Quotes About Complexity

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat the enemy.

John Maeda, a designer at the MIT Media Lab, puts the matter, well, simply: "Complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity implies the feeling of being found." When people feel "found," they can join the conversation.

There's nothing offensive about this pragmatism. The relationship between money and voluntariness is too complex to be summarized in one or even many paragraphs of a code. Most people wouldn't go to work if they weren't paid, and yet rarely is it suggested that there should be laws to stop them working. Workers in dangerous occupations tend to get paid more: again it is rarely suggested that compensation for risks is contrary to public policy.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

...the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

My life is a twisted rainbow.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

Los libros pertenecen a la vez a varios campos. La literatura, en sí misma, pertenece al orden del arte en general que, por supuesto, es muy complejo, y, yendo hacia lo más sencillo, al orden primario del juego, como el trapo que se vuelve muñeca, como el palo de escoba que hace de caballo.

The function of a good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.

When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, "It's too early to tell.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

Normally, when they opened up the womb, they were presented with the top of the baby's head, and then with its face, its eyes squinched tight. All they could see inside Chiasoka was a mess of tubes, like a bowlful of thick cannelloni, although some of the tubes appeared to have rows of small nobbles on them, which could have been rudimentary fingers.

English is illogical in places. Trying to make it logical is a mistake. Instead, bend to it.

Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward "perfection.

the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that

I don't believe their minds were so different from ours that we're in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes.

the knot of their interdependencies grew, until marriage began to seem far simpler than disentanglement, and, once accepted, almost as natural as puberty or death.

Haven't you heard of Occam's Razor: once you have a perfectly simple explanation for something, you don't go looking for ever more complicated ways of explaining the very same thing?

Durham said, "Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?" Maria was caught blank for a second, then she said, "Yes, of course. In cellular automaton theory, it's a state of the system that can't be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system's first state.

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

There are no monotone "values" in biology.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.