MetaFilter posts tagged with complexity

George Soros on the Way Forward

kliuless — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:42:21 -0800

Soros lectures
You can slog through the video, but I preferred the transcripts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 + to me, it started off rather abstract* (admittedly on his part) and slow (covered ground; note soros tag) and doesn't really get interesting until 3 -- "The event that forced me to thoroughly reconsider the concept of open society was the re-election of President Bush..." [altho he can get a bit arrogant ("even I, who discovered—or invented—reflexivity, failed to recognize...")] -- and gets better from there... so i'd skip to that if you're so inclined :P kinda previously... and btw, as a bonus, also see... - Why Do We Hate? - What Makes a Nation Rich? - How Much Is Enough? - What the U.S. Long Bond Market Is Telling Us (cf.) - The G20 in 2050 (viz.) - Rare earth: The New Great Game [1,2,3,4,5,6] --- *in fleshing out his concept of reflexivity he goes thru (among other things and in other words) descriptive vs. prescriptive (or normative) theories, instrumental rationality and empiricism, false thinking and truthiness, the law of unintended consequences, &c. so if you're into that sort of stuff... have at it!

Angkor Wat Edition

kliuless — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:42:27 -0800

Too Complex To Exist? [1] Paul Kedrosky has been pondering complex social systems and why they sometimes fail. Apparently it has something to do with "normalization of deviance," "tight coupling" [2] and "slack." [3]

"...And all for the want of a horseshoe nail."

orthogonality — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:21:22 -0800

Picture a three-guy trading floor. They would call a carrier,... [and] manually move trunks in and out of route by issuing SQL commands against the Veraz's Oracle database.... Let me write that out for you: One ass-hat residential customer with a 20yo telephone with four extra buttons did thirty million dollars in damages in less than one night. Anyways, that's how the company went bankrupt... and about 6000 or so people ... all got laid off.

Yugos used Commodore Basic

mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:11:20 -0800

"The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter...about 5.7 million lines of code...Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner...about 6.5 million lines of software code. These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code."

It's a massively multiplayer world after all

Doktor Zed — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:35:42 -0800

While it's been noted Obama is the first presidential candidate to run political ads in video games and one of his transition team leaders plays World of Warcraft, there's no real evidence as yet that the coming administration encompasses the gaming experience and mindset. Since future ones undoubtedly will, as video and computer games go mainstream, it's worthwhile to ponder what things would be like if gamers ran the world. (via) (For example, does the issue of complexity in MMO worlds hold any lessons for the current Rube-Goldberg financial system?)

(laws of human stupidity)

kliuless — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:33:00 -0800

Why systems fail - Review of the book: Systemantics; how systems work... and especially how they fail by John Gall. New York, Pocket Books, 1978. {via}

At last those concerned with social change have a basic textbook to explain why "things generally are indeed not working very well" despite our many efforts. As is remarked on the cover: "Have you ever wondered why the unsinkable Titanic sank... or the poor in India eat better bread than the rich in America... or hospital patients are blamed for not getting well... or why, in general, things that don't work badly don't work at all?" Similar questions are of deep concern to those working in international organizations. "The religious person may blame it on original sin. The historian may cite the force of trends such as population growth and industrialization. The sociologist offers reasons rooted in the peculiarities of human associations. Reformers blame it all on 'the system', and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point - that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted. "The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular system but rather in systems as such. Salvation, if it is attainable at all, even partially, is to be sought in a deeper understanding of the ways of systems, not simply in a criticism of the errors of a particular system."

cf. Peter Klausler's Principles of the American Cargo Cult & Axel Boldt's Political Opinions and Other Thoughts

the next debt bubble?

kliuless — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:39:55 -0800

Plunging into the shadows: "In thinly traded, lightly regulated and untransparent markets, the bold can make an awful lot of money—and they can lose it on an even more extravagant scale... In today's caffeine-fuelled dealing rooms, a barely regulated private-equity group could very well borrow money from syndicates of private lenders, including hedge funds, to spend on taking public companies private. At each stage, risks can be converted into securities, sliced up, repackaged, sold on and sliced up again. The endless opportunities to write contracts on underlying debt instruments explains why the outstanding value of credit-derivatives contracts has rocketed to $26 trillion—$9 trillion more than six months ago, and seven times as much as in 2003."

The Complexity of a Controversial Concept

kliuless — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:03:37 -0800

The Logic of Diversity "A new book, The Wisdom of Crowds [..:] by The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, has recently popularized the idea that groups can, in some ways, be smarter than their members, which is superficially similar to Page's results. While Surowiecki gives many examples of what one might call collective cognition, where groups out-perform isolated individuals, he really has only one explanation for this phenomenon, based on one of his examples: jelly beans [...] averaging together many independent, unbiased guesses gives a result that is probably closer to the truth than any one guess. While true — it's the central limit theorem of statistics — it's far from being the only way in which diversity can be beneficial in problem solving." (Three-Toed Sloth)

Exploring Emergence

Gyan — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 23:24:06 -0800

Exploring Emergence. [Java]

systems theory Donella Meadow's

thedailygrowl — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 00:21:25 -0800

Dancing with Systems: What to do when systems resist change. Is an excerpt from the late Systems Theorist and Enviromentalist Donella Meadow's unfinished last book. There is beautiful information here. If you are confused and wondering about some of the ideas that has infused the world-wide peace, enviromental, social justice and anti-globalization movements (That is of course Globalization as defined by the Washington Consensus policies) you would be very hard pressed to find a better place to start. Here are points in the essay. Listen to the wisdom of the system. Expose your mental models to the open air. Stay humble. Stay a learner. Honor and protect information. Locate responsibility in the system. Make feedback policies for feedback systems. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable. Go for the good of the whole. Expand time horizons. Expand thought horizons. Expand the boundary of caring. Celebrate complexity. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

The Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning

patrickje — Mon, 09 Dec 2002 13:39:26 -0800

Do you have problems finding the cheapest flight? Well so do computers.
Carl de Marcken, the man who created the engine behind Orbitz and other travel search engines posits that finding the cheapest fare from one point to another is a NP-Hard problem. Even if you fix the specific route between destinations there can be as many as 10³⁶ combinations.