Quotes About Complexity

The gains from size are visible but the risks are hidden

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

while the bulk of their risks came from outside their models.

the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for.

Siempre es preferible optar por aquellas cosas que funcionan desde hace mucho tiempo, pues es más probable que ya hayan alcanzado su estado ergódico. Y, de todos modos, en el peor de los casos, el problema sería que no sabemos cuánto durarán.* Recordemos que la carga de la prueba recae en quien perturba un sistema complejo y no en la persona que protege el statu quo.

The problem is primarily size, and the fragility that comes from size.

This absence of penalty makes them antifragile at the expense of the society

A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.

even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right

the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If

The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. Again, the insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule.

In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today's world.

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

It is very difficult to isolate a single cause when there are plenty around.

Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called "efficiency" that makes people now sail too close to the wind.

a) The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000, then 110,000 cars on the one hand, or 100,000 cars on the other.

Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.

they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.