Quotes About Complexity

as societies gain in complexity, with more and more "cutting edge" sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse.

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story—to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.

One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.

In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically.

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

These may seem irrational to an outsider who defines rationality in terms of what he can explain.

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And

el mayor y más acuciante objetivo humano es comprender cómo actuar en condiciones de información incompleta.

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

I count myself one of those).

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.