298 Quotes About Complexity

Human beings are driven toward consistency and coherence in their perception, thinking, feeling, behavior, and social relationships. This is natural and functional. Conflict intensifies this drive, which can become dysfunctional during prolonged conflicts. However, developing more complex patterns of thinking, feeling, acting, and social organizing can mitigate this, resulting in more constructive responses to conflict.

Two examples illustrate the redundancy principle. First, when a virtual machine fails in a cloud-based system, an identical instance is started automatically. Second, a critically important system should have at least one secondary backup system that runs in parallel with the primary system to ensure a safe fallback. Leading up to the next principle, we note that the secondary system should differ from the primary system to avoid both failing for the same reasons.

Note that there is not a focus on eliminating failures. Systems without failures, although robust, become brittle and fragile. When failures occur, it is more likely that the teams responding will be unprepared, and this could dramatically increase the impact of the incident.

The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos. — PanSpechi aphorism

america as much a problem in metaphysics as it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy an organism that changes even as i examine it fact and fantasy never twice the same so many variables

Only through understanding do we have any hope of harnessing the enormous potential that the world possesses.

Functional analysis and the study of structural complexity should be approached as essentially conjoined programs. Unless both are in place, description and prescription in any form will be untenable, and prospective explanations, interventions, analyses, and critiques will result in dogmatic positions ranging, depending on their contexts, from resigned cynicism to fatalist optimism, from analytic stinginess to speculative overenthusiasm.

What then? Who then?' she said. 'Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well.

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.