Quotes About Complexity

An invention, especially one as complex as the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm but from a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity.

An irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.

Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs's attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.

Los ordenadores de hoy son idiotas brillantes

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard," according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.

Podía construir ecuaciones complejas, pero lo más importante era que sabía que las matemáticas constituyen el lenguaje que usa la naturaleza para describir sus maravillas

Einstein's great strength: he could look at a complex mathematical equation, which for others was merely an abstraction, and picture the physical reality that lay behind it.

it folded and twisted, which would reveal how it interacted with other molecules.5

the sequence of letters in the DNA did not reveal how it worked; what was important was

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.

I mention "mosaic," a term often used in biology. "That's a better description than grayscale," she says. "And frankly that's true for all of us. All of us, if we're honest with ourselves, know that we have things that we're great at and things that we're not so great at.

They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.

It's hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.

We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going – blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

Saying that Jesus was a moral teacher is like calling Winston Churchill a landscape painter; both statements are true (and Jesus was a much better moralist than Churchill was a painter) but in neither case does the description capture the true greatness of the person.

O, the tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.

We are indeed seeing in our time the birth of a global superculture that pours together bits and pieces of many different cultures. But it is not just a combination of pieces, and neither will it be merely an homogenization; human beings are far too inventive for that, and the human mind is far too complex. We

Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running.

The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it's impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it's worse than ever.

Predicting causes litter.

There is pleasure from learning the simple truth, and there is a pleasure from learning that the truth is not simple.