Complex Systems Quotes - Page 2

• Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Littles, Assumption

  Thomas Sowell (1993). “Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday.

  David Graeber

  Everyday, Communism, Form

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences.

  Edward Snowden

  Offensive, Internet, Unintended Consequences

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.

  Herbert Spencer Jennings

  Cells, Substance, Delicacy

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• Computer science doesn't know how to build complex systems that work reliably. This has been a well-understood problem since the very beginning of programmable computers.

  Matt Blaze

  Computer, Problem, Wells

  Source: www.politico.com

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• New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

  Adam Frank

  Moving, Thinking, Law

  "Doctor Strange Advisor Explains the Science Behind Marvel's Multiverse". Interview with Screenrant, screenrant.com. March 2, 2017.

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• The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Real, Independent, Agency

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

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• My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Taken, Typewriters

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines

  Frederick Lenz

  Science, Self, Levels

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• Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system. A resilient, efficient system needs to be diverse and interconnected. On the other hand, diversity and interconnectivity decrease efficiency. Therefore, the key is an appropriate balance between efficiency and resilience.

  Bernard Lietaer

  Keys, Hands, Two

  Interview with Tracy Fernandez Rysavy, www.greenamerica.org. 2009.

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• I always liked to be fairly simple because you could get more players ready to play quickly. If you lose players to free agency, injuries, etc., it is easier to get young players ready to play in a less complex system.

  Tony Dungy

  Simple, Player, Agency

  Interview with Aaron Schatz, www.footballoutsiders.com. May 11, 2010.

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• When discussing complex systems like brains and other societies, it is easy to oversimplify: I call this Occam's lobotomy.

  I. J. Good

  Simplicity, Brain, Lobotomy

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• Market bashers ... might understand the claim that in some particular field, markets required no intervention--though they'd be skeptical--but the notion that, on general principle, complex systems ran themselves just fine without benign intervention seemed like it could only be the product of a quasi-religious faith. ... Of course, this gets things almost precisely backwards. It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct.

  Julian Sanchez

  Religious, Order, Ideas

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• You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

  Geoffrey West

  Order, Law, Cities

  "The Sameness of Organisms, Cities, and Corporations". Interview with Ben Lillie, blog.ted.com. July 26, 2011.

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• It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.

  Ivan Pavlov

  Animal, World, Infinite

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• The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

  Charles C. Mann

  Visitors, Explaining, Complexes

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• The Founders were not democrats and socialists..., but conservatives who had a healthy distrust of political passions and who devised a complex system designed to frustrate the schemes of social redeemers and others convinced of their own invincible virtue.

  David Horowitz

  Passion, Political, Healthy

  David Horowitz (2016). “The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz”, p.154, Encounter Books

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• Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts.

  Ivan Pavlov

  Cutting, Order, Connections

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• You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.

  Garrett Hardin

  Change, Taken, Law

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• Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time.

  Benjamin Hoff

  Steps, Purpose, Phrases

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• It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

  Jamais Cascio

  Atmosphere, Accepted, Rough

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• Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.

  Herbert Simon

  Organization, Decision, Problem

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• What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Memories, Interesting, Feelings

  "Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Vol. II". Book by Jean Dubuffet, p. 103, 1967.

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• We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.

  Hal Abelson

  Learning, Mean, Ideas

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• Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Opportunity, Goal, Cynical

  "Philosophy in a Time of Terror". Book by Giovanna Borradori, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, 2003.

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