A realization that this leaves out something essential Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. Matter versus Materials: A Historical View knowledgecomplexityholism
Measured by the number of its features A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. Any incompatibility with the original system concept is either ignored or passes unrecognized, which renders the design more complicated and its use more cumbersome. When a system's power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality. Every new release must offer additional features, even if some don't add functionality. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software featuresqualitycomplexity
Features and complexity Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”. Ben Hoyt, The small web is beautiful benhoyt.com A Plea for Lean SoftwareSpeed is a featureRequirements proliferation featurescomplexity
The multiplicity of living patterns The more living patterns there are in a thing—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building The right overlapEach element performs many functions complexity
The kind of problem a city is Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity. The history of modern thought about cities is unfortunately very different from the history of modern thought about the life sciences. The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Order Out of ChaosOrder Without Design problemscitiescomplexity
The difficulty of designing complexity Designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act. The mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception. Experiments suggest strongly that people have an underlying tendency, when faced by a complex organization, to reorganize it mentally in terms of non-overlapping units. The complexity of the semilattice is replaced by the simpler and more easily grasped tree form. Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree complexityintuitiondesign
Structural complexity The idea of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect, and the semilattice are not less orderly than the right tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure. Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree structurecomplexity
Losing meaning The people who’ve proven that they can make very good individual products with the radical focus of a spotlight seem to be pushed ever further from making good ecosystems. Products are being made “consistent” with the application of so-called “design patterns,” and rather than bringing coherence to these various touch-points, the painting-on of interface standards and interaction patterns did something far less valuable. Rote consistency, in the way many seem to be going about it (Material Design being just one example), is at odds with making things be good. It simplifies what needs to remain complex. Always, when simplification is underway, meaning is being lost. Dan Klyn, What Good Means complexitysoftware
Notes on the Legibility War An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com The basic idea of legibility is that the act of making something comprehensible enough to control is itself an act that shapes the thing to be controlled, often with far greater consequences than the control itself. This is because it removes complexity that is deemed as irrelevant that makes it harder to control, and that complexity may be in some way essential to the health of the system. controlsystemscomplexitylegibility
The return of fancy tools An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing complexitysimplicitytoolssoftwaretechnologynotetaking
On the other side of complexity A Quote "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Don't Rush to Simplicity simplicitycomplexity
Rationality: From AI to Zombies A Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky www.readthesequences.com The Tao of rationalityEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyArgue against the bestLet the meaning choose the wordPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it+11 More Do not propose solutionsOne brickYour intention to cut rationalitythinkingconsciousness
The Tao of rationality If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao: Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened. Mystery exists in the mind realityrationality
Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally. behavior
Argue against the best To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out. argumentideas
Let the meaning choose the word What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. meaningwords
Knowing the design Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design. design
Cutting through to the truth The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement. Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon. Your intention to cut intent
Joy in the merely attainable But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated. happinessdesire
I have failed my art The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.” The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art." experiencewisdom
Taboo your words Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all. meaning
Your map of reality Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, “Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map.” What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it. reality
What you're trying to swim There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim. words
Applause lights Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test. For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI. If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI. Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light. speech
Reality just seems to go on crunching I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward. physics
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
Lost purposes There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves. It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving. So many tactics, so well entrenched metricsgoals