Quotes About Complexity

complex system: a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.

Linearity is a reductionist's dream, and nonlinearity can sometimes be a reductionist's nightmare. Understanding the distinction between linearity and nonlinearity is very important and worthwhile. To

Above all, the take-home message from this book is that we humans tend to overestimate AI advances and underestimate the complexity of our own intelligence. Today's

How is it that those systems in nature we call complex and adaptive—brains, insect colonies, the immune system, cells, the global economy, biological evolution—produce such complex and adaptive behavior from underlying, simple rules?

But twentieth-century science was also marked by the demise of the reductionist dream. In spite of its great successes explaining the very large and very small, fundamental physics, and more generally, scientific reductionism, have been notably mute in explaining the complex phenomena closest to our human-scale concerns.

idea models—models that are simple enough to study via mathematics or computers but that nonetheless capture fundamental properties of natural complex systems.

He's like a lake. You assume it has great depths, pure undisturbed undiscoverable depths. You assume depths must be there because the surface is so flat--pretty and flat and utterly unrevealing. Boring almost, you might say, if you didn't know about the depths, that is, if you didn't believe they were there.

Sometimes you look at me and it's like all the bullshit gets stripped off and I'm left with what's underneath and I kind of like what I see. Someone who actually fails. Someone who has absolutely no self-control. Someone who says real dickhead things like 'this is complicated.' I like that part of me, you know. I like the fact that I know I can't control you or how I feel about you and that doesn't freak me out.

We don't even love each other. I do a bit, you know. You do what a bit? You know. Like you...whatever...love you a bit. I think I kind of love you too.

And I hate him and love him and curse him and feel sorry for him, all at the same time.

He has a strange face. It's all sharpness and angles and incredibly fair skin. But then he's got this thatch of black hair that's such a contrast. It's like two cultures had a massive fight over his face and neither won.

I still don't say anything. I want to but I can't. I want to explain everything that's going on in my head but I can't find the words

Do you think you love him?" Phaedra had once asked. "I don't know really what that is," Quintana had responded in her cold, practical way. Yes, you do, my queen, Phaedra wanted to say now. Quintana's love was unabashed. Wondrous. The type of love that lit a strange, strange face and turned it into a beacon.

A clear division between good and evil, right and wrong, would simplify everything, but life was rarely simple.

I am discovering that it is truly a mistake--it may even be a moral wrong, in fact--to judge. Truth is too complex, too contradictory, too mercurial, to be one-sided, though it is human nature to prefer the reassurance and ease of firm judgement. Judgement helps us to justify our less savory actions.

being a teenager these days is not for the faint of heart.

People are always talking about love like it's something everyday. People say they love their parents, but what does that mean?

There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word 'through' and over sixty of the pronoun 'she', which is quite hard to imagine.

Marriage, if one will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil.

Tots els homes són iguals de qui sap quines maneres.

In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible," reads the caption.

The problems are hidden inside code and data, which makes them harder to see and easier to ignore.

Here's an open secret of the big data world: all data is dirty. All of it.

Because social decisions are about more than just calculations, problems will always ensue if we use data alone to make decisions that involve social and value judgments.