Quotes About Complexity

even if a universe's life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.

Ease of learning isn't the primary force in language evolution.

They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech.

When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn't trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic.

Even if a universes's life span is calculable , the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable... The fact that it {universe} spawned such plenitude is a miracle...

Conventional languages. . . lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

What if all the difficulties anticipated in the Federalist Papers—regional tensions, unscrupulous leaders, and a dysfunctional Congress—happened at precisely the same moment?

We are complex combinations of strengths and weaknesses. There are things that we can do with ease. There are other things that are painful and arduous.

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.

The art of it is, the more we can bring complex game mechanics to a mass market, the more engaging the games will be. But at the same time, we have to simplify everything: the mass market has a lower attention span; they're not seeking that experience from the outset.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.

What is it to be white? It does mean something to be Norwegian. It means something to be Polish or German or Spanish. But 'white' is simply a catchall for 'light-skinned person.' It doesn't really mean anything.

I am an Irish Catholic person. I've been a man and a woman. I speak Russian, sort of. And then I'm very diplomatic.

Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That's one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?

The women I cast have to embody all sorts of contradictions... I have to find the right woman to speak to other women.

The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.

Comedians could do mindless things - and by mindless, I mean the easy jokes and things that you already agree with - but I find it more interesting, more of a reward, for people to feel something. I like to make a human connection, and that involves speaking emotionally, a bit more intellectually, or with a bit more moral complexity.

Among the many problems with taking the Bible literally is it reduces the most mysterious and complex of realities to simple - even simplistic - terms. Yes, scripture speaks of fire and damnation and eternal bliss, but the Bible is the product of human hands and hearts, and much of the imagery is allegorical, not meteorological.

When a woman speaks to a man about the love she feels for another man, she is not liked.

I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.

With guitar riffs, we always look for something that 's a little bit special. We've always found that it is harder to come up with something that's nice and simple without getting something that's hard but easy.