#complexity

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better. ↗

— Edsger Wybe DIJKSTRA

#elegance #simple #simplicity #virtue #education

The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it. ↗

— Lord Palmerston

#politics #men

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty. ↗

— Herman Melville

#human-nature #humanity #infallibility #nature

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ↗

— Howard Pattee

#philosophy #science #systems #nature

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#complexity #consists #delicacy #evolution #formation

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. ↗

— William Gibson

#city #clusters #complexity #computer #constellations

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#capable #complexity #construction #creature #drive

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. ↗

— Douglas Horton

#complexity #puzzle #simplicity

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity. ↗

— Scott Turow

#complexity #narrative #present #purpose #us

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations. ↗

— David Deutsch

#complexity #contain #deepest #explanations #hierarchy