Quotes on Complexity

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.

Most people in business and within their personal lives move towards complexity. More To Dos. More projects. More products. More meetings. More possessions. More goals. The best - I suggest to you - move in the opposite direction.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

I feel most people’s sexuality is enormously complicated. That’s what it means to be human. Wouldn’t it be great if we honored that complexity rather than turn it into gossip or ridicule? Wouldn’t it be great if we accepted sexual diversity, in ourselves and others, without condemning it?

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

My encouragement: delete the energy vampires from your life, clean out all complexity, build a team around you that frees you to fly, remove anything toxic, and cherish simplicity. Because that's where genius lives.

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

No design can exist in isolation. It is always related, sometimes in very complex ways, to an entire constellation of influencing situations and attitudes. What we call a good design is one which achieves integrity – that is, unity or wholeness – in balanced relation to its environment.

That [American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.