Complexity Quotes

“The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“And I thought about how life was like the weather, it could change, and how Dante had moods that were pure as a blue sky and sometimes they were dark like a storm and that maybe, in some ways, he was just like me, and maybe that wasn’t such a good thing - but maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing either. People were complicated. I was complicated. Dante, he was complicated, too. People - they were included in the mysteries of the universe. What mattered is that he was an original. That he was beautiful and human and real and I loved him - and I didn’t think anything would ever change that.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

“Read books. Try to understand the reason why things happen, why they are as they are. If you see only the surface phenomena, then the world becomes extremely confusing, ever more unsettling. But if the reasons are understood there's a kind of simplicity that emerges.”
― David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For

“More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too. Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Do not be afraid of complexity.
Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.”
― Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

“Look at the crowd. They all agree on some simple answer to a complex problem. You know in your gut that they are wrong, even if the situation does not break down into a 100% good party versus a 100% bad party. Their assertions, cloaked in positivity, reek of denial and death to the instinct in your gut and heart.”
― Brett Stevens

“Life is simple. Humans make it complicated.”
― Torron-Lee Dewar

“Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

“Mathematics is a wonderful common sense! To understand the harmony in its nature magnificent this wondrous language, abundantly rich in terms of matter and manner, calls for cleverness to manoeuvre through the complexities. Finally it is all wisdom.”
― Priyavrat Thareja

“Religious and idealogical dogmas are still highly attractive in our scientific age precisely because they offer us a safe haven from the frustrating complexity of reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“When everyone says the same thing about some complex topic, what should come to your mind is, 'wait a minute, nothing can be that simple, something's wrong.' That's the immediate light that should go off in your brain when you ever hear unanimity on some complex topic." (The Ezra Klein Show 2021/04/23)”
― Noam Chomsky

“How do you know who you are?
After all, you are complex beyond your own understanding; more complex than anything else that exists, excepting other people; complex beyond belief.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained. "Should one be embarrassed by choosing cheddar every time?" he asked. Matthew laughed. "There's no need to apologize for simple things." "But is cheddar simple?" Domenica enquired. "Just because there's a lot of it, does that make it simple?”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“The only true solutions to complex systemic problems are piecemeal, multi-pronged answers, and they will vary wildly from forest to desert, from city to city, and even between neighborhoods within a single city. Life is messy and civilization even messier. If your answer is ever any less messy, you’re fooling yourself.”
― John Bierce, The Siege of Skyhold

“Things have various qualities and the soul various tendencies, for nothing presented to the soul is simple, and the soul never applies itself simply to any subject. That is why the same thing makes us laugh and cry.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“If we, humans, were to discover that the universe is fathomable and anything smaller than infinity, the revelation would disrupt and doom us. Man worships complexity. For us, the unattainable universe complexity is the source of our spirit and dynamism, rather than the cause of confusion or death.”
― Aneesh Abraham, Super Dense Crush Load: The Story of Man Redux

“Beauty = elegance = economy = simplicity. This is not only the simplest possible world but also the most beautiful possible world. The only thing that makes our world ugly is human behavior! That’s because humans have failed to know themselves. They have over-complicated everything.”
― Thomas Stark, Base Reality: Ultimate Existence

“This is unfortunate, but the world is too complex for there to be good reasons for any truly great decision.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.”
― Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity ?? The Physics Of Complex Systems

“As a subject of behavioral study, nest architecture offers an appealing feature that practically no other behavior offer; namely, the nest is a perfect record of the collective digging effort of a colony, and once cast, is ready to study. By studying a series of casts of increasing size it is possible to describe the nest's growth and ontogeny, infer its species-typical characteristics, and bracket the range of variation. By doing this under different environments and soil types, possibly with transplanted colonies, it is possible to tease out the variation that the environment imposes on the architecture. The current study is only a small, initial step toward creating a field of nest architecture studies, whose ultimate goal is an understanding of how the nest emerges from self-organizing behavior, what function it serves, how it varies within and between species, and how it evolves. In addition, these casts reveal something previously unseen. The study of nest architecture is thus a true exploration of a hidden world that hold unsuspected beauty, patter, and complexity.”
― Walter Tschinkel

“In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“The eternal paradox of writing for a Poet: do you try simplicity in complexity or complexity in simplicity?”
― Avijeet Das

“The saddest steak is on the grill, its juices bleeding and sizzling into the fire. Death never tasted so good as a last meal. You once were admired, until she left when you couldn't fit through the door anymore. The mirror last laughs as your skin runs over the edges. One hand feeds time, the other hand scratches the face of the clock, swallowing the past. As the mirror smashes, the piano keys the car, and pieces reflect the thinner you once again.”
― Anthony Liccione

“In her search for solutions [to high conflict], [Amanda] Ripley shows that the process of escaping these situations usually involves five steps. Participants in the conflict, she suggests, need to “investigate the understory” that made them so invested in the first place. They should “reduce the binary,” recognizing that they may share more values and interests with their adversaries than they realize. They must “marginalize the fire starters,” ceasing to listen to those who seem to get a thrill out of the fight. They should “buy time and make space,” stopping themselves from escalating when they feel triggered. Most important, they need to “complicate the narrative,” recognizing that any story in which one side consists of pure heroes and the other of cartoonish villains is unlikely to be altogether accurate.”
― Yascha Mounk

“Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“I don’t tell my friends about her. There’s a precious quality in good things that is lost when you explain them at parties. I try not to. One because telling people what you love is like stapling them to a paper you read every day. I don’t want them on it. And two, if you do discuss it and they react without a care, you feel like they took something from you. But there is also the other reason I keep my mouth shut, which is that there is a sweetness to not knowing other folks’ reactions about what only you love. Secrecy is the only way you can know you love it. So I hide her with me, like a treasure chest in an ocean full of partying pirates: deep-down and with a spell.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“In the Adaptive Markets framework, complexity means we don't have a good narrative for the system. The solution is obvious: we need to get smarter. Complexity can sometimes be reduced by developing a deeper understanding of the underlying structure of the system. For example, now that we understand the potential for liquidity spirals in statarb portfolios, thanks to August 2007, we can better prepare for them.

But the Adaptive Markets framework points to a second problem with complexity, which is the potential divisiveness of special knowledge and the potential for conflict. If the financial system becomes so complex that only a small number of elites truly understand its function and proper maintenance, this knowledge divides the population into those who know and those who don't. Of course, this situation arises with any piece of unique information - I know how to make scallion pancakes in a particular way so they're crispy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and you probably don't. But that piece of knowledge is hardly worth keeping a secret, and the fact that you don't have that knowledge isn't going to get you too upset.

But suppose I know how to cure diabetes and you don't. Or I know how to prevent cancer by avoiding certain common foods and you don't. Or I know how to price mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and you don't. In these cases, the knowledge I possess confers a certain power and status to me. Complexity creates the need for better narratives and those who have those narratives will become the high priests of complex systems, the gatekeepers of critical, life-altering knowledge. And the difficulty in joining the priesthood - earning an MD/Ph.D. in molecular biology and having twenty year of work experience at biotech and pharmaceutical companies, in the case of curing diabetes - coupled with the societal values of the special knowledge will determine the divisiveness of this elitism.”
― Andrew W. Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

“We also tend to undervalue the elementary ideas and overvalue the complicated ones. Most of us get jobs based on some form of specialized knowledge, so this makes sense. We don’t think we have much value if we know the things everyone else does, so we focus our effort on developing unique expertise to set ourselves apart. The problem is then that we reject the simple to make sure what we offer can’t be contributed by someone else. But simple ideas are of great value because they can help us prevent complex problems.

In identifying the Great Mental Models we have looked for elementary principles, the ideas from multiple disciplines that form a time-tested foundation. It may seem counterintuitive, to work on developing knowledge that is available to everyone, but the universe works in the same way no matter where you are in it. What you need is to understand the principles, so that when the details change you are still able to identify what is really going on. This is part of what makes the Great Mental Models so valuable—understanding the principles, you can easily change tactics to apply the ones you need.”
― Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

“There was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail’s horns, instinctively trying to protect one’s mind. And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Dreams, mundane to the mundane.”
― Minoaristw