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Complexity Quotes

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Complexity Quotes

“From under her relentless hatred of you, which is sincere and absolute, shines love at every moment and... madness... the most sincere and boundless love, and - madness! Conversely, from under the love she feels for me, also sincerely, there shines hatred at every moment - the greatest hatred! Until now I could never have imagined all these "metamorphoses".”

RelationshipsEmotionalMadnessPsychologicalComplexityParadoxIntrospectionDualityLove And HateLiterary
Book:Demons
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“Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind.”

HistoryComplexityKnotsComplicationsMessesTangles
Book:Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“Maybe at the end of our lives we get a Ferris-Wheel vantage of the whole tapestry, the quilt laid flat, answering for its complexity. At the beginning we’re handed frayed and stained flowery bed sheets, a scrap of polka-dots, a snatch of strawberry print. Tattered as they are, there’s some sustaining sweetness in there. The oldest pioneer quilts conceal bits of paper batting between their threadbare layers: postcards, recipes, clipped snippets of newspaper poetry. Every spare material had a part to play, fragments of experience and feeling arranged in a repeating pattern, little sewn sound bytes spinning ordered fractals.”

CreativityComplexitySweetnessSustainingTapestryPioneerQuiltScrapsFerris Wheel
Book:Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir
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“Rhett: 'Do you still want me to go to hell?' Scarlett: 'Well, not as often as I used to.' Rhett: 'Do it whenever you like, if it makes you happy.' Scarlett: 'It doesn't make me especially happy,' said Scarlett and, bending, she kissed him carelessly. His dark eyes flickered quickly over her face, hunting for something in her eyes which he did not find, and he laughed shortly.”

ComplexityUnrequited LoveBest Character Ever
Book:Gone with the wind
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“More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too. Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”

IdeologyComplexityLibertarianismAuthoritarianismPluralismPolitical Psychology
Book:Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
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“She gave me breast and vaginal exams until I was seventeen years old. These 'exams' made my body stiff with discomfort. I felt violated, yet I had no voice, no ability to express that. I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative. When I was six years old, she pushed me into a career I didn't want. I'm grateful for the financial stability that career has provided me, but not much else. I was not equipped to handle the entertainment industry and all of its competitiveness, rejection, stakes, harsh realities, fame. I needed that time, those years, to develop as a child. To form my identity. To grow. I can never get those years back. She taught me an eating disorder when I was eleven years old--an eating disorder that robbed me of my joy and any amount of free-spiritedness that I had.”

ComplexityVoicelessFamily DynamicsLiving For Another
Book:I'm Glad My Mom Died
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“The artist is often misunderstood because, stepping outside himself and holding most details in great tension, he's about as complex as a shape-shifter; or a head with faces on all sides, but not necessarily in the negative connotation as one being two-faced usually implies. For instance, to be misunderstood can mean to be improperly deemed a troublemaker when that is not one's true intent: you see, to troublemakers, the artist knows that the peacemaker may seem like a troublemaker; therefore he may, whether in honesty or in jest, at times, present himself as a troublemaker for perceptual, artistic flair. But then to the artless peacemakers, because of this they will interpret him as a troublemaker. This is why the artist has so few allies. To the troublemakers he's a troublemaker, yet still the peacemakers a troublemaker.”

ArtistPeaceUnderstandingTroubleTensionComplexityPreciseMisunderstoodPeacemakerFlairTroublemakerAlly
Book:Killosophy
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“We don't always think about how oversimplification leads to greater conflict, but it does... keeping it simple also leads to ignoring what doesn't fit the picture until it becomes a throbbing wound. Keeping it simple leads to things being missed and so not getting things completely right, which, in the world of over-simplification, means getting them wrong.”

ConflictWoundsComplexityOversimplificationConflictedReality Is ComplexRight Versus Wrong
Author:Shellen Lubin
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“Of course, our natural impulse in these [intractable conflict] situations is to fight or flee. To lash out, blame, attack, or challenge someone, or otherwise try to get out and avoid the situation altogether. These responses make perfect sense in the short term, but likely will have little effect on the 5 percent [of conflicts that are intractable]. In fact, they may make matters worse in the long term. So if escaping or resolving this conflict is your goal (and we do not assume this is always the case), we suggest a different approach. And it begins with complicating your life.”

ComplexityEngagementAvoidanceConflict ResolutionPolarizationConflict ManagementOversimplificationUs Vs ThemIntractable ConflictSocial Conflicts
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent [i.e. intractable] conflicts happens along many dimensions: - A very complication situation becomes very simple. - A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle. - Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one's identity, ideology, and values. - The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all alike. - The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all similar. - Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict. - Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict - good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate. - I've shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns. - Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack. This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it's also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading to a similar state of 'us versus them' thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of leverage to rupture the certainty and oversimplification that rules in these situations. The question is how to find them.”

PerspectiveConflictComplexityTribalismFramingOversimplificationUs Vs ThemIntractable ConflictConfliction Resolution
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“[Isaiah] Berlin was aware that when people feel lost in the complicated labyrinth of life, with its unsolvable tensions and paradoxes, they attempt to save themselves by trying to simplify and reduce reality to a few manageable patterns and clear ideas. Yet, they can never change the fact that life is a mixture of complexity and perplexity, and the more possibilities we are confronted with, the more perplexed and challenged we are likely to be.”

SimplicityComplexityParadoxPerplexityOversimplification
Book:Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes
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“The saddest steak is on the grill, its juices bleeding and sizzling into the fire. Death never tasted so good as a last meal. You once were admired, until she left when you couldn't fit through the door anymore. The mirror last laughs as your skin runs over the edges. One hand feeds time, the other hand scratches the face of the clock, swallowing the past. As the mirror smashes, the piano keys the car, and pieces reflect the thinner you once again.”

Life QuotesDepressionAngerComplexityHopelessnessObesityEating DisorderLose WeightFatThinner
Author:Anthony Liccione
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“Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that the biological design argument did not falter until Darwin provided a proper naturalistic explanation for adaptive complexity; others maintain that David Hume had already shattered the argument to pieces by sheer logical force several decades earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 2007 [1779]). Elliott Sober has been among the philosophers who maintain that, as Hume was not in a position to offer a serious alternative explanation of adaptive complexity, it is hardly surprising that 'intelligent people strongly favored the design hypothesis' (Sober 2000, 36). In his most recent book, however, Sober (2008) carefully develops what he thinks is the most charitable reconstruction of the design argument, and proceeds to show why it is defective for intrinsic reasons (for earlier version of this argument, see Sober 1999, 2002). Sober argues that the design argument can be rejected even without the need to consider alternative explanations for adaptive complexity (Sober 2008, 126): 'To see why the design argument is defective, there is no need to have a view as to whether Darwin’s theory of evolution is true' (Sober 2008, 154).”

ScienceAtheismEvolutionComplexityBiologyTheory Of EvolutionDarwinCharles DarwinDavid HumeRichard DawkinsDawkinsBiological ComplexityArgument For AtheismDeathblowGraham OppyArgument From Design RefutedAtheistic ArgumentDesign Argument RefutedElliott SoberIntelligent Design Refuted
Author:Maarten Boudry
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“Overall, then, we will view cas [complex adaptive systems] as systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In cas, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agent's efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents. This one feature is a major source of the complex temporal patterns that cas generate. To understand cas we must understand these ever-changing patterns.”

AgentsComplexityAdaptationEcosystemsSystemsComplex Adaptive Systems
Book:Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity
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“Think what characterises the really intelligent person. They can think for themselves. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent comes easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only unnecessary for most business jobs, they are actually a handicap when it comes to rising through the ranks of large companies.”

ThinkingSuccessWorkBusinessIntelligenceComplexityDissentBrillianceDispassionAbstract Ideas
Author:Lucy Kellaway
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“Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.”

TechnologyComplexityInformation TechnologyInformation AgeLawyersAppleImacKim DotcomTechnology Theory
Book:I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains
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“Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning of belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place, a continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world. Patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it.”

LifePatternsMeaningComplexityInterconnectednessPatterning
Book:Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
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“Think of the Omega Point as a star radiating energy, a transcendental attractor, a divine 'tractor beam' - things are not being pushed from behind on the evolutionary timeline but being pulled toward the Omega Singularity, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity.”

ConsciousnessComplexityConnectivityOmega PointTeleological AttractorCosmological SingulartiyEvolutionary TimelineOmega SingularityTractor BeamTranscendental Attractor
Book:Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality
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“A similar argument can be made about the form that the interface takes—with little pictures of folders and pages and trash cans. Those analogies are based in physical forms and so we associate the simplicity of the physical folder with that of the digital one. At best, we have faith in the interface that it is an accurate simplification of a more complex system behind it, and at worse, we don’t even recognize the complexity at all.”

ComplexityInterface
Book:Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice
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“It is complicated,’ they say. I am so sick of this response. Many people use it repeatedly to escape depth and confronting reality. They use it to take solace in the fact that they don’t know (or don’t wish to know) the ugly truth of what is happening right in front of their eyes. They reduce crimes, injustice, war, pain, hunger, rape, and everything that must be unpacked, dissected, and confronted to this: ‘It is complicated.’ They say this about COVID-19, too. Oh, how I have grown to hate this response. Every time I hear this statement from someone, it sounds like ‘I am a loser’ to my ears. ‘It is complicated’ is the favorite response of lazy brains that refuse to think and do. Oh, my friends, I insist it is not complicated. If you really want to know, it is not so complicated. However, if you are really looking for reasons and excuses to justify your silence, complicity, and to protect your self-interest, then you are absolutely right – it is complicated!”

InspirationalComplexityEscapeSuperficialityComplicityShallownessJustificationsComplicated Problems
Author:Louis Yako
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“In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”

ScienceComplexity
Book:The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
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“The only true solutions to complex systemic problems are piecemeal, multi-pronged answers, and they will vary wildly from forest to desert, from city to city, and even between neighborhoods within a single city. Life is messy and civilization even messier. If your answer is ever any less messy, you’re fooling yourself.”

CivilizationComplexityProblem SolvingCivilisationAnswerCivilizationsCivilisationsSystemic ProblemSystemic Problems
Book:The Siege of Skyhold
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“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”

LoveLifeScienceSeaUnityComplexity
Book:Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
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“People associate science with absolutes that are immutable, when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information. As new information evolves, the process of science allows for self-correction. The biological or health sciences are different from the physical sciences and mathematics. With mathematics, two plus two equals four today, and two plus two will equal four a thousand years from now. Not so with the biological sciences, where what we know continues to evolve and uncertainty is common. This uncertainty is magnified in the context of a deadly pandemic when there is already anxiety and suffering. With COVID, our understanding of transmissibility, severity, vulnerability of different people, and level of protection, to name a few, continually evolved, and our medical advice had to change to reflect this. This is exactly what happened in early March with the question of whether to wear masks and how effective they were.”

ScienceChangeMathematicsComplexity
Book:On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service
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“I gave up on honoring Christopher Columbus long before the country did and have often espoused the questioning of the path trod by those we studied as the great explorers. What havoc they wreaked on the lands they explored. And who really did the exploring? The myth of the lone white man braving the new land is just that, a myth-- the local guides were the ones who knew the territory and did the work, including the work of keeping them all alive. And yet, indigenous populations explored as well, and some wreaked their own havoc on other populations at the same time that they grew worlds. History is incredibly complicated.”

RealityGrowthHistoryEvolutionPerceptionMythClarityComplexityExplorers Day
Author:Shellen Lubin
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“If the voices and perspectives we assess ourselves by are stuck in systems of their own they can be another trap. If they're stuck in their own agendas-- their needs and desires-- then they're another "wicked temptation" to sell out our deepest truths to please or pacify someone else. Which is why I advocate multiple mirrors, offering different ways of seeing, of feeling, of processing, angles and views we might otherwise miss, and reminding us to revere just how complex reality is.”

RealityDesireAwarenessPerspectiveBetrayalComplexityFeelingVoicesAgendaDifferent View
Author:Shellen Lubin
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