[HN Gopher] Complexity Explained
___________________________________________________________________
Complexity Explained
Author : harscoat
Score : 273 points
Date : 2021-02-06 11:22 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (complexityexplained.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (complexityexplained.github.io)
| goodmachine wrote:
| Complexity theory is interesting and useful.
|
| However, because it's approximately descriptive, rather than
| accurately predictive, the field is haunted by quantum woo
| merchants, grand metaphysical unifiers, quasi-ecological musings
| and Buddha-lite pantheism. Which is neither interesting nor
| useful, except perhaps as a sociological phenomenon. Discuss.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking about the
| philosophical side of complexity theory, I do quite a lot and
| arguably fall into the second and fourth categories you've
| described. You are, of course, free to not be interested in
| metaphysical philosophy.
|
| Woo merchants latch onto anything science-sounding that they
| can, as they're trying to steal authority by use of jargon, so
| I don't think that's unique to systems science - but their
| influence is of course extremely toxic as they both kill people
| and erode the authority of the subjects they steal from.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Nothing to discuss for me.
|
| Agreed to both points.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| It covers how little it contains with how flashy it is.
| andrepd wrote:
| Certain topics like "complexity theory" or even "artificial
| intelligence" attract this sort of thing. It's easy to appear
| that you're saying insightful things without actually saying
| anything at all.
| neuronic wrote:
| I have an entire undergrad degree in complex systems theory,
| found it great and useful, yet in the instance of discussing
| this website I agree with you.
| id wrote:
| If I use the scrollbar or scroll too fast, I don't see any text.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| I don't understand the negativity here. I think this is a pretty
| cool site (when browsing on my iPhone at least).
| cabalamat wrote:
| Didn't read due to annoying web design. Can someone summarise?
| dstick wrote:
| Any recommendations for books on the subject? I read Simply
| Complexity and hungry for more!
| gbolcer wrote:
| Dave Weinberger's Everyday Chaos.
|
| Also, the fbook Santa Fe Institute Complexity Explorer's group
| is a daily stop.
| nicholast wrote:
| This website was a neat resource. The whole point of complexity
| science is that there are domains with computational
| irreducibility where in order to estimate system behaviors we can
| not rely on formulaic models, in complexity science we instead
| make use of computer models via simulation to try and approach
| dynamics.
|
| As potential further reading, one of the cited authors gave a
| lecture on intersections of AI and complexity science that I
| captured in this blog post. https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-
| of-john-henry/making-the...
|
| Also recommend writings of any author affiliated with Santa Fe
| Institute, a lot of books to choose from.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| AI originally grew out of complexity science, in the form of
| cybernetics - hence cybernetics' popular association with AI.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The booklet quotes Herbert Simon, AI pioneer:
|
| "It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common
| properties among diverse kinds of complex systems... The
| ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of
| reference for viewing a wide range of situations."
| littlemtman wrote:
| This is a very cool blog, thanks for sharing, had no problems
| opening the page in chrome on windows.
| franze wrote:
| I wrote the book "Understanding SEO"[1] with Systems Theory in
| mind.
|
| After the 1000 meeting w people talking about tips and tricks and
| competing theoretical constructs including bullshit and
| thoughtcancer constructs like "linkjuice, pagerank, pinguins,
| pandas, ..." I set out to build a bullshit free theory of SEO.
| For my own sake - otherwise I would have had to quit my job.
|
| And yeah "All models are wrong, but some of them are useful."
| Rephrased: It's a model, therefore it's wrong. But we'll, I deem
| it damn useful.
|
| [1] free for HN: https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-
| news/
| franze wrote:
| My inspiration for the book was the great works of Donella
| Meadows and Jerry Weinberg. Recommendations to anyone
| interested in Systems Thinking.
| moosebear847 wrote:
| Wow.. love your clear and straightforward writing. And it's the
| first time I've felt I understand what SEO is and isn't (super
| secret magical sorcery).
|
| How come you would have had to quit the job wo this book?
| franze wrote:
| Progress.
|
| I got clients via word of mouth and then worked with them to
| have a more structured & systematic way to think about SEO
| and online growth.
|
| Now I get most of my clients via the book. And I already
| start with them from a systematic baseline.
|
| ------
|
| Or think of it the other way, imagine getting contracted to
| create a webapp and the first thing that you need to do is to
| explain how the internet works.
|
| Vs. Getting contracted and starting to talk about the
| advantages/disadvantages of different frameworks and app
| paradigms.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Ok look, another website that doesn't work on desktop.
|
| It's so frustrating that we seem to have lost any understanding
| of how to to put information on a screen.
| j4yav wrote:
| It doesn't seem to work on mobile either, for what it's worth.
| Very low contrast text and general weirdness that makes it hard
| to tell if it's working that way on purpose or not.
| khiner wrote:
| For me, it works on both desktop and mobile, chrome & firefox.
| I don't get the left/right swooshing on mobile, but do on
| desktop. Mac/iPhone
| justicezyx wrote:
| The Chinese translation of the title is a bit puzzling to me, as
| a Chinese mainlander lived in US:
|
| Complexity Explained is translated to "Mei Shuo Ni Bu Zhi Dao ",
| literally means "you wont know if I don't tell you". Generally
| "Explained" usually corresponds to "Xiang Jie "
|
| But anyway, very good content. I am surprised that double-
| pendulum is a chaotic system. I thought it's possible to
| precisely predict its motion, because its apparent simplicity.
| hliyan wrote:
| I recently had the (possibly flawed) epiphany that _all behavior
| is emergent_. If you think about it, all things that we consider
| objects are just semi-permanent aggregations of fundamental
| particles that we recognize and label as objects for convenience
| of thought. When the patterns in such aggregations are outside
| the space and time scales that allow human minds to recognize
| them, the only label available is "complex".
| walleeee wrote:
| Philip McShane wrote something similar
|
| "...a thing is defined by... systematizations of coincidental
| aggregates of the properties of lower things [and] the
| emergence of the systematic from the non-systematic"
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If you are discussing the macroscopic day-to-day reality we
| human live in, sure, all things and all characteristics-of-
| things are emergent in broad sense. Every distinct, discreet
| thing here comes out of the interactions of quantum fields and
| gravitational fields, so yeah.
|
| The problem is saying "everything is X" makes X useless as an
| adjective.
|
| Usually, when you talk about this stuff, you look just a couple
| layers of reality. For example, if your lower level is water
| molecules and the upper level is observation, then "waves"
| "whirlpool" and so-forth are emergent objects/characteristics
| and water is a primitive object/characteristics - never mind
| that water molecules emerge from still lower level processes.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| I've always found videos like these to be the most direct (and
| beautiful) examples of this principle:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiIUjPF060
| beaconstudios wrote:
| This is the reality of bottom up organisation, and is basically
| a completely different metaphysics to the current Western
| modernist one. Going further down this path of thought will
| lead you to ideas like constructivism, teleology, and non-
| dualism - all ideas that have long philosophical histories but
| are currently out of vogue.
| fallous wrote:
| Is this not similar to the philosophy of capitalism (at least
| as posited by Adam Smith) upon which much of modern Western
| thought rests? Arguably it's also very much reflected in John
| Locke's work as well as many philosophical foundations for
| democratic institutions.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yes there are some Western philosophical foundations which
| treat organisation as bottom-up at certain levels of
| abstraction - Adam Smith on the economic level, Locke and
| Hobbes on the sociopolitical level, and so on. I think we
| have a good cultural understanding of human beings as
| existing in a network. But we don't consistently apply this
| perspective. For example:
|
| - individualism treats individuals as good or bad,
| successful or unsuccessful based on their outcomes without
| regard for the structural incentives around that person.
|
| - we still categorically divide between "life" and "not-
| life", treating life (and especially consciousness) as a
| conundrum and "not-life" as dead matter. We try our best
| not to look at the fuzzy edges between life and not-life. I
| would argue that this is a hang-over from Abrahamic dualism
| (the spiritual inhabiting the material), and that there is
| no distinction but instead a continuum from less-organised
| to more-organised. We do the same as the above with many
| other issues of category.
|
| - Identity isn't concrete in bottom-up organisation. The
| Ship of Theseus, for example, is not a paradox when you
| take a bottom-up metaphysical approach. The illusion of
| identity is only propagation of a pattern.
|
| TL;DR - yes, we do have some ideas around bottom-up
| organisation, but they're not applied consistently or
| across the board.
|
| If you think all this sounds like woo, then you are at
| least in agreement that these ideas are not Western
| modernist canon.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| It would be nice if someone could untie them from religion,
| make them simpler to understand, and bring them back into
| vogue, if they're so useful.
| carapace wrote:
| Well, there was Siddhartha Gautama, who became Buddha. His
| original teachings are non-religious.
|
| I can recommend the books of David Hawkins for a modern,
| scientifically-informed view on the subjective experience
| of Reality.
|
| https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/
|
| > Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. was a nationally
| renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, spiritual
| teacher and lecturer. The uniqueness of his contribution to
| humanity comes from the advanced state of spiritual
| awareness known as " Enlightenment," "Self-Realization,"
| and "Unio Mystica." Rarely, if ever, has this spiritual
| state occurred in the life of an accomplished scientist and
| physician. Therefore, Dr. Hawkins was uniquely qualified to
| present a spiritual path that is scientifically compelling
| to modern society.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| There are a few of us out there trying to do exactly that,
| including the above article.
| jameal wrote:
| I'm curious how this epiphany came to you. This strikes me as
| very similar to the Buddhist concept of the Five Aggregates,
| which describe five elements that combine to make up our
| existence: Physical form -> Sensation -> Perception -> Mental
| formations -> Consciousness
| hliyan wrote:
| I was just trying to understand what people mean when they
| say that "consciousness is an emergent property", which
| always felt like a hand-wavy explanation. I was weighing that
| explanation against panpsychism and then this thought
| emerged.
| airstrike wrote:
| > and then this thought emerged.
|
| I see what you did there...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I'm wondering which sort of consciousness is under
| scrutiny. We know when we're conscious and unconscious.
| E.g. Awake vs Asleep. Even animals exhibit that dichotomy.
|
| The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to
| detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they
| understand when they look silly? Do they recognize
| themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic.
|
| It's important to know which one is intended since they are
| so very different, at least in their distribution among
| living creatures.
| hliyan wrote:
| Awareness, definitely. I'm using consciousness in the
| same sense Julian Jaynes used it (he used to call the
| other form "reactivity", a term that never quite caught
| on).
| Smaug123 wrote:
| > We know when we're conscious and unconscious.
|
| I claim that this is not true as stated. The main bulk of
| the habit-forming nearly everyone needs to do when
| learning to lucid dream is to recognise when you're
| dreaming, because almost nobody natively knows when
| they're dreaming. You have to learn to spot it by paying
| attention to the things which the dream machinery is very
| bad at (like text, clocks, and your own breathing).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Sorry, I meant 'we' as an observer. Should have said "its
| clear from observation " perhaps.
|
| Anyway good point.
| zikzak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed
|
| I discovered this book in my early teens and it helped me
| in structuring my thinking about this sort of thing.
| crdrost wrote:
| Complexity is not just about these larger features, although
| they are certainly manifestations of complexity. So like a
| mechanical watch is complex, but it is complex in a very
| different way than weight gain or weight loss is.
|
| Nevertheless yes, this is the basic idea. Systems theory speaks
| about how you have substances flowing between different buffers
| or containers, as well as feedback loops that look at the
| buffers and adjust new flows based on those buffers. Or at
| least that is one of the most universal models. A nice general
| set of theorems about this are the fixed point theorems, which
| say that in a very large set of circumstances such systems find
| themselves in a "fixed point," a set of buffer quantities and
| flows that is self-sustaining and usually healing from small
| perturbation. This is why when you stop dieting you gain back
| the weight; the same causes lead to the same effects.
|
| The complexity of systems theory in particular comes from a few
| different properties worth thinking about:
|
| (a) not being able to predict the whole from the parts and thus
| not knowing how to change the system to facilitate the overall
| behavior change [in other words "if dieting doesn't work, _what
| does?_ ]
|
| (b) metastability transitions where there is enough random
| variation to allow for spontaneous reorganization between
| multiple fixed points [in other words if I get skinny in the
| Netherlands and fat in the US, then maybe American pandemic-me
| is skinny but Dutch pandemic-me is fat--as a corollary there is
| no such thing as "best practices" really, the same "causes" do
| _not_ produce the same effects: what is the difference with the
| above?]
|
| (c) when you _do_ manage to create change, it is typically by
| thinking wishfully about what the system should do and then
| driving it to produce that "at whatever cost" and initially
| some "bottlenecks" emerge which appear to be resistant to the
| desired change, which you _want to_ think is bad, but what
| _actually_ starts to happen is that everything else about the
| system re-architects to reinforce that "bad" thing and that
| makes it okay. [In other words the journey from fat to skinny
| may seem to be limited at first by my love of food and joyous
| hedonistic eating... if that 's the main bottleneck then unlike
| a diet's plan to make me deny myself, my healthy relationship
| with food will actually feature _more_ of that, indeed the
| reason that I was fat was that I did not love food _enough_ and
| with _delectatio morosa_ consumed whole boxes of cookies not
| for my truest enjoyment of them but because the pleasure of
| even a few cookies was always denied to me. If you read Marie
| Kondo 's book you may be struck that her diagnosis of mess is
| that you have too much stuff and her prescription for having
| too much stuff is perversely not to love your stuff less and be
| more stoic but to actually love your stuff more. Ecclesiastes
| seems to come to a similar conclusion.]
|
| Yeah, I think those are the most outrageous parts of dealing
| with systems which makes me astonished by their "complexity." I
| often find that if I ask "why can't we do that," I get some
| response "because of such-and-so" and then I surprise my
| interlocutor by saying "but what if I accept the such-and-so?"
| and, we eventually arrive at a whole different self-consistent
| system.
|
| One example of this in a tech context since I feel I have
| overmilked the health context: "What if we don't have merge
| conflicts?" "psh, yeah right, you're never gonna get rid of
| merge conflicts." "ok but pretend I am dumb, tell me why?"
| "because people modify the same code in different ways and you
| have a conflict!" "so if I could make them take turns then
| there would be no conflict?" "well you can't make us all take
| turns on the codebase! That would mean only one person is
| allowed to work at any given time!" "Ah I see your point, but
| what if it's more like a Google Doc where everyone sees other
| peoples' changes in realtime, that sequences the edits so that
| they never have merge conflicts." "but then we couldn't do code
| reviews properly!" "why does _that_ matter?" "because when I am
| setting out to rewrite the auth logic, I put the thing into a
| half-finished state! The code review protects those failing
| states from getting to prod." "Ok, so is there a way to develop
| without failing states?" "Well, kind of. Like I can write `if
| (false)` and then write breaking code. But if our codebase were
| littered with those I would never be sure what I needed to re-
| enable." "So there 's no way to define your own version of true
| and false for this thing you're working on?" "I mean, I guess a
| boolean variable. But that won't work either." "why not?" "if
| you have 10 of those then you have 1,024 different states that
| the system can be in, it becomes a nightmare." "and you can't
| remove them when a developer is done?" "not without proper code
| review! That's what I am saying!!" "okay but what if you then
| have both mini review and proper review, mini reviews just
| check to make sure that everything is behind a feature toggle,
| very quick approval-at-a-glance of work in progress: then
| bigger reviews happen when you instate the new code path and
| delete the old one. We could detect those mass deletions,
| yeah?" "I mean, yeah, but, I mean, this is just not how it's
| done. Nobody develops code like this." "Well, can we try it as
| an experiment for a month and see if we like never having merge
| failures more than we hate doing things a new way?"
| FriedrichN wrote:
| I read the PDF, it looks great but it doesn't really contain that
| much information. It's all very abstract, which is fine since
| it's a booklet, but it doesn't offer much in how to go deeper
| into it.
| melomal wrote:
| I really appreciate the effort on this, after 8+ years of SEO it
| can get a little hectic to say the least.
|
| But honestly. Truthfully.
|
| Backlinks are all you need to rank. I've been white/black/grey
| hat SEO and each and every time, buying a bunch of solid
| backlinks (a.k.a. you get what you pay for) and within 2 weeks I
| am on page 1 and still rocking. For 246k keyword too. Spend a bit
| of time running some searches these days and since the two major
| algo updates in Dec/Jan all rules have basically gone out of the
| window.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| This is not a very good overview of complexity.
|
| Instead read John Holland's "Complexity: A Very Short
| Introduction"
|
| To dig deeper (and something that will apply directly to many
| here) I loved "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and
| Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" by Geoffrey West
| mvolfik wrote:
| I have no idea what this means, I love the visualizations though
| rawland wrote:
| Nice idea, however the readability/contrast...
|
| Author, please read: https://contrastrebellion.com/
| metalliqaz wrote:
| That's one issue.
|
| Another is how some people seem to think that you can only put
| one idea on the screen at a time, and users should scroll
| scroll scroll.
|
| Both OP and your link both commit that sin.
|
| Just put everything on one page and let my eyes do the moving.
| iFreilicht wrote:
| Holy hell that website is awfully designed. Why does it try to
| snap my scrolling position to what it thinks is the right
| position? It doesn't even work, it jumps around like hell, I
| try to click through the examples and it just kicks me to the
| bottom. This is exactly the same idiocy of bad and unaccessible
| design for aesthetic purposes that the site complains about.
| The irony is palpable.
| complexcomplex wrote:
| I hope to see the end of LaTex only explanations.
|
| The site already has simulations so one must assume it has code
| that could codify those LaTex eqs.
|
| Perhaps a 'things ever ___ should know about ___' is needed for
| mathematicians and notation.
|
| Ala, "some disciplines use the same symbols for different
| functions" and "many symbols are intended to obfuscate details
| for ease of hand writing".
|
| Perhaps this is meant as a collection of reference material and I
| am wrongfully assuming complexityexplained is trying to be
| educational material, but if the intended audience is people
| hoping to have complexity explained to them then I think code and
| its underlying abstractions are going to better explain to a
| higher percentage of people who click through than LaTex.
|
| Show both if you can.
| ColinWright wrote:
| > _I hope to see the end of LaTex only explanations._
|
| I don't know what you mean by this. LaTeX is a type-setting
| system ... in what way is this site/page a "LaTex only
| explanation"?
|
| I'm also confused by this:
|
| > _The site already has simulations so one must assume it has
| code that could codify those LaTex eqs._
|
| I don't know what LaTeX equations you might be referring to.
|
| Also:
|
| > _... code and its underlying abstractions are going to better
| explain to a higher percentage of people who click through than
| LaTex._
|
| What LaTeX are you referring to?
|
| Seriously, LaTeX is a type-setting system, and LaTeX equations
| are just markup. I see neither of those on this page, so I
| don't understand your comment at all. Could you explain?
| andrepd wrote:
| When you say "LaTeX", do you mean... maths? I'm confused about
| what's your criticism.
| complexcomplex wrote:
| I sniff an air of condescension; what's your goals therein?
| Are you posturing your 'maths' knowledge?
|
| I thought I was explicit in my criticism of "notation only"
| explanations, but perhaps a positive example would be more
| explicit.
|
| https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython
|
| This repo explains computational fluid dynamics (an example
| of a complex system!) from "what is a python function" to "2d
| Navier stokes".
|
| It shows the work of how to discretize 'latex beautified'
| notation, shows the relationship between the computations and
| the notation, and even explains when their LaTex strays from
| "conventional use of notation" and why.
|
| The authors even throw in traditional handwritten board
| lecture videos if that helps you learn better.
|
| complexityexplained reads like it's written by the Spider-Man
| points at Spider-Man meme.
| aogaili wrote:
| Have you ever faced a problem or system so complex, that you
| tried to understand and gave up in frustration? Do you think
| there are systems out there completely beyond humanity grasp?
| that we won't even have an entry point to reason about them?
| hliyan wrote:
| I've learned to think of understanding as a form of
| compression. The more recurring patterns there are in a system,
| the better we can understand them. The fewer such recurring
| patterns in a system, the harder it is to understand them.
| Fortunately for us, a lot of things in nature are recurrent.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| And if you want to understand why they are recurrent, then
| you'll find the commonality in the shape of the system's
| components' causality - how they influence each other, often
| in loops. These are the subject of control theory,
| cybernetics (also a systems science), and systems dynamics
| (if you like maths).
| d0100 wrote:
| Death by a thousand slide-ins
| pilingual wrote:
| If you are interested in complexity, Complexity Explorer from the
| Santa Fe Institute has courses and other resources available:
| https://complexityexplorer.org
| ColinWright wrote:
| Oh, FFS. Now it's been pointed out[0] that there are links and
| animations embedding in the page. And there are!
|
| But their existence is beautifully hidden by the bloody annoying,
| horribly slow "Swoosh! Swoosh" of the animation.
|
| It's a perfect example of having potentially fantastic content,
| then making it really, really hard to notice.
|
| Urgh.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048154
| beefman wrote:
| All the actual content seems to be on this site
|
| http://www.complexity-explorables.org
| ColinWright wrote:
| I got three slides in and the "Swooshing!" was driving me nuts.
| I'm sure the content is fine, and the presentation is simply
| _gorgeous_.
|
| For me ... unusable.
|
| _Edit: In the end, at the end, I found the PDF. It seems a
| little light on content, but I guess I 'm not the audience. Not
| sure who the audience would be, though._
| FriedrichN wrote:
| At the end you can download a PDF. I must say I prefer that
| over the slow web page.
|
| To be honest I always leave a page immediately if it's way too
| fancy, especially when stuff starts moving and fading, I simply
| hate it.
| sliken wrote:
| Same here, page up/down almost works, but misses text, gave up.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > Edit: In the end, at the end, I found the PDF. It seems a
| little light on content, but I guess I'm not the audience. Not
| sure who the audience would be, though.
|
| Thanks for that. I suspected as much. I'll wait to read
| something more serious, less market-y.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| On mobile Safari, navigation is fine. It's probably a simpler
| versions of the desktop one.
| uyt wrote:
| For the people suggesting reading the pdf or disabling JS,
| you're missing the point of this submission.
|
| 90% of the value is in playing with their interactive demos.
| (though all of them seem to be from https://www.complexity-
| explorables.org/ so it might be better to go there directly
| instead)
| ColinWright wrote:
| If those links are the _intent_ of this page, the "Swoosh!
| Swoosh!" is a _great_ way to hide them.
|
| There's a maxim in publishing: Don't bury the lede.
| bpicolo wrote:
| They may want to add an option to have all the context in a
| single column, centered.
|
| This is hard to use on wide screens right now - it's kind of
| like watching a tennis match
| ksec wrote:
| Another fine Example of we cant even do Web _Pages_ , let alone
| Web apps.
|
| On Safari, simple scrolling makes the content unreadable.
| hawski wrote:
| It is so slow, that after the title slide I scrolled through
| three slides and stopped, because I thought something was
| wrong. Then the slide appeared and I realized I missed three
| slides, because of those animations being so slow and not at
| all correlated to how fast I scroll or how far I'm in.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Disabling JS helps.
|
| PDF:
| https://complexityexplained.github.io/ComplexityExplained.pd...
|
| (Multiple languages available.)
| cabalamat wrote:
| Having read the pdf, I was underwhelmed. There doesn't appear
| to be any meat here, merely restatements of the obvious.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Maybe this could be more useful for you?
|
| "An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its
| Applications"
| https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2020/6105872/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A far more appropriate title would be "Complexity: A very
| brief introduction to major themes with bibliography".
|
| The booklet is 20 pages covering aspects with a one-
| paragraph description, several examples as a bullet list,
| list of concepts, and two references for further readig.
|
| The title sets up rather greater expectations.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Turn off JS, fixed :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| ToJ;F!
| jmatthews wrote:
| many of the examples are based from this site
| https://www.complexity-explorables.org/ if you're looking for
| additional examples.
| ncfausti wrote:
| Thank you! This is why I read the comments on HN. I was
| thinking while reading that I'd like to find some good
| resources to explore complexity theory in more depth, this
| looks great.
|
| Side note: 14 people created something of value and distribute
| it for free, and still many of the comments here are just
| complaints about auto-scroll, websites, and JS. Pretty sad to
| see.
| ColinWright wrote:
| > _14 people created something of value and distribute it for
| free, and still many of the comments here are just complaints
| about auto-scroll, websites, and JS._
|
| Or, to put it another way, 14 people created fantastic
| material with all sorts of genuinely wonderful animations,
| then put links to them on a page that was so annoying that
| potential readers clicked away before finding the useful and
| intriguing stuff that had been shared so freely. Pretty sad
| to see.
| khiner wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. I often read some top comments even
| before checking an article just to get a quick read on
| whether something is likely e.g. clickbaity. Reading the
| comments it seemed like there was some consensus that this
| was a page with mostly information that would be better
| presented in a flat form like a pdf rather than an
| interactive website... but it's actually a super fun
| collection of interactive visualizations for some of the
| classic complexity examples, and it worked perfectly for me
| except for a kind of ostentatious fade-from-white effect on
| page load.
| khiner wrote:
| Ah I see. I was on mobile and didn't get the left/right
| swooshing, but do on desktop. I also find the left/right
| swooshing from the outside pretty clunky and unnecessary.
| But the content is really nice, and I personally appreciate
| a bit of fun in experimenting with content presentation.
| Esp. given the topic.
| paulorlando wrote:
| This is great. I try to write about little pieces of this, but
| mostly from a perspective of new tech, policy, and history:
| https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
| JackFr wrote:
| I'm not sure I get the point.
|
| Cool animations, no details, no math. Profound quotes from heavy
| names but not math.
|
| Revolutionary, paradigm breaking stuff, but not really.
|
| Almost makes me long for a Stephen Wolfram press release.
| blindm wrote:
| If you are doing software engineering, Dave Snowden's Cynefin
| Framework is worth a look. Considers complexity as one quadrant
| to deal with when making decisions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework
| jonsneyers wrote:
| Needs better contrast. The difference between text and background
| color is just too low, even for people with normal vision it is
| hard to read.
| robbmorganf wrote:
| How does complexity theory benefit real people? Unlike theories
| of physics or economics, it doesn't appear to describe how
| anything actually _works_ , rather that things are just more
| complex than they seem. For instance, complexity theory just
| points out that the double pendulum is hard to predict without
| adding value, while controls theory was more useful by
| stabilizing the double pendulum.
|
| So what are some real-world benefits of complexity theory?
| api wrote:
| Critics say complexity has no predictive power. That's the
| point. The field studies systems that are unpredictable by
| instead modeling them and studying how their conditions or
| parameters affect their behavioral characteristics.
| jananas wrote:
| I second that. I see it as something to build intuition for
| "complex" problems. To make this more concrete: If you want
| to study the brain you can go the "biology" approach and
| describe neurons really well and build mathematical models
| for all the neuron types. Or you could do it the other way
| around with the "psychology" approach and put
| people/monkey/rats in an MRT. Both ways you learn important
| stuff but it will be hard to connect both worlds because
| simulation of enough neurons to predictive power over the
| outcome of an MRT is probably far fetched (although there are
| the human brain project or its US counterpart, the brain
| activity map project which attempt to do something like
| this). Complexity theory might help to learn how to close
| this gap. Things like synchronization (http://www.scholarpedi
| a.org/article/Synchronization#Chaotic_...) or Self organized
| criticality (form the critical brain theory) could help
| distinguishing which parts of neuronal dynamics are due to
| biological restrictions and which form the function of the
| brain. With this knowledge one might be able to "dumb down"
| neuronal models enough to make large scale simulations
| without loosing to much of the processing dynamics. You might
| still not have predictive power then, but then again,
| complexity theory might help you to understand what the
| limitations of your approach are.
|
| The same intuitions could be applied to other things. Large
| scale power grids are also often hard to predict when not
| moving into a sure fail state. Being able to analyze how you
| stabilize these systems without basically dumping a lot of
| money on them is the way to go (Looking in the past, the
| money will probably not be spend).
|
| You could study the behavior of crowds and maybe make
| estimations on the safety large conventions build a "panic
| index" that calculates the risk of having something like at
| the Loveparade
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster . Again -
| you would not be able to make a precise prediction of whats
| gonna happen but I'd say it'd even knowing if you have like a
| 0.5% Chance of a disaster would be worth knowing. (Of course,
| there are effective methods taught to prevent this disasters
| anyway. But sometimes you have new configurations that didn't
| occur in the past and you might catch these things with a
| simulation. I could be an additional approach)
| robbmorganf wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the power grid idea? It seems like a
| good example of how to apply complexity theory to make hard
| decisions, in this case optimal investments in grid
| stabilization.
| jananas wrote:
| That's not really my strong side...
|
| But a quick search brought this paper to the light which
| might serve as a starting point: https://res.mdpi.com/d_a
| ttachment/energies/energies-11-01381...
|
| For example they report on a project where they used
| photovoltaic panels to stabilize changing power
| consumption in a power grids with minimal changes in the
| existing structure - something that is hard with
| traditional power plants since they basically have to
| much momentum for quick switching action.
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7007647
|
| Also, agent based simulations (building on the idea of
| self organized criticality) are a thing. With these
| setups you can test power grids on their reaction for
| certain failure types - something you don't want to test
| in real life. I assume these simulations would also be
| quite accurate since consumption and production should be
| well known, as well as the physical properties of
| transmission.
| hdivider wrote:
| Complexity theory provides _metaphors_ for nonlinear change,
| for one thing.
|
| And most things in business are neither truly linear nor simple
| exponential. Yet most people in business revert to these two
| mathematical concepts.
|
| For example, it might convince a CEO to keep working on a
| project because this 'emergence' thing may be happening --
| where a non-complexity-empowered CEO might kill the project
| because there is no linear return, and no apparent potential
| for exponential return.
| Schroedingers2c wrote:
| Complexity theory is fascinating in itself (talking about how
| efficiently solvable or complex a problem is in an absolute,
| mathematical way), but also can spur a lot of research. As an
| example, integer factoring is _strongly_ believed to be hard
| for classical computers (in a well defined complexity theory
| sense). When Peter Shor presented an efficient quantum
| algorithm for integer factoring in 1994 it was a breakthrough
| for the field and triggered huge interest into the field of
| quantum computing and quantum alogrithms. Serious widespread
| research into quantum computing more or less started then.
| Quantum computing is estimated (by BCG) to create a market
| value of 450-850 billion $ by 2050 (mainly in chemistry,
| optimisation and cryptography).
|
| So, the academically interesting aspect aside, it can spur
| research for useful things, it can act as a guide to what is
| worth / not worth researching (if something is proven to be in
| a "hard" complexity class, then you won't find any efficient
| algorithm to solve the problem, ever (assuming P =/= NP).) and
| is generally a great framework for algorithms research. And
| evidently, algorithms create a lot of value (good and bad,
| unfortunately).
|
| It's just very much "under the hood". 100 years ago people
| could have also, rightly, said "how does quantum theory benefit
| people, what's the value in that". Yet, without the fundamental
| research in quantum theory we would not have modern technology.
| Understanding the behaviour of electrons in materials on an
| atomic level requires quantum mechanics.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Complex systems theory is not complexity theory from
| theoretical computer science.
| robbmorganf wrote:
| Is complexity theory related to computational complexity? The
| webpage never mentioned big-O notation, and Wikipedia's
| disambiguation header seems to imply they're mostly
| unrelated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity
| breck wrote:
| I wrote a paper called "Counting Complexity" (https://github.co
| m/treenotation/research/tree/master/papers/...).
|
| In it are the beginnings of a new simple universal way to
| measure complexity.
|
| The "real-world benefits" are that you can compare 2 systems
| that accomplish the same problem and objectively choose the
| less complex one, much like you could use the measurement of
| "weight" to pick a lighter material for something like a plane.
| jungturk wrote:
| I found the material from the Systems Innovation group
| instructive on the presence and application of some of the
| aspects of complexity in the real world:
|
| https://www.systemsinnovation.io/course
| robbmorganf wrote:
| Thanks for the link! I'm looking for a course that really
| does get into the weeds about applying complexity theory to
| create value for my work. Would you recommend one of their
| listed courses in particular?
| jungturk wrote:
| I think most of the video media inside the courses are also
| available on youtube - maybe you can stroll through those
| to see if any reach the level of detail you could use?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/ComplexityLearningLab/videos
| probablypower wrote:
| You mention economics.
|
| Macro-economic theories are based on high-level relationships
| that economists have observed in reality, and that have some
| theoretical basis. For example, supply and demand can be
| represented as curves (aggregates of individual positions), and
| that in a perfect market the value of a good will converge at
| the intercept of supply and demand. There are a considerable
| number of assumptions required to make a statement like this,
| most of which are made to 'manage away' complexity.
|
| Complexity theory helps us find ways to address and model
| complexity, such that we can reduce the number of assumptions
| required. For example, if we can build an agent-based
| simulation of supply and demand, and we model these agents as
| realistically as possible (few assumptions), we can then see if
| the same realisation of a good's value occurs.
|
| The value in this is that we can then test the assumptions
| directly (what happens if 20% of people make irrational
| decisions?) and see how it affects the emergent behaviour.
|
| Complexity theory can help in properly building these kinds of
| fine-grained simulations in a smart way, and can also help in
| understanding and debugging such simulations when the wrong
| behaviour emerges.
|
| In my field (power systems) complexity theory can help us
| investigate and understand why large-scale blackouts have a fat
| tail distribution. That is, to understand why our macro-level
| statistical models aren't accurate in the edge cases. Primarily
| it is because these outliers occur 'emergently' due to the
| complexity of power systems, in ways that we overlook by
| applying old-school approaches to grid development and system
| operation.
|
| In short: complexity theory helps us look beyond our 'mostly
| right' high-level statistical models and theories.
| robbmorganf wrote:
| I mentioned this in another thread, but I was wondering if
| you had any examples of complexity theory informing what
| investments to make into the power grid? e.g. emergent
| behaviour is predictably reduced by adding X MWh of batteries
| in a certain region?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| There's a distinction to be made between chaotic and complex
| systems. You cannot model chaotic systems at their chaotic
| level of abstraction (higher levels may form more predictable
| behaviour, eg. The weather patterns). Complex systems cannot be
| predicted with certainty but you can interact with and model
| them. Consider the human body - it's impossible to know the
| total state of the body and predict exactly what will happen
| next, but we can model different states of the body and
| understand what interventions can counteract undesired states.
| Of course the specific fields for working with the body have
| made many discoveries long before systems science existed, but
| in the same way that the scientific method provides tools for
| understanding linear causalities across fields, systems science
| provides tools for understanding nonlinear causality across
| fields.
| vonnik wrote:
| Simulations are one of the ways we can see where complexity
| leads.
|
| The work of OpenAI on Dota show how RL can produce a successful
| emergent behavior in response to complexity.
| dgb23 wrote:
| The parametrized visualizations are fun and useful. They really
| help with the mental model and intuition.
|
| Also I didn't know that field existed. Very interesting. One
| could imagine using visualization and generative testing for
| software systems to be a subject where this model could be
| applied.
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