Quotes About Complexity

Bent Flyvbjerg (do capítulo 18) mostrou, em seu Black Swan Management [Gerenciamento do Cisne Negro], a

Now run the idea in reverse:

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.

Besides narrative and causality, journalists and public intellectuals of the sound-bite variety do not make the world simpler. Instead, they almost invariably make it look far more complicated than it is.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units.

We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.

While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild

3) The regulator's incentive to make complicated regulations in order to subsequently sell his "expertise" to the private sector.

Things are not as simple as that. We

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).

on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.

in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

to how deep the author wants to go into a topic

1) how a collection of units doesn't behave like a sum of units

So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such a process, a loop:

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

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

Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.