Complex Systems Quotes

“In a systemic world, there is no such thing as a discrete or isolated event - impacts cascade and spill over.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Maybe the existential risk is not machines taking over the world or reaching human-level intelligence, but rather the opposite where human beings think like idle machines - unable to connect the emerging dots of our complex, systemic world.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Our complex world is unpredictable and subject to dynamic change that can yield disproportionate and incomprehensible impacts. Relying on arbitrary assumptions does not help quantify the unquantifiable, nor make the unknowable known.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The single most dangerous mistake is looking at disruption as isolated, special cases or independent single episodic events.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“AI won’t replace humans, but people who can use it will.” This sounds reassuring, but it oversimplifies the complex future of work and AI integration. Experts predict a surge in opportunities, but the intricate interplay between cognification, mass automation, and how we work remains uncharted. The net effect of AI on employment is unknown - we have no data on the future.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“We need the humility to acknowledge that we may not fully understand the net impacts or timing [of AI].”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Science does a great job at reducing variables until they are small enough to be understood, but we aren't doing a great job at reassembling the picture once it has been broken down into a thousand pieces”
― Katy Bowman, Move Your DNA

“The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.”
― James Glieck

“That was acceptable, his father told him: you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account of nature replaces another.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.”
― James Glieck

“The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.”
― James Glieck

“Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.”
― James Glieck

“The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary.”
― James Glieck

“In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.”
― James Glieck

“Implicitly, the mission of many twentieth-century scientists — biologists, neurologists, economists — has been to break their universes down into the simplest atoms that will obey scientific rules.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The repetitions were never quite exact. There was pattern, with disturbances. An orderly disorder.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Had he stopped with the Butterfly Effect, an image of predictability giving way to pure randomness, then Lorenz would have produced no more than a piece of very bad news. But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. [...] Analyzing the behavior of a nonlinear equation like the Navier-Stokes equation is like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn’s language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“In daily life, the
Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks

everywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, a
flowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by a
truck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—his
connection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s daily
trajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows that
approximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result,
baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“I’m growing to believe that I shouldn’t have an opinion on some things or at least shouldn’t have an opinion that people listen to. When asked about some of the current hot issues of the day, I have grown OK with saying, “It’s complicated, I haven’t really looked into it enough.” I don’t have to, and will never, know about everything. In order to really understand most things, it takes a lot of research.”
― Eric Overby

“The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between the sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about, tiny deviations from the average. By 12:01, those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors will have multiplied to the ten-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Not by accident, he made scientists seem less than perfect rationalists.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“In these paradigm shifts, addressing individual parts of a problem will not resolve anything.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World