I got three slides in and the "Swooshing!" was driving me nuts. I'm sure the content is fine, and the presentation is simply <i>gorgeous</i>.<p>For me ... unusable.<p><i>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.</i>
Oh, FFS. Now it's been pointed out[0] that there are links and animations embedding in the page. And there are!<p>But their existence is beautifully hidden by the bloody annoying, horribly slow "Swoosh! Swoosh" of the animation.<p>It's a perfect example of having potentially fantastic content, then making it really, really hard to notice.<p>Urgh.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048154" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048154</a>
I recently had the (possibly flawed) epiphany that <i>all behavior is emergent</i>. 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".
How does complexity theory benefit real people? Unlike theories of physics or economics, it doesn't appear to describe how anything actually <i>works</i>, 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.<p>So what are some real-world benefits of complexity theory?
If you are interested in complexity, Complexity Explorer from the Santa Fe Institute has courses and other resources available:
<a href="https://complexityexplorer.org" rel="nofollow">https://complexityexplorer.org</a>
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.<p>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.
<a href="https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/making-the-complex-coherent-d414908c6926" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/making-the...</a><p>Also recommend writings of any author affiliated with Santa Fe Institute, a lot of books to choose from.
many of the examples are based from this site <a href="https://www.complexity-explorables.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.complexity-explorables.org/</a>
if you're looking for additional examples.
I wrote the book "Understanding SEO"[1] with Systems Theory in mind.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] free for HN: <a href="https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news/</a>
This is not a very good overview of complexity.<p>Instead read John Holland’s “Complexity: A Very Short Introduction”<p>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
Complexity theory is interesting and useful.<p>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.
I hope to see the end of LaTex only explanations.<p>The site already has simulations so one must assume it has code that could codify those LaTex eqs.<p>Perhaps a ‘things ever ___ should know about ___’ is needed for mathematicians and notation.<p>Ala, “some disciplines use the same symbols for different functions” and “many symbols are intended to obfuscate details for ease of hand writing”.<p>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.<p>Show both if you can.
This is great. I try to write about little pieces of this, but mostly from a perspective of new tech, policy, and history: <a href="https://unintendedconsequenc.es/" rel="nofollow">https://unintendedconsequenc.es/</a>
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.
The Chinese translation of the title is a bit puzzling to me, as a Chinese mainlander lived in US:<p>Complexity Explained is translated to "沒說你不知道", literally means "you wont know if I don't tell you". Generally "Explained" usually corresponds to "详解"<p>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.
All the actual content seems to be on this site<p><a href="http://www.complexity-explorables.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.complexity-explorables.org</a>
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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework</a>
The parametrized visualizations are fun and useful. They really help with the mental model and intuition.<p>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.
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?
I’m not sure I get the point.<p>Cool animations, no details, no math. Profound quotes from heavy names but not math.<p>Revolutionary, paradigm breaking stuff, but not really.<p>Almost makes me long for a Stephen Wolfram press release.
Simulations are one of the ways we can see where complexity leads.<p>The work of OpenAI on Dota show how RL can produce a successful emergent behavior in response to complexity.
Ok look, another website that doesn't work on desktop.<p>It's so frustrating that we seem to have lost any understanding of how to to put information on a screen.
I really appreciate the effort on this, after 8+ years of SEO it can get a little hectic to say the least.<p>But honestly. Truthfully.<p>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.