The Complexity Edition

Complexity basically means that everything is circuitous and hard to understand. Hard to understand means that the things that lead to the things you want aren't the things you want. They're very complex. So you need to do things like work on vacuum tubes to get to computers because vacuum tubes are in the first computers, even though vacuum tubes ... See more

Complexity – A typical complex system is composed of myriad individual constituents or agents that once aggregated take on collective characteristics that are usually not manifested in, nor could easily be predicted from, the properties of the individual components themselves. For example, you are much more than the totality of your cells and, simi... See more

There is no limit to the most complex things we will make. We’ll dazzle ourselves with new complexity in many directions. This will complexify our lives further, but we’ll adapt to it. There is no going back. We’ll hide this complexity with beautiful “simple” interfaces, as elegant as the round ball of an orange. But behind this membrane our stuff ... See more

Complexity science, also called complex systems science, studies how a large collection of components – locally interacting with each other at small scales – can spontaneously self-organize to exhibit non-trivial global structures and behaviors at larger scales, often without external intervention, central authorities or leaders. The properties of ... See more

The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more

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