Quotes About Complexity

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

Cualquier reducción del mundo que nos rodea puede tener unas consecuencias explosivas, ya que descarta algunas fuentes de incertidumbre, y nos empuja a malinterpretar el tejido del mundo.

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects.

with unknown side effects

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

la acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.

Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them.

George Soros, a complex man who thrived on rare events

which condition preceded the other.

the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become.

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

My problem is that I'm not rational.

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

because the interactions are not necessarily linear.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

la conciencia de un problema no significa mucho, sobre todo cuando están en juego intereses personales o instituciones interesadas.

the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

parts and whole differ because what matters are the interactions between such parts.

You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

and I should base my decisions around that.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number.