Quotes about Complexity

Life is a continuing process of making adjustments and creative responses in a world too complex to be predictable. But institutions insist not only upon their illusions of predictability, but their systems of control by which they imagine they can direct the world to their ends. This is why institutions have always aligned themselves with the forces of power, in order to compel the rest of nature – particularly mankind – to conform to their interests.

When I was five years old, the world was incomprehensible.  When I was thirteen, it seemed to me much smaller, much dirtier, and depressingly predictable.  Today it still seems muddled, but once again - although in a different way - as complex as when I was a child.  With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations.  I don't have the energy to start over again.  To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

Simplicity can be very complex to achieve.

Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

Next time you are designing a process, a product, or a service, ask yourself, “What can I remove?” For most consumers, simplicity is more important than comprehensiveness (and complexity).

The concept of “taking away” is also a great time management technique.  In addition to your “to do” list, be sure to create a “don’t do” list.  Become masterful at killing products, eliminating non-value adding tasks, and removing old/pointless habits.

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

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.

Complexity is not a cause of confusion. It is a result of it.     

An honorable human relationship-- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"-- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

When we try to explain the complexity of what we see to others who demand that things be laid out in straight paths, they often become resistent and critical... when our viewpoint repeatedly falls on deaf ears, we become silent - avoid confrontation. One source of human suffering arises when our words and actions are perceived, by those we serve or love, in a light of being different from that intended.

Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals.

Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. […]

“(Martin) Heidegger notes that the origin of the word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, and this word was applied not only to technology, but to art, and artistic technique as well.  'Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was also called techne.'  He found this to be a numinous correspondence, and considered that, in art, the 'saving power' capable of confronting the abyss of the technological enframing might be found.

If art contains a saving power, it is not in the atomized artworks produced by individual subjects, but in a deeper collective vision that sees the world as a work of art, one that is already, as (Sri) Nisargadatta (Maharaj) and (Terrence) McKenna suggest, perfect in its 'satisfying all-at-onceness'.'  Instead of envisioning an ultimately boring 'technological singularity,' we might be better served by considering an evolution of technique, of skillful means, aimed at this world, as it is now.  Technology might find its proper place in our lives if we experienced such a shift in perspective–in a society oriented around technique, we might find that we desired far less gadgetry.  We might start to prefer slowness to speed, subtlety and complexity to products aimed at standardized mind.  Rather than projecting the spiritual quest and the search for the good life onto futuristic A.I.s,  we could actually take the time to fulfill those goals, here and now, in the present company of our friends and lovers.

Part of the problem seems embedded in the basic concept of a concrescence or singularity, which compacts our possibilities rather than expands them.  The notion of a technological singularity reflects our culture's obsessive rationality, reducing qualitative aspects of being to quantifiable factors, and imposing abstract systems over complex variables.  Instead of a technological singularity, we might reorient our thinking toward a more desirable multiplicity of technique.  Technique is erotic in essence; it is what Glenn Gould or Thelonious Monk expresses through the piano–the interplay between learned skill and quantum improvisation that is the stuff of genius.  Technique embraces the now-ness of our living world; technology throws us into endless insatiation.”

For every human problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
wrong.

In romance, you at least hope that you can operate on an equal basis. But at work, someone is almost always above or below the other person and this can add layers of complexity that a relationship simply does not need.

Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.