Quotes About Complexity

This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

If you could have dozens of lesser lives, didn't that add up to one big one?

H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Entropy is a bitch

Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

When I glanced back up, a holoed globe of Hyperion ceased spinning and unwound itself into a series of flattened projections: oblique equirectangular, Bonne, orthographic, rosette, Van der Grinten, Gores, interrupted Goode homolosine, gnomonic, sinusoidal, azimuthal equidistant, polyconic, hypercorrected Kuwatsi, computer-eschered, Briesemeister, Buckminster, Miller cylindrical, multicoligraphed, and satplot standard, before resolving into a standard Robinson-Baird map of Hyperion.

Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?

Occam's Razor: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the correct one. —William of Occam, fourteenth century Darwin's Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. —Darwin Minor, twenty-first century

You had a corollary to Occam's Razor," persisted Syd. "I think it went—'All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.

Human thought can be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.

the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.

All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attended them

All Evills are to be consider'd with the Good that is in them, and with what worse attends them.

The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.

In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.

Emotional intelligence skills are synergistic with cognitive ones; top performers have both. The more complex the job, the more emotional intelligence matters—if only because a deficiency in these abilities can hinder the use of whatever technical expertise or intellect a person may have.

The problem gets compounded by what's called the "illusion of explanatory depth," where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge.

It takes a panoramic attention to appreciate system-level interactions

In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential. Creative insights entail joining elements in a useful, fresh way.

Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways kids interact with games—that's the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. As the world becomes more complex," Wright adds, "games are better at preparing you." "Kids are natural systems thinkers," says

The first three or four years of life are a period when the toddler's brain grows to about two thirds its full size, and evolves in complexity at a greater rate than it ever will again. During this period key kinds of learning take place more readily than later in life—emotional learning foremost among them. During this time severe stress can impair the brain's learning centers.

complexity—to reason—plummeted.