Quotes About Complexity

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.

We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it. I will be taking the concept deeper in Book VII, on ethics, about the unfairness of a bonus system and how such unfairness is magnified by complexity.

Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what's going on. Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.

This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.

ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We

Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday

people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind.

complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.