Quotes About Complexity

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

Everything you know and dream of is nothing, not even a speck of what is. The life of even the tiniest ant is as infinitely complex as a man's and the life of a man is like a god's. And even this vast whole is enclosed in my endlessness like the faintest glimmer of the first thought on the dawn of the first day of creation. Everything is still possible. You have not yet begun to live.

Economics [...] has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize.

As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)

Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the 'origins of the state'), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom - to refuse orders - and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don't do as they're told.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity's original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state fo pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our 'complexity' and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it's equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a 'state' and another isn't?

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

He'd have to be really smart. The universe is pretty intricate. And humans themselves are so complex, given what we've learned about DNA and all.' "Okay, God would have to be super intelligent." 'Yeah. I'm not sure I buy that design in the universe proves God, but if there was a God, he would really be intelligent – and powerful – to pull it all off.

What if one characteristic of really advanced intelligence is to become less and less distinguishable from natural phenomena?

The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes.

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.

What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to the knowledge of it without difficulty, and without any stretch of thought or judgment, is but little regarded.

For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.

The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.

self: "This is how I felt." Before long, this leads to incredibly convoluted psychoanalysis in a futile effort to justify the most banal, superficial

David, we have been around your building and we've seven kanban boards. Each one is different! Each team is following a different process! How can you possibly cope with this complexity?' My answer was always a dismissive 'of course! Each team's situation is different.

Chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

Our brains are comprised of around eighty billion neurons interconnected to form an enormous network involving approximately five hundred trillion connections called synapses.

This country has no indigenous art that requires this level of skill. When classical music is transposed to our society we understand its purpose to be playing in a band or orchestra and we equate its complexity and sophistication to jazz. This is at best naive, at worst a perversion. A