Sitater
“Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)
“Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)
"Expansion means complexity and complexity decay."
—C. Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993)
“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.”
― Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990)
"If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity."
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
“There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
“About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
“The Iron Law of Liberalism:
Any market reform, government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
"If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value."
― David Graeber (1961-2020)
"Complexity is a device for evading simple truths"
― John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
“Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and our systems are getting more complex all the time.”
— Bruce Schneier
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer)."
— Larry Tesler (1945-2020)
"You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around."
— Larry Tesler (1945-2020)
"Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapusulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other."
— Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972)
"The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch."
—Donella Meadows (1941-2001)
“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”
― Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
"Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
― Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”
― Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
"As society becomes more and more complex, cheating will in many ways become progressively easier and easier to do and harder to police or even understand."
— Vitalik Buterin
"One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved."
― Scott Adams
"Complexity is a long-term paradox of problem solving. It facilitates the resolution of problems in the short run while undermining the ability to solve them in the long term."
—Joseph A. Tainter
"The cost of supporting complexity is the energy, labor, time, or money needed to create, maintain, and replace a system that grows to have more and more parts and transactions, to support specialists, to regulate behavior so that the parts of a system all work harmoniously, and to produce and control information."
—Joseph A. Tainter
"No society can become more complex without increasing its consumption of high-quality energy, human labor, time, or money."
—Joseph A. Tainter
“…in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.”
—Joseph A. Tainter
“Happily, solving problems by intensifying production and increasing complexity does not always yield catastrophic results.”
—Joseph A. Tainter
"when thinking about systems, the first thing to note is that systems are complex. The system is a unity even though it is comprised of a diversity of parts."
"When you look at a complex problem you immediately see the limits of classical logic, because we can see that the system is, at the same time, both more and less than the sum of its parts.
More: A system has certain qualities and properties that we cannot find in the parts by themselves. These qualities come from the organization of the system.
Less: The system is also less than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it imposes constraints on the behavior of the parts, so that some qualities or properties of the parts cannot be expressed. E.g. in social systems: as individuals we have many qualities and potentials that present us with many possibilities for behavior which we cannot exhibit because of constraints, due to socially determined laws or inhibitions due to group norms."
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
— Andy Benoit
"The word hypothesis has now a somewhat different significance from that given it by Newton. We are now accustomed to understand by hypothesis all thoughts connected with the phenomena.
Newton was far from the crude thought that explanation of phenomena could be attained by abstraction."
—Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866)
“Because of their composite nature, complex systems can exhibit catastrophic behavior.”
― Per Bak (1948-2002)
“the laws of physics are simple, but nature is complex.”
― Per Bak (1948-2002)
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."
—Alan Perlis (1922-1990)
“No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth’s thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.”
― Vaclav Smil
"You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error."
― Tim Harford
"The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional;
the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent
the rich visual world of experience and
measurement on mere flatland?"
― Edward R. Tufte
"Complex data from disparate sources can be processed and presented in very different ways, and to “prove” many different theories."
— Burt Rutan
"Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information."
— Shoshana Zuboff
"Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error."
― George Soros
“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”
― Pete Seeger (1919-2014)
“As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”
― John Gall (1925-2014)
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
"The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer"
― Bjarne Stroustrup
“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
― Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
"There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well."
― Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
"The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler."
― Edward Teller (1908-2003)
"Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena."
― Lee Smolin
"If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter."
― Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
“Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.”
“Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".
―Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Universal Leonardo