft and hard, sciency and artsy, interested in being looked at and in admiring others' physical form. Everything.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.

If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

Compounding the cost, most mapping software is processor-intense.

Computers in general, and software in particular, are much more difficult than other kinds of technology for most people to grok, and they overwhelm us with a sense of mystery.

It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.

It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.

Complicated feelings are fertile soil for creative ideas.

Titan is the one place in our solar system whose geographical and atmospheric diversity and complexity are rivaled only by the Earth's. It's very Earth-like, but it's also very different, which means we have a lot to learn as well as a prayer of understanding what we find.