Quotes About Complexity

In technology, our work happens almost entirely within complex systems with a high risk of catastrophic consequences. As

doing the same thing twice will not predictably or necessarily lead to the same result. It is this characteristic that makes static checklists and best practices, while valuable, insufficient to prevent catastrophes from occurring. See

Complex work is managed so that problems in design and operations are revealed.

limit on [team] size ... ensures the team has a clear, shared understanding of the system they are working on. As teams get larger, the amount of communication required for everybody to know what's going on scales in a combinatorial fashion.

Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?

Being a girl is complicated. But it isn't all bad, I have to admit.

No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, You cannot tell if computation will stop.

A major intent is to show that underlying the extraordinary complexity, diversity, and apparent messiness of the world we live in lies a surprising unity and simplicity when viewed through the lens of scale.

The two dominant components that constitute a city, its physical infrastructure and its socioeconomic activity, can both be conceptualized as approximately self-similar fractal-like network structures.

the fantastic power and ultimate absurdity of unchecked exponential growth.

Even more challenging and of perhaps greater urgency is the need to understand how to scale organizational structures of increasingly large and complex social organizations such as companies, corporations, cities, and governments, where the underlying principles are typically not well understood because these are continuously evolving complex adaptive systems.

If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing.

In general, then, a universal characteristic of a complex system is that the whole is greater than, and often significantly different from, the simple linear sum of its parts.

Perhaps, then, the most surprising consequence of a visionary Theory of Everything is that it implies that on the grand scale the universe, including its origins and evolution, though extremely complicated, is not complex but in fact is surprisingly simple because it can be encoded in a limited number of equations, conceivably even just a single master equation.

can any of this be sustainable?

TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES

So why do almost all cities remain viable, whereas the vast majority of companies and organisms die?

is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions

It's extremely difficult to kill a city! On

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written

Cuando se empieza a ver todo en todo, la manera de expresarse suele volverse más oscura. Se empieza a hablar con lengua de ángel […].

Con demasiada frecuencia la "noble sencillez" en las obras de la naturaleza tiene su origen en la noble ignorancia de quien las contempla.