complexity theory

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The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Climate, biology, solar flares, forest fires, traffic jams, and other natural and man-made behaviors can all be described using complexity theory. Lorenz’s observation that long-run forecasting in nonlinear systems is impossible given minute differences in initial conditions did not mean that no valuable information is derived from the models. Applied complexity theory is interdisciplinary. Complex systems all have behaviors in common, yet have dynamics unique to each domain. A team out to crack the code in applied complexity theory would include physicists, mathematicians, computer modelers, and subject matter experts from the field being addressed.

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Complexity Bayesian technique is not a science in itself, it’s an applied mathematical tool with robust predictive properties. The prime science of capital markets is complexity theory. Capital markets are complex systems, yet complexity is little understood and even less used in financial economics. From the 1998 global liquidity crisis, to the 2000 tech bubble collapse, to the 2008 panic, policymakers have led the world into one crash after another. Their failure to use complexity theory explains why. The case for complexity theory is straightforward. It’s not difficult to grasp. Investors must grasp it now if they wish to preserve wealth. The next panic will be too late.

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This is why central bank and Wall Street equilibrium models produce consistently weak results in forecasting and risk management. Every analysis starts with the same data. Yet when you enter that data into a deficient model, you get deficient output. Investors who use complexity theory can leave mainstream analysis behind and get better forecasting results. The third tool in addition to behavioral psychology and complexity theory is Bayesian statistics, a branch of etiology also referred to as causal inference. Both terms derive from Bayes’ theorem, an equation first described by Thomas Bayes and published posthumously in 1763. A version of the theorem was elaborated independently and more formally by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1774.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

A new paradigm has emerged in the past twenty years from several schools of thought, including behavioral economics and complexity theory, among others. This new thinking comes with a healthy dose of humility—practitioners in many cases acknowledge the limitations of what is possible with the tools at hand. The new schools avoid the triumphalism of Keynes’s claim to a “general theory” and Friedman’s dictum that inflation is “always and everywhere” monetary. The most promising new school is complexity theory. Despite the name, complexity theory rests on straightforward foundations. The first is that complex systems are not designed from the top down.

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Cold War era Collapse of Complex Societies, The (Tainter) collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) commodities Commodity Futures Modernization Act Communist Party of China competitive devaluations complexity theory Connally, John connectedness, in complex systems convening power theory copper correlation, in global financial warfare Cosmic Evolution (Chaisson) Coughlin, Charles counterfeiting Credit-Anstalt Bank of Vienna critical state systems critical thresholds currency collapse capital flight response to dollar collapse in complexity theory 1920s currency convergence currency devaluations competitive dollar devaluation against gold, 1930s and 1970s 1930s and 1970s sterling devaluations Tripartite Agreement of 1936 and currency markets currency peg currency wars Atlantic theater benefits of chaos as outcome of Currency War I (1921–1936) Currency War II (1967–1987) Currency War III (2010–) Eurasian theater Pacific theater Czechoslovakia Davison, Henry P.

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When the system reaches a certain scale, the energy inputs dry up because the exponential relationship between scale and inputs exhausts the available resources. In a nutshell, complex systems arise spontaneously, behave unpredictably, exhaust resources and collapse catastrophically. When you apply this paradigm to finance, you begin to see where the currency wars are headed. Complexity theory has a strong empirical foundation and has had wide application in a variety of natural and man-made settings, including climate, seismology and the Internet. Significant progress has been made in applying complexity to capital and currency markets. However, a considerable challenge arises when one considers the interaction of human behavior and market dynamics.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

If the economy is seen in this light, then the reactions of technology with agents and the following assemblages and adaptations that are seen in an economy are reflective of the study of complex systems, an academic discipline that observes the deep laws of complexity and emergence in any system. Complexity theory was born in the 1970’s (Wilson, 1998) and was originally inspired by 19th century physics, specifically the fields of classical mechanics, statistical non-equilibrium physics and thermodynamics (Helbing and Kirman, 2014). The main tenets of complexity theory borrow their conceptions from chaos theory, self-criticality and adaptive landscapes, to bring into focus the way complex systems grow, persist and collapse. The first scholars of complexity theory began their formulations at the Santa Fe institute, and based their study of complex systems on abstract non-linear transformative computer simulations.

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Jack Rabin, Handbook of Strategic Management (pp. 67-87). Routledge. Levy, M. (2012). Agent Based Computational Economics. In R. A. Meyers, Computational Complexity: Theory, Techniques, and Applications (pp. 18-39). Springer. Manson, S. M. (2001). Simplifying complexity: a review of complexity theory. Geoforum, Volume 32, Issue 3, 405-414. Morçöl, G. (2008). A Complexity Theory for Policy Analysis. In K. A. Richardson and Linda F. Dennard (Editors), Complexity and Policy Analysis (pp. 23 - 35). ISCE Publishing. Pfleiderer, P. (2014). Chameleons: The Misuse of Theoretical Models in in Finance and Economics . Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives - Volume 6, Number 2, 117-136. Kirman, D. H. (2014). Rethinking Economics Using Complexity Theory . Iowa State University. Kirman, M. G. (2013). Reconstructing economics: Agent based models and complexity . Baltzer Science Publishers, DOI : 10.​7564/​12-COEC2 . Lawrence J. Christiano, M. E. (1998). Monetary Policy Shocks: What Have We Learned and to What End? LeBaron, B. (2002). Building the Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market . Brandeis University. Levy, D. L. (2000). Applications and Limitations of Complexity Theory in Organization Theory and Strategy. In G. J. Jack Rabin, Handbook of Strategic Management (pp. 67-87).

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER 17 TRANSITION TO EXTINCTION Taleb had first met Yaneer Bar-Yam, a slender, cerebral man with a curly shock of hair and an enduring fondness for wool sweaters, when he attended a New England Complex Systems Institute conference in Cambridge in 2010. He’d been teaching Bar-Yam’s textbook, Dynamics of Complex Systems, to his class at NYU, and saw interesting connections between Bar-Yam’s specialty, complexity theory, and his own idiosyncratic Black Swan worldview. Bar-Yam, he came to believe, was the world’s leading expert in complexity theory. It was a big claim. No less an authority than Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “Complexity is the science of the twenty-first century.” Not only founder of NECSI but also chair of the International Conference on Complex Systems, Bar-Yam had long been at the very forefront of the complexity pack.

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Crunching the numbers on a computer program called Wolfram Mathematica, Taleb grew increasingly unnerved. If the disease got out of control, it could be devastating. Millions could die. Videos emerging from Wuhan of overrun hospitals and doctors in space-age protective suits frightened Taleb. He called Yaneer Bar-Yam, a friend and expert in complexity theory—the broad, interdisciplinary study of interactions within and among systems ranging from cells to forests to the global climate—and the disturbing dynamics of pandemics in the modern world. “You’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in Wuhan,” Taleb told him. Bar-Yam agreed. Founder of an elite research center called the New England Complex Systems Institute, or NECSI, Bar-Yam had for years been growing progressively worried about the outbreak of a global pandemic.

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Neither Spitznagel nor Taleb claim to know when the crashes will happen. As Spitznagel wrote in a 2020 letter to investors, “There are no crystal balls!” Not everyone agrees that it is impossible to predict market crashes, however. A growing breed of mathematicians, many of whom are steeped in a fiendishly arcane branch of science called complexity theory, practiced by brainiacs such as Taleb’s friend Yaneer Bar-Yam, have claimed they can detect certain signals in the market’s noise that auger collapse. Experts in the theory, such as French physicist Didier Sornette, have devised experiments to demonstrate the reliability of their predictive systems, with some surprising successes.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The best illustration of immanent self-organization, as far as I know, is still jazz group improvisation, to which chapter 1 will add a number of others from a variety of fields (including science, games, and ethology); the concept of immanence they illustrate, in any case, is key to nomadism and nomadology, as first defined by Deleuze and Guattari.24 Some of its roots lie in complexity theory and nonlinear mathematics, which have both formalized and reinforced long-standing impressions that order can and often does arise in systems spontaneously, without being imposed by some transcendent instance standing above or outside the system. Complexity theory supports both the nontotalized view of society and the nonlinear view of history informing nomadology.25 The discovery of emergent self-organization seemed to belie the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy is supposed to increase—in any closed system operating close to equilibrium, that is.

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Complexity theory supports both the nontotalized view of society and the nonlinear view of history informing nomadology.25 The discovery of emergent self-organization seemed to belie the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy is supposed to increase—in any closed system operating close to equilibrium, that is. But the fields to which complexity theory was most dramatically applied were not closed systems and were nowhere near equilibrium: life on earth, for instance, receives practically immeasurable amounts of energy from the sun and thus represents a classic case of negentropy or syntropy rather than en­ tropy. As Stuart Kauffmann (among others) has shown, starting from al­ most trivially simple mathematical models, spontaneous self-organization emerges in all kinds of systems, from inorganic molecule clusters to cells and organisms, to ecosystems, economies, and cultures.26 Of course, de­ bates about the sources or bases of social organization date back to the dawn of philosophy, but complexity theory gave new impetus and added credence to conceiving of various kinds of social order as immanently self­ organizing, and this becomes a key component of the concept of nomad citizenship.

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As Stuart Kauffmann (among others) has shown, starting from al­ most trivially simple mathematical models, spontaneous self-organization emerges in all kinds of systems, from inorganic molecule clusters to cells and organisms, to ecosystems, economies, and cultures.26 Of course, de­ bates about the sources or bases of social organization date back to the dawn of philosophy, but complexity theory gave new impetus and added credence to conceiving of various kinds of social order as immanently self­ organizing, and this becomes a key component of the concept of nomad citizenship. The main components of the concept of free-market communism, mean­ while, come from more disparate sources, starting with theories of the free market and Marxist theory itself.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Only nations and individuals who make provision today will survive the maelstrom to come. In place of fallacious, if popular, methods, this book considers complexity theory to be the best lens for viewing present risks and likely outcomes. Capital markets are complex systems nonpareil. Complexity theory is relatively new in the history of science, but in its sixty years it has been extensively applied to weather, earthquakes, social networks, and other densely connected systems. The application of complexity theory to capital markets is still in its infancy, but it has already yielded insights into risk metrics and price dynamics that possess greater predictive power than conventional methods.

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-Iran financial war and, 56, 57 Warlord Period, 91 Warring States period, 90 China Daily, 52 China Investment Corporation (CIC), 51 China National Petroleum Corporation, 97 China Petrochemical Corporation (SINOPEC), 97 China Railway Corporation, 255 China State Shipbuilding Corporation, 97 China Telecom, 97 Churchill, Winston, 116, 223 Citibank, 28, 30–31, 262 Citigroup, 196 civilizational collapses, 5 Clinton, Bill, 210 cluster paradigm, 192–93, 194, 198 CNN, 36, 37 codetermination, 123–24 Cohen, David, 54 Coinage Act of 1792, 217 Cold War, 46, 231 collapse civilizational, 5 financial, 265–67 of international monetary system, 5 market, 11–12 warning signs of, 295–98 collateral swaps, 188 College of Europe, 116 commodities, 217 Communist Dynasty, 90, 91–92 complexity theory, 6, 269–70 financial collapse and, 265–67 market collapse and, 11–12 phase transitions in, 172, 265, 289–90 computational complexity theory, 71 confidence, in U.S. dollar, 253–56, 291 confirmation bias, 26 continuity of government operations, 63 contract theory of money (contractism), 165–67, 169 corporate tax rates, 122 correlations, 4–5 Cosco, 133 Counter-Reformation, 115 credit, in premoney economies, 255 creditism, 168–69 credit risk, 218 criticality, 270 Croatia, 136 Croseus, King, 217 “Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy” (Mishkin), 286–87 Crusades, 115 currency war, 159 cyberattacks, 59–60 cyclical downturns, 197–98 Cyprus, 200, 290 Dam, Kenneth W., 209–10 Da Silva, Tekoa, 236 Davoudi, Parviz, 151 “Day After, The” (Ambinder), 63 debasement, of money, 172 debt, 171–80, 290–91 Federal Reserve monetary policy’s relation to, 176–77, 180–89 Federal Reserve Notes as, 167 monetization of, 287–88 sustainable, 171–72, 176–80 tests for acceptable government spending, 173–76 of United States, 171–73 Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, The (Fisher), 246–47 debt-to-GDP ratio, 159–60, 173 deflation, impact of, 9, 258–59 of Japan, 159, 259, 261 of United Kingdom, 159 of United States, 159, 173, 259 defensive aspects of financial war, 46 deficits, 172–73, 176–80 deflation, 9–11, 76–83, 243–52, 256–64 banking system, impact on, 9, 259 Bernanke’s response to, 76, 77 Chinese imports and, 76 debt-to-GDP ratio and, 9, 258–59 deleveraging after housing market collapse and, 76–77 government debt repayment and, 9, 258 Greenspan’s response to, 76 versus inflation, in depression of 2007 to present, 243–52, 260, 290–91 in Japan, 160–61, 260–62, 264 post-2000 deflationary bias, 76 SDR issuance to prevent, 213–14 tax collection and, 9, 259–60 unemployment and, 77 De Gasperi, Alcide, 116 degree distribution, 265–66 de Léry, Jean, 115 deleveraging, 76–77, 246 DeMint, Jim, 205 Democrats, 175–76, 179, 180, 294 Deng Xiaoping, 93, 97 depressions defined, 244 deflation in, 246–47 Great Depression, 84, 85, 125–26, 155, 221–22, 223–24, 234, 244, 245 Long Depression, in Japan, 160 of 1920, 246–47 regime uncertainty and, 125–26 2007 to present, 3, 76, 87, 126, 197, 243–52, 260, 290–91 derivatives, 80–81 gold as not constituting, 217–18 mortgage-related, 290 risk posed by, 11–12 size of positions in, 11 Deutsche Bank, 32–33 Deutsche Bundesbank, 232 devaluations, 158, 200 of dollar, U.S., 1, 10–11, 235 Gold Bloc devaluations, 222 Great Depression and, 223 digital currencies, 254 dollar, U.S., 161 alternatives to, 254 Beijing Consensus and, 120–21 confidence in, 253–56, 291 contract theory of, 165–67, 169 deflation as threat to, 9–11 demise of, potential paths of, 292–95 devaluation of, 1, 10–11, 235 financial war as threat to, 6–7 geopolitical threats to, 12–13 gold convertibility abandoned, in 1971, 1, 2, 5, 209, 220, 235, 285 inflation as threat to, 7–9 King Dollar (sound-dollar) policy, 118, 176–77, 210, 211 loss of confidence in, in 1970s, 1–2, 5 market collapse as threat to, 11–12 MARKINT as means of detecting attacks on, 40 pegging to, effect of, 155 SDRs as potential reserve currency replacement for, 211–14, 292–93 threats to, 5–13 Volcker’s efforts to save, 2 Washington Consensus and, 118–20 dollar index in 1978, 1, 253–54 in 1995, 2, 253–54 in 2011, 2–3, 253–54 in 2013, 253–54 SDR issuance and weakness in, 210–11 Dr.

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If the United States faces severe deflation again, the antidote of dollar devaluation against gold will be the same, because there is no other solution when printing money fails. ■ Market Collapse The prospect of a market collapse is a function of systemic risk independent of fundamental economic policy. The risk of market collapse is amplified by regulatory incompetence and banker greed. Complexity theory is the proper framework for analyzing this risk. The starting place in this analysis is the recognition that capital markets exhibit all four of complex systems’ defining qualities: diversity of agents, connectedness, interdependence, and adaptive behavior. Concluding that capital markets are complex systems has profound implications for regulation and risk management.

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

The Sraffian scorecard Though the Sraffian school was fairly influential up until 2000, there have been few developments in it since, certainly in comparison to the growth in post-Keynesian economics since that date. Complexity theory and Econophysics Complexity theory is not so much a school of thought in economics as a group of economists who apply what is popularly known as ‘chaos theory’ to economic issues. Since the first edition of this book, there has also been an enormous growth in the number of physicists taking an active interest in economics and finance, and this new school of ‘Econophysics’ has largely subsumed the complexity theory approach. The concept of chaos itself was first discovered in 1899 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré.

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Modeling Minsky Minsky did develop a mathematical model of a financially driven business cycle in his PhD, which resulted in the one paper he ever had published in a mainstream economic journal, the American Economic Review (Minsky 1957).3 But the model was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, and he subsequently abandoned it to stick with predominantly verbal reasoning. Minsky’s failure to develop a satisfactory mathematical model was partly due to bad timing: the 1950s pre-dated the development of complexity theory, which made trying to build a model of his hypothesis virtually impossible. Minsky simply added a financial dimension to the dominant linear trade cycle model of the day, which was a particularly unsuitable foundation for his hypothesis.4 In 1993, well after complexity theory had developed, I built my initial Minsky model using the far more suitable foundation of the cyclical growth model developed by the non-neoclassical economist Richard Goodwin (Goodwin 1967).

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The Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu result is one of many that have effectively split the caste of mathematical economists into two sects. One pretends that business as usual can continue, despite the presence of this (and many other) fallacies in the creed. The other is dabbling in alternative religions – such as complexity theory, or evolutionary economics. Sadly, the uninformed majority of the profession believes that the first sect is the bearer of the true religion, and that the members of the second sect have betrayed the faith. A more accurate analogy is that the dabblers in alternative religions are experiencing the first flushes of adolescence, while the majority of the profession remains mired in infancy.

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook

Bletchley Park, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, financial engineering, four colour theorem, index card, John von Neumann, linear programming, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, traveling salesman, Turing machine

What sets the traveling salesman problem apart is the fact that despite decades of research by top applied mathematicians around the world, in general it is not known how to significantly improve upon simple bruteforce checking. It is a real possibility that there may never exist an efficient method that is guaranteed to solve every example of the problem. This is a xii Preface deep mathematical question: is there an efficient solution method or not? The topic goes to the core of complexity theory concerning the limits of feasible computation. For the stouthearted who would like to tackle the general version of the problem, the Clay Mathematics Institute will hand over a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can either produce an efficient method or prove that this is impossible. The complexity question that is the subject of the Clay Prize is the Holy Grail of traveling-salesman-problem research and we may be far from seeing its resolution.

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Thousands of LP users nonetheless go ahead and include such restrictions in their models everyday, unable to resist the flexibility that integer-only variables bring to the table. The extended framework is known as integer programming, or IP for short. Dantzig himself was the first to document how versatile integer programming can be. In a paper that is fundamental in both the field of optimization and the field of complexity theory, he showed how each member of a long list of important optimization problems can be modeled as an IP problem.29 Dantzig described his work as follows in his 1963 LP book.30 Linear Programming Figure 5.19 Four-coloring of a graph. Our purpose is systematically to review and classify problems that can be reduced to linear programs, some or all of whose variables are integer valued.

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Edmonds was coy with his explanation, noting only that it was a legitimate possibility that no good algorithm exists. Four years after this bet, Stephen Cook and Richard Karp developed their theory placing the question in the larger world of P vs. N P. The Complexity Classes Mathematicians like to keep things tidy, and in the case of complexity theory this has led to a focus on decision problems, that is, a focus on problems having yes or no answers. So, for example, does a graph have a Hamiltonian circuit? Yes or no. Or, given a set of cities, is there a tour of length less than 1,000 miles? Yes or no.7 Among decision problems, Richard Karp introduced the short notation P to denote those that have good algorithms.

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

The Association for Computing Machinery is a major society serving computing researchers and professionals, and Communications is the society’s main magazine devoted to articles of interest for that community. At first I tried to push the article onto another computer scientist, but eventually relented. As Moshe put it to me, “If physicists write popular articles (and books) about string theory, we should be able to explain what complexity theory has accomplished, I’d hope.” I wrote the article, aiming for the Communications audience, not just about the status of the P versus NP problem, which can be summarized as “still open,” but about how people deal with hard problems. “The Status of the P versus NP Problem” was published in the September 2009 issue and quickly became the most downloaded article in the Communications’ history.

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Every year dozens of these manuscripts are emailed to computer scientists, submitted to academic journals, and posted on the Internet. The most prestigious computer science journal receives a steady stream of papers claiming to resolve the P versus NP question and has a specific policy for those papers: The Journal of the ACM frequently receives submissions purporting to solve a long-standing open problem in complexity theory, such as the P/NP problem. Such submissions tax the voluntary editorial and peer-reviewing resources used by JACM, by requiring the review process to identify the errors in them. JACM remains open to the possibility of eventual resolution of P/NP and related questions, and continues to welcome submissions on the subject.

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JACM remains open to the possibility of eventual resolution of P/NP and related questions, and continues to welcome submissions on the subject. However, to mitigate the burden of repeated resubmissions of incremental corrections of errors identified during editorial review, JACM has adopted the following policy: No author may submit more than one paper on the P/NP or related long-standing questions in complexity theory in any 24 month period, except by invitation of the Editor-in-Chief. This applies to resubmissions of previously rejected manuscripts. Most attempts at solving P versus NP are unreadable or clearly wrong and are generally ignored by the community. Deolalikar’s paper went through a different process.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Tools of the Trade-Off Chapter 24 - You’ll Meet a Bad Fate If You Extrapolate Social Versus Security Nonstationarity and Historical P/Es Why the Past May Not Be Prologue Bounded Parameters Unpacking the (Mental) Baggage Chapter 25 - I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up Returns and Growth Death, Taxes, and Reversion to the Mean I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up Chapter 26 - Trench Cooperation The War Metaphor—Death or Life? Why a Date and a Marriage Are So Different Price and Quantity Chapter 27 - Great (Growth) Expectations Compounding and Confounding Reality Check The Bigger They Are, the Slower They Grow (or Don’t Grow) Refuse Refuge in Castles in the Air Part 4 - Science and Complexity Theory INTRODUCTION Chapter 28 - Diversify Your Mind Ant Brain A-Mazing Getting a Diversity Degree Creativity and Investing Chapter 29 - From Honey to Money Smart Ant Traveling Salesman? Follow the Ant . . . Delphic Decision Markets The Stock Market—the Ultimate Hive? Swarm Smarts Chapter 30 - Vox Populi The Accuracy of Crowds Needle in a Haystack Weighing the Ox with the Vox Estimating Printers with Populi And Now, For the Real World Chapter 31 - A Tail of Two Worlds Experience Versus Exposure Tell Tail What Fat Tails Mean for Investors Chapter 32 - Integrating the Outliers Bernoulli’s Challenge What’s Normal?

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Unlike a best-selling thriller, you can read More Than You Know from back to front just as easily as from front to back. But I recommend you simply go to the table of contents, find something that interests you, and jump in. While the essays cover a range of topics, I categorize them into four parts—investment philosophy, psychology of investing, innovation and competitive strategy, and science and complexity theory. Consider these compartments in a toolbox, each addressing a distinct facet of investing. That said, every essay is meant to stand by itself. This edition has updated tables and charts and new chapters in each part. Fresh topics include thoughts on management assessment, the role of intuition, applications of game theory, and the mechanisms behind the market’s mood swings.

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Furthermore, while there is nothing wrong with growth stocks, the indications are that it is very difficult to know which companies will exceed expectations and which will disappoint. Investors should continue to focus on investment ideas where the expected value is favorable—where the upside opportunity outstrips the downside risk. Part 4 Science and Complexity Theory INTRODUCTION One of my first calls after the major East Coast power blackout in August 2003 was to my friend Duncan Watts, then a Columbia University sociology professor. I peppered him with questions about the failure: what might have caused it, how it progressed, and by what means could we avoid future similar events.

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

From now on, when I refer to universality I shall mean it in this sense, unless otherwise stated. Just how efficiently can given aspects of reality be rendered? What computations, in other words, are practicable in a given time and under a given budget? This is the basic question of computational complexity theory which, as I have said, is the study of the resources that are required to perform given computational tasks. Complexity theory has not yet been sufficiently well integrated with physics to give many quantitative answers. However, {197} it has made a fair amount of headway in defining a useful, rough-and-ready distinction between tractable and intractable computational tasks.

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We could not avoid the latter question, and it is effectively a repetition of what we were trying to answer in the first place. Now we can rephrase Dr Johnson's criterion thus: If, according to the simplest explanation, an entity is complex and autonomous, then that entity is real. Computational complexity theory is the branch of computer science that is concerned with what resources (such as time, memory capacity or energy) are required to perform given classes {91} of computations. The complexity of a piece of information is defined in terms of the computational resources (such as the length of the program, the number of computational steps or the amount of memory) that a computer would need if it was to reproduce that piece of information.

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The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse. (Some readers may be familiar with the geometry of fractals; the notion of self-similarity defined here is much broader than the one used in that field.) {96} complexity theory The branch of computer science concerned with what resources (such as time, memory capacity or energy) are required to perform given classes of computations. SUMMARY Although solipsism and related doctrines are logically self-consistent, they can be comprehensively refuted simply by taking them seriously as explanations.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

That story begins in the late sixties in New York City, with a scientist named Evelyn Fox Keller. A Harvard Ph.D. in physics, Keller had written her dissertation on molecular biology, and she had spent some time exploring the nascent field of “nonequilibrium thermodynamics,” which in later years would come to be associated with complexity theory. By 1968, she was working as an associate at Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan, thinking about the application of mathematics to biological problems. Mathematics had played such a tremendous role in expanding our understanding of physics, Keller thought—so perhaps it might also be useful for understanding living systems.

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Weaver had played a leading role in the Natural Sciences division of the Rockefeller Foundation since 1932, and when he retired in the late fifties, he composed a long report for the foundation, looking back at the scientific progress that had been achieved over the preceding quarter century. The occasion suggested a reflective look backward, but the document that Weaver produced (based loosely on a paper he had written for American Scientist) was far more prescient, more forward-looking. In many respects, it deserves to be thought of as the founding text of complexity theory—the point at which the study of complex systems began to think of itself as a unified field. Drawing upon research in molecular biology, genetics, physics, computer science, and Shannon’s information theory, Weaver divided the last few centuries of scientific inquiry into three broad camps. First, the study of simple systems: two or three variable problems, such as the rotation of planets, or the connection between an electric current and its voltage and resistance.

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As our everyday life becomes increasingly populated by artificial emergence, we will find ourselves relying more and more on the logic of these systems—both in corporate America, where “bottom-up intelligence” has started to replace “quality management” as the mantra of the day, and in the radical, antiglobalization protest movements, who explicitly model their pacemakerless, distributed organizations after ant colonies and slime molds. Former vice president Al Gore is himself a devotee of complexity theory and can talk for hours about what the bottom-up paradigm could mean for reinventing government. Almost two centuries after Engels wrestled with the haunting of Manchester’s city streets, and fifty years after Turing puzzled over the mysteries of a flower’s bloom, the circle is finally complete.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

business climate, butterfly effect, complexity theory, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, impulse control, Lao Tzu, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, power law, systems thinking

In a sense, complexity was an extension of the thinking that gave rise to chaos theory; indeed, it was often referred to as existing at “the edge of chaos.” (There has also been strong objection to linking complexity and chaos and to using the term “complexity.”) Like chaos theory, complexity theory postulated “upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events—and yet with a deep law hidden beneath.” Complexity theory is a bold attempt to explain everything all at once, and so far it’s done a better job in some ways than either Einstein’s relativity theory or Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics did. The climbers on Mount Hood discovered the enormous consequences of the trivial-seeming event of pulling their protection.

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The closer you get, the more interesting detail you see, until at last you are looking at the tiniest of figures sculpted on its surface. Matter itself appears to be like that. Just when you think you’ve found the smallest piece, you find another even smaller one. The theory of self-organized criticality, sometimes called Complexity theory, was developed hard on the heels of chaos theory by some of the same people. It asked and suggested answers to questions as fundamental as: Where does order come from? How do you reconcile it with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything is heading toward more disorder? In a sense, complexity was an extension of the thinking that gave rise to chaos theory; indeed, it was often referred to as existing at “the edge of chaos.”

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Now under stress, he failed to take in new information: In his haste, he built his fire beneath a tree that was laden with snow. It was one of those nonlinear kickback systems that was tightly coupled and that magnified trouble when upset. The Sand Pile Effect. London described all this long before chaos or complexity theory had been developed. His story touches on the most important elements of surviving in a spare and systematic manner: Each bough was fully freighted. Each time he had pulled a twig [from the tree] he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree—an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

As a general rule, diffusion alone is easily cracked (although double transposition ciphers hold up better than many other pencil-and-paper systems). 11.2 Complexity Theory Complexity theory provides a methodology for analyzing the computational complexity of different cryptographic techniques and algorithms. It compares cryptographic algorithms and techniques and determines their security. Information theory tells us that all cryptographic algorithms (except one-time pads) can be broken. Complexity theory tells us whether they can be broken before the heat death of the universe. Previous Table of Contents Next Products | Contact Us | About Us | Privacy | Ad Info | Home Use of this site is subject to certain Terms & Conditions, Copyright © 1996-2000 EarthWeb Inc.

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7.6 Caveat Emptor Chapter 8—Key Management 8.1 Generating Keys 8.2 Nonlinear Keyspaces 8.3 Transferring Keys 8.4 Verifying Keys 8.5 Using Keys 8.6 Updating Keys 8.7 Storing Keys 8.8 Backup Keys 8.9 Compromised Keys 8.10 Lifetime of Keys 8.11 Destroying Keys 8.12 Public-Key Key Management Chapter 9—Algorithm Types and Modes 9.1 Electronic Codebook Mode 9.2 Block Replay 9.3 Cipher Block Chaining Mode 9.4 Stream Ciphers 9.5 Self-Synchronizing Stream Ciphers 9.6 Cipher-Feedback Mode 9.7 Synchronous Stream Ciphers 9.8 Output-Feedback Mode 9.9 Counter Mode 9.10 Other Block-Cipher Modes 9.11 Choosing a Cipher Mode 9.12 Interleaving 9.13 Block Ciphers versus Stream Ciphers Chapter 10—Using Algorithms 10.1 Choosing an Algorithm 10.2 Public-Key Cryptography versus Symmetric Cryptography 10.3 Encrypting Communications Channels 10.4 Encrypting Data for Storage 10.5 Hardware Encryption versus Software Encryption 10.6 Compression, Encoding, and Encryption 10.7 Detecting Encryption 10.8 Hiding Ciphertext in Ciphertext 10.9 Destroying Information Part III—Cryptographic Algorithms Chapter 11—Mathematical Background 11.1 Information Theory 11.2 Complexity Theory 11.3 Number Theory 11.4 Factoring 11.5 Prime Number Generation 11.6 Discrete Logarithms in a Finite Field Chapter 12—Data Encryption Standard (DES) 12.1 Background 12.2 Description of DES 12.3 Security of DES 12.4 Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis 12.5 The Real Design Criteria 12.6 DES Variants 12.7 How Secure Is DES Today?

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It is easy to imagine that 50 years in the future we will all sit around, reminiscing about the good old days when people used to think factoring was hard, cryptography was based on factoring, and companies actually made money from this stuff. It is easy to imagine that future developments in number theory will make factoring easier or that developments in complexity theory will make factoring trivial. There’s no reason to believe this will happen—and most people who know enough to have an opinion will tell you that it is unlikely—but there’s also no reason to believe it won’t. In any case, today’s dominant public-key encryption algorithms are based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers that are the product of two large primes.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

In 1995 Brad Hoyt, a senior project manager at Senco, a Cincinnati toolmaker, recalled a scenario-planning session with Stewart Brand: “He changed my whole life in one scenario planning session. He asked whether we’d heard about complexity theory. . . . Little did I know he’s on the board of the Santa Fe Institute.”36 Over the next year, Hoyt reported reading another dozen books on complexity and came to use complexity theory as a guide to “thinking about the housing industry and other ecosystems affecting Senco.” For executives like Hoyt, the systems-oriented rhetoric of complexity theory, buttressed by the cultural legitimacy of Stewart Brand, offered a compelling framework within which to understand the topsy-turvy economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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Early reviews included Poundstone, “Can You Trust Your Computer?”; Boisvert, “Weird Science”; Mitchell, “Mystifying the Net”; and Tetzeli, “Managing in a World Out of Control.” 63. Taylor, “Control in an Age of Chaos,” 65. 64. For critiques of Kelly’s cyberrevolutionism, see Terranova, “Digital Darwin”; Best and Kellner, “Kelly’s Complexity Theory”; Borsook, Cyberselfish. 65. As Walter Powell has pointed out, these forces included a flattening of corporate hierarchies, newly flexible employment structures for executives as well as laborers, globalization, and the integration of information technology into the firm. See Powell, “Capitalist Firm in the Twenty-First Century,” esp. 40 – 61. 66.

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Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: G. Braziller, 1968. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. “Kevin Kelly’s Complexity Theory: The Politics and Ideology of Self-Organizing Systems.” Organization and Environment 12, no. 2 (1999): 141– 62. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991. Bijker, Wiebe E. “The Social Construction of Bakelite: Toward a Theory of Invention.”

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

A guy can’t catch a break—or more accurately might be he can’t get someone else to catch his breaks. Somehow the timing ballet that feels like second nature in person seems consistently—here, and as a general rule—to break down over the phone. I do the best I can, but it feels, somehow, solitary— Computability Theory vs. Complexity Theory The first branch of computer science theory was what’s come to be known as “computability theory,” a field that concerns itself with theoretical models of computing machines and the theoretical limits of their power. It’s this branch of theory in which Turing made some of his greatest contributions: in the 1930s and ’40s, physical computing machines were so fledgling that it made sense to think idealistically about them and the purely theoretical extents and limits of their potential.

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The two operations are both perfectly computable, but the second happens to be exponentially slower—making it intractable. This is what makes online security, and online commerce, possible. The next generation of computer theorists after Turing, in the 1960s and ’70s, began to develop a branch of the discipline, called complexity theory, that took such time-and-space constraints into account. As computer theorist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts explains, this more “modern” theory deals not only “with the ultimate power of a machine, but also with its expressive power under constraints on resources, such as time and space.”

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But note that the idealized form of language which Chomsky makes his object of study explicitly ignores “such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations … [and] actual performance.” In other words, Chomsky’s theory of language is the computability theory of Turing’s era, not the complexity theory that followed. Very similarly idealized, as it happens, are chatbots’ models of language. Yet it turns out—just as it did in computer science—that there’s a tremendous amount happening in the gap between the “ideal” process and the “actual performance.” As a human confederate, I planned to make as much of this gap as possible.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Stuart Kauffman, one of the movement’s leaders, suggested that feats like self-organization, order, stability, and coherence may be an “innate property of some complex systems.” Evolution, he suggests, may be a “marriage of selection and self-organization.” Complexity theory raises interesting issues. Natural selection presupposes that a replicator arose somehow, and complexity theory might help explain the “somehow.” Complexity theory might also pitch in to explain other assumptions. Each body has to hang together long enough to function rather than fly apart or melt into a puddle. And for evolution to happen at all, mutations have to change a body enough to make a difference in its functioning but not so much as to bring it to a chaotic crash.

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“Punctuated equilibria” are not the same as macromutations: Dawkins, 1986; Gould, 1987, p. 234. 160 “Adaptive mutation”: Cairns, Overbaugh, & Miller, 1988; Shapiro, 1995. Problems with adaptive mutation: Lenski & Mittler, 1993; Lenski & Sniegowski; Shapiro, 1995. 160 Complexity theory: Kauffman, 1991; Gell-Mann, 1994. 161 Take a hike, Darwin: James Barham, New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1995; also Davies, 1995. 161 Limitations of complexity theory: Maynard Smith, 1995; Horgan, 1995b; Dennett, 1995. 162 Evidence for natural selection: Dawkins, 1986, 1995; Berra, 1990; Kitcher, 1982; Endler, 1986; Weiner, 1994. 163 Ascent of man: Bronowski, 1973, pp. 417–421. 164 Simulated evolving eye: Nilsson & Pelger, 1994; described in Dawkins, 1995. 165 Darwin-hating academics: Dawkins, 1982; Pinker & Bloom, 1990 (see commentaries and reply); Dennett, 1995. 165 Straw adaptationist: Lewontin, 1979. 166 Snagged seminal ducts: Williams, 1992. 166 Adaptationist advances: Mayr, 1983, p. 328. 167 Animal engineering excellence: Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Dawkins, 1982, 1986; Williams, 1992; Griffin, 1974; Tributsch, 1982; French, 1994; Dennett, 1995; Cain, 1964. 168 The splendid camel: French, 1994, p. 239. 168 Howlers: Author’s reply in Pinker & Bloom, 1990.

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If there are abstract principles that govern whether a web of interacting parts (molecules, genes, cells) has such properties, natural selection would have to work within those principles, just as it works within other constraints of physics and mathematics like the Pythagorean theorem and the law of gravitation. But many readers have gone much further and conclude that natural selection is now trivial or obsolete, or at best of unknown importance. (Incidentally, the pioneers of complexity theory themselves, such as Kauffman and Murray Gell-Mann, are appalled by that extrapolation.) This letter to the New York Times Book Review is a typical example: Thanks to recent advances in nonlinear dynamics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics and other disciplines at the boundary between biology and physics, there is every reason to believe that the origin and evolution of life will eventually be placed on a firm scientific footing.

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

Every now and then something happens, apparently by chance, that sparks off a cascade of connections and insights I could never have anticipated. It is a glorious feeling. The first of these was when I met Gary Hirsch, in Portland, Oregon. We met to talk about his art, but he happened to make a few passing comments about improv. Odd though it may seem, in an instant I connected what he was saying to complexity theory. I had been studying the science of complexity and adaptive systems for years, because I felt it held great promise for changing the way we think about organisations and creativity. The trouble was I couldn’t explain it for toffee. Improv, by contrast, was something I could use. A business, a great friendship and everything else I have written about followed.

…

50–2 listening intently 55–6 one-way/two-way 43–4 presentations 39, 44–58 trust the driver 48 what is expected of the audience; what are they going to have to do? 49 what is the audience going to get as a result of listening? 50 ‘whites of the eyes’ 46 who am I (the speaker) beyond labels? 48–9 your own baggage (shadow story) and 42 complexity theory 118 ‘connective tissue’ 99 control: changing attitudes towards 116–17 companies which give employees 121–3 exerting influence without 31 imposing in areas where it isn’t appropriate 9, 11 as neither sensible or desirable 30 new ideas and 79§ paying attention to what you can 12, 52, 113–14 creativity 65–88 all creativity is co-creativity 85–6 and solving future world problems 66 creative doing, not creative thinking 72–6 creative process 67 ‘creativity is the new literacy’ 85 embracing constraint and 80–6 Game: Object Taps 87–8 importance of 66, 85–6 importance of play 69–72 ‘last letter, first letter’ 80, 81 popular image of 66–8 putting flow first 77–80 sets humans apart 85 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 66 ‘Dance Your Ph.D’ (TED talk) 76 discomfort, accepting 10, 94, 96 eatbigfish 20, 138 Edison, Thomas 102 education 30, 114 either/or, seeing things as 114 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 17, 18 ‘Facebook effect, the’ 23 ‘fit and well’ 35, 102 Fleming, Alexander 70 flexibility 90–1, 107, 121 future-proof 30, 101 games, killer 12–13, 27–8, 32, 33–8, 59–64, 78, 79, 81–2, 87–8, 99, 108–11, 112, 117, 118, 120, 125–37, 138 see also under individual game name General Motors 103 Gore Associates 121 Heifetz, Professor Ronald 107 Hirsch, Gary 27, 38, 45–6, 49, 61, 71, 88, 111, 118 Hollywood 67, 89, 93–4 Honda 122–3 ideas, generating new 10, 12, 70, 87, 88, 113 acting first 72–6 constraint and 80–6 creating a flow of 31 finding in areas your competitors don’t notice 20, 21, 22–5 flow and 77–80 games and see games in spite of how things are organised, not because of them 116 leaders and see leadership new ideas as combinations of old ones, re-expressed 14 play and 69–72 practice and 94, 95, 96 re-designing organisations and 121 using other people’s 98–100 IDEO 75 IKEA 28, 102–3, 111 image bank 85 improv in action 112–24 analysis, nature of 113–15 building into the design of an organization 119–23 education and 114 either/or ‘yes, and...’ 114 enthusiasm for taking things to pieces and 115–16 journeys and 115 order without control 113, 116–17 planning and 114–15 improv theatre 31, 112, 119 improvisation, nature of 8–13 incorporations (game) 135–7 intuition/hunch 30, 100, 101, 115, 123 journeys, improv and 115 Kamprad, Ingvar 28, 102–3 Keating, David 42–3 Kelleher, Herb 85 knee-jerk conclusions/reaction, resisting 18, 23–4 Kranz, Gene 100 leadership 89–111 accepting discomfort and 94, 95 distributed 91–2 ‘fit and well’ 102 flexibility and 107 fluid approach to 90–1 focus on your own experience 93 Game: Swedish Story 108–11 intuition/hunch and 100, 101, 123 level of trust in 99 looking for offers 101–3 mistakes and 93–4, 95, 102–3 new ideas and 98–9 no single leader 89–92 paying attention to others and 97–8, 99–100 practice and 93, 94–6 presence and 96–7 status and 104–6 value ‘connective tissue’ 99 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 listening 20, 21, 29, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 55–6, 60, 62, 81, 96–8, 107 Mandela, Nelson 97 Michelangelo 79 mistakes 26, 27, 54, 93–4, 95, 101, 102–3, 105, 113, 114–15, 123, 127 Morgan, Adam 20, 42, 51 Morning Star 121–2 Nike 48 ‘no’, saying 28, 42, 51, 54 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Object Taps (game) 87–8 offer/offers: blocking 37, 40–2, 54, 56–7, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 76, 78–80, 103, 120 errors and mistakes as 26–8, 103 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 16, 17, 18, 26, 102–3 failure and breakdowns as 28–9 seeing objections as 56–7, 101–3 On Your Feet 38, 49, 71, 82, 84, 119, 122 One to Twenty (game) 125, 131–4 Pascale, Richard 122–3 paying attention 19, 22, 24, 96–8, 99–100 Pert, Candace 22 planning 9, 51–2, 62, 63, 81, 113, 114–15 practice, improvisational 12, 13, 14–31 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 96, 119 presentations 39, 44–58 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Robinson, Sir Ken 85, 86 Rodriguez, Robert 28 Roshi, Suzuki 27 Rosling, Hans 53 SCRUM 119 Semco 121 senses 18–21, 76, 96 shadow story 24–5, 42, 56 Sloan, Alfred 103 software engineers 119–20 Southwest Airlines 85 status 49, 104–6, 107 storyteller improv games 27–8, 99, 108–11 Swedish Story (game) 108–11 taking things to pieces, enthusiasm for 8, 18, 29, 30, 113, 115–16 TED talks 53, 76 3M 121 Toyota Production System 91 Twain, Mark 54 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 35, 96, 119 Wake Wood (film) 42–3 weak signals 99–100 ‘whites of the eyes’ 46 ‘Yes, and’ (game) 59–64, 78 ‘yes, and...’, seeing things as 11, 42, 98, 114, 120 Published by The Do Book Company 2013 Works in Progress Publishing Ltd www.thedobook.co Text copyright © Robert Poynton 2013 Illustrations copyright © Andy Smith 2012 The right of Robert Poynton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The mere sight of these books reminds me of a lunch with a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, the kind of thing to which one should never be subjected more than once per lifetime. So I will dispatch the topic of torts in a few lines. As we intimated in the first paragraphs of the introduction, some nonsoporific topics (pagan theology, religious practices, complexity theory, ancient and medieval history, and, of course, probability and risk taking) match this author’s naturalistic filter. Simply: if you can’t put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else. Talking about soul in the game, I had to overcome some shame as follows. In the Paris episode of Hammurabi at the Louvre, when I stood in front of the imposing basalt stele (in the room with Koreans with selfie sticks), I felt uneasy not being able to read the stuff and having to rely on experts.

…

And, as the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, even the investment bank Goldman Sachs, known for its aggressive cupidity, acts like a communist community from within, thanks to the partnership system of governance. So we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply. It is unfortunate, but the general kills the particular. The question we will reexamine later, after deeper discussion of complexity theory, is whether it is possible to be both ethical and universalist. In theory, yes, but, sadly, not in practice. For whenever the “we” becomes too large a club, things degrade, and each one starts fighting for his own interest. The abstract is way too abstract for us. This is the main reason I advocate political systems that start with the municipality, and work their way up (ironically, as in Switzerland, those “Swiss”), rather than the reverse, which has failed with larger states.

…

and Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting. THE STATIC AND THE DYNAMIC Visibly, a problem with economists (particularly those who never took risk) is that they have mental difficulties with things that move and are unable to consider that things that move have different attributes from things that don’t. That’s the reason complexity theory and fat tails (which we will explain a few pages down) are foreign to most of them; they also have (severe) difficulties with the mathematical and conceptual intuitions required for deeper probability theory. Blindness to ergodicity, which we will begin to define a few paragraphs down, is indeed in my opinion the best marker separating a genuine scholar who understands something about the world from an academic hack who partakes of ritualistic paper writing.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

.), Code (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2005) 30 Alessandro Nuvolari, ‘Open Source Software Development: Some Historical Perspectives’, Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies Working Paper 03.01 (2003); Koen Frenken and Alessandro Nuvolari, ‘The Early Development of the Steam Engine: An Evolutionary Interpretation Using Complexity Theory’, Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies Working Paper 03.15 (2003) Chapter 3 1 Andrew Brown, In the Beginning Was the Worm (Pocket Books, 2003) 2 Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly, 2001) 3 Doc Searls, ‘Making a New World’, in Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper and Mark Stone (Eds), Open Sources 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2006) 4 Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Penguin, 2002) 5 Like many radical innovations Linux is not as revolutionary as it first seems.

…

Available from http:// www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/content/pubs/wps/ CWP-2005–02-Blogging-in-the-Knowledge-Society-MB.pdf Bragg, Melvyn, The Routes of English (BBC Factual and Learning, 2000) Bragg, Melvyn, The Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2003) Brown, Andrew, In the Beginning Was the Worm (Pocket Books, 2003) Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 2000) Bush, Vannevar, ‘As We May Think’, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. Available from http://www.theatlantic.com/ doc/194507/bush Byrne, David, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences (Routledge, 1998) Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996) Castells, Manuel, and Pekka Himanen, The Information Society and the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2002) Chesbrough, Henry, Open Innovation (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 2003) Chesbrough, Henry, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West (Eds), Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford University Press, 2006) Christensen, Clayton M., The Innovator’s Dilemma (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 1997) Clippinger III, John H.

…

Lakhani (Eds), Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) Ferris, Timothy, Seeing in the Dark (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002) Flichy, Patrice, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007) Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002) Florida, Richard, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperBusiness, 2005) Frayn, Michael, Copenhagen (Methuen, 2003) Frenken, Koen, and Alessandro Nuvolari, ‘The Early Development of the Steam Engine: An Evolutionary Interpretation Using Complexity Theory’, Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies Working Paper 03.15 (2003) Garud, Raghu, Arun Kumaraswamy and Richard N. Langlois (Eds), Managing in the Modular Age (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003) Gawer, Annabelle, and Micheal A. Cusumano, Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 2002) Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer (Ed.), Code (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2005) Gillmor, Dan, We the Media (Farnham: O’Reilly, 2004) Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point (Little, Brown, 2000) Granstrand, Ove (Ed.), Economics of Technology (Amsterdam/London: North-Holland, 1994) Gratton, Lynda, The Democratic Enterprise (Harlow: Pearson, 2004) Gray, Matthew, ‘Web Growth Summary’, www.mit.edu.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

We've built some extremely complex systems, such as the global marketplace, that already work on these letting-go principles, and we've built some powerful tools to help us master these principles. We now have computers capable of tracking billions of functions at a time, and we have intellectual and mathematical models, like complexity theory, to carry the insights of nature into our realm. Complexity theory was born in the attempt to track the complex gyrations of the mushroom clouds of atomic explosions, where billions of independent variables all come together. But since the 1980s, complexity theory has evolved to try to apply to human systems like market behavior and global economics. Much of the early work was done in more offbeat places like the Santa Fe Institute, but now the theory has gone mainstream—and it looks as if its influence will only grow.

…

See microprocessors Connections, See Networks Christian Democratic coalition, 94, Control vs. complexity, 263-265 113 Copernicus, 212 Chrysler, 60, 175 Corporations, 2, 42-45, 121 Citibank, 262 Climate change Corruption, 114-115, 126 COX2, 190 developing vs. developed worlds, 157-159 Crime, 285-286 floods, 150 Culture preservation, 234 forest fires, 150-151 Cuyahoga River, 156 global warming, 10, 152-154 Cyberspace libraries, 89 Hurricane Andrew, 149,150 Cystic fibrosis, 198 Hurricane Mitch, 150 overview, 148-154 Daimler-Benz, 60,171, 174 pollution in China, 158-159 D'Alema, Massimo, 94 regional weather problems, 151 Dark matter, 213 tornadoes, 151 Databases, 215-216 United Nation's Conference on Decentralization Climate Change, 157 personal computers and, 19, 26 Clinton, President Bill, 41, 52, 76, ragtag computer techies fostering, 92, 121 28-30 Cloning, 195-199 of telecommunications, 22,178 Club of Rome, 162 of utilities industry, 178-181 Coal, 158-159 Defense Advanced Research Projects Coca Cola, 112 Agency (DARPA), 50 Code of honor, 28-30 Delphi Energy & Engine Cold fusion, 219-220 Management Systems, 176 Cold War, 48, 49, 134-135, 22 Deming, W, Edwards, 119 Colorado, 267 Democracy Communism, 40, 116, 262 free markets and, 111-112, 115 Compassionate conservatism, 274 growth of middle class and, 235 Complexity theory, 263-265 media freedom in, 114 Computers rule of twos in, 112-114 economic decentralization and, in Singapore, 269 19, 26, 28-30 transparency rule, 114-115 impact of, 189-190 women in, 250 326 Democratic Party, 76-77 Democrats of the Left, 92 Deng, Xiaoping, 48, 116 Depression, 51-52 Deregulation of European businesses, 93 of U.S. businesses, 41 of utilities industry, 178,180-181 in Washington consensus, 96 Detroit Edison, 178 Digital technologies, 25-26 Diversity, 248, 273 DNA, 188-189, 197-198 Dolly, 195 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 47, 92 Downsizing, 42, 93 Drake, Frank, 220 Drake's equation, 220 Drexler, Eric, 203-204, 208 Dust Bowl, 149 Earth Day, 160 Earth Summit, 157 East vs.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

But putting that aside, a larger problem is that, while necessary for life, stars could readily exist in universes having a much broader set of parameters than those which life requires. For example, life as we know it requires the existence of carbon, with all its peculiar characteristics that enable complex organic chemistry. Stars have no such requirement. So, let me advance a hypothesis of my own, which is based on complexity theory. According to such theory, as set forth in other contexts by thinkers like Santa Fe Institute philosopher Stuart Kauffmann, order arises spontaneously in systems when A causes B and B causes A (or A causes B which causes C which causes D which causes A).20 The free market works like this. Farmers grow crops that other people want to buy.

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See carbon dioxide colonization of asteroids, 131–35, 142–43 chemistry for space settlers of, 150 leading to new types of societies, 143–45 list of what needs to be done, 327–34 of Mars, plate 7, 101–23 chemistry for space settlers of, 146–50 commercial benefits of, 114–17 “Dragon Direct” plan, 108 habitation module, plate 5 leading to a human asteroid mission, 131–32 as new frontier for humanity, 277–79, 316 as a public-private enterprise, 328 raising families on Mars, plate 8 use of greenhouses, 101, 113, 115, 278 of the moon, 69–99 achieving long-range mobility on, 80–81 chemistry for space settlers of, 145–46 energy sources, 82–91 phases of Moon Direct program, 75 as a public-private enterprise, 317 range and lunar accessibility of an LEV, 81 sending solar energy back to earth, 82–83 use of microwaves to extract water vapor, 79 need for low cost spaceflight, 25–26 Noah's Ark Eggs (seed spaceships), 209–14 of outer solar system Jovian system, 166–70 obstacles to settling, 173–74 Saturn system, 160–65, 173 reasons for pursuing for the challenges, 271–86 for the future we can create, 315–25 to gain more freedom, 301–25 for the knowledge gained, 249–69 for survival of humanity, 287–99 terraforming other worlds, 215–45 time needed for interstellar civilizations to spread, 266–67 vision of for the year 2069, 317 vision of for the year 3000, 319–24 Columbus, Christopher, 174, 182, 208, 316, 328 comets, 129, 130, 151, 170, 171, 195–96 commercial benefits of spaceflight, 66–68 on asteroids, 136–40 commercial energy system in space, 57–60 communications and data satellites, 51–56 CubeSat revolution, 54–56 fast global travel on Earth, 40–43 on Mars, 114–17 orbital industries, 48–50 orbital research labs, 47–48, 50 of outer solar system, 161–62 commercial development of Titan, 162–65 Jovian system, 166–70 in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, 171–72 space business parks, 50–51 space tourism, 45–47 space triangle trade (Earth-Mars-asteroids), 140–42 See also mining Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), 330–31 Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), 176–77 communications and data satellites, 23, 52–56, 63, 64, 65, 277 CubeSat revolution, 54–56 potential impact of on World War II, 61–62 “Compact Fusion Reactor” (CFR) project, 180 complexity theory applied to the universe, 262–63 computers, early, 233–34 constants, role of in physics, 260–61 Coons, Steve, 148 Coppi, Bruno, 176–77 Cosmic Microwave Background Surveyor, 251 cosmic rays, 104, 132, 135, 167, 192, 253, 259, 339 cost-plus contracting, 22–24, 330–31 COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services), 330–31 Crèvecoeur, Jean de, 274 cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen, 102, 339–40 CT Fusion, 180 CubeSat revolution, 54–56 Curiosity rover (NASA), 13, 106 Customs and Border Protection (US), 138 Cygnus (constellation), 240 D.

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., 152 Toutatis (near-Earth object), 129 Transcontinental Railroad, 97, 97 Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS telescope), 244, 251 “Translife” mission, 31 translunar injection orbit (TLI), 107, 109, 110, 111 Trans-Mars injection (TMI), 77, 344 transorbital railroad, 93–97 Tri-Alpha Energy (TAE), 177–78, 178 Triton (moon of Neptune), 152, 237 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 316 Tumlinson, Rick, 138, 332 Turner, Frederick Jackson on importance of having a frontier to conquer, 272–73 Twigg, Robert, 54 two-stage rocket systems, 39–45 payloads for one and two stage reusable rockets, 42 types of civilization. See civilizations, types of Ulam, Stanislaw, 186 United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin-Boeing), 35 comparison of space launch systems, 36 universe, why it is an ultimate mystery, 260 complexity theory, 262–63 universes born within black holes, 262 University of Rochester/Sandia Lab project, 180 Uranus, 125, 181, 200, 239 discoveries of, 152 exploration spacecraft to, 153 moons of, 152 solar system energy resources of, 159 statistics on getting to and back from, 162 Van Allen, James, 166 Vancouver Sun (newspaper), 228–29 vapor pressure, 344 Vector Launch, 12, 37–38 Vector-H microsatellite launcher, 36 Vector-R microsatellite launcher, 36, 37 Vega (star), 240, 244 Velcro as a space-program spin-off, 284 Venrock, 177 Venus IKAROS solar sail spacecraft flying to, 197 NASA and Soviet probes reaching, 220 terraforming of, 220–23 water on, 221–22 “young Venus,” 222, 223 Verne, Jules, 318 Vesta (asteroid), 125, 130 Viking mission (NASA), 119, 153 Virgin Group, 29, 53 Virgin Galactic, 12, 29–30, 38, 42, 43 virtual reality allowing visits to space, 98–99 von Braun, Wernher, 296, 332 Von Neumann, John, 231 Voyager missions (NASA), 154, 167, 168, 181, 183, 184 Voyager 1, 152–53 Voyager 2, 153 wars belief in inevitability of, 305–309, 309 use of space power to deter, 60–66 War with the Newts, The (Čapek), 212 water on asteroids, 130, 131, 140, 142–43, 294, 297 on Jupiter's moons, plate 10, 153–54, 167 Kepler mission finding, 242 in Kuiper Belt, 170, 171 on Mars, 14, 101, 102–103, 105–106, 109, 113–15, 117, 118, 120, 146–49, 218, 222, 297 on the moon, 13, 55, 69, 70, 73, 75–76, 79, 79, 81, 91–92, 145–46 nuclear salt-water rocket, 187–88, 187 in Oort cloud, 171 reverse water-gas shift reaction, 147–48, 149 on Saturn's moons, 155–56, 157, 163, 164, 165 use of in fusion, 142–43 on Venus, 221–22 water vapor, 13 on Mars, 117, 218 on the moon, 79, 79 on Venus, 222 Webb, Walter Prescott, 271 Webb space telescope, 201, 251 Wellcome Trust, 177 WFIRST (WideField InfraRed Space Telescope), 251 Whitmire, Daniel, 202 Whyte, Dennis, 177 WideField InfraRed Space Telescope (WFIRST), 251 Williams, John, 148 WorldVu (aka OneWeb), 53 World War II, 64–65 impact present technology could have had on, 61–62 lead-up to, 305–309 Wyler, Greg, 53 XPRIZE Foundation, 29 Young, Larry, 133 zero-gravity.

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

In 1963 Thomas Sowell wrote a long paper that explained Malthus’s supposed position in torturous detail. But one can understand Malthus in roughly the following way. He disagreed with Say, arguing that his theories were “utterly unfounded”. He disagreed with Ricardo, who had also come up with a complex theory explaining why depressions were not possible. Malthus did not have Ricardo’s gift for abstract theorising–if you can call it a “gift”–but it was obvious to him that the economy was not self-correcting. He just looked out the window. According to Keynes, Malthus explained the “formidable” weakness of the economy as a problem of “the insufficiency of effective demand”.

…

We have what you could call the “pamphleteer Marx”, who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with his sidekick, Friedrich Engels, in 1848, and who delivered rousing speeches to left-wing groups across Europe. Then we have what you can call the “British Library Marx”, a man who spent hours a day by himself, critiquing the works of political economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith. The “British Library Marx” came up with complex theories about how capitalism had evolved, and where it was going next. Understanding Marx’s thought is especially difficult because he changed his mind over the course of his life. Ideas that are raised in early books do not make it into later ones. Some philosophers delineate between a “young”, optimistic Marx and an “old”, pessimistic Marx.

…

The classical political economists tried to cram everything they knew into a beautiful, overarching theory that would, in time, benefit from formal mathematical analysis. Marshall, despite being the best mathematician in this book, steered economics back towards its empiricist roots. Bagehot had remarked in 1876 that political economy “lies rather dead in the public mind”. People were fed up with complex theories that treated humans like automatons and which suggested that a sustained improvement in living standards was impossible. Marshall came along and offered a more positive story. Economists could, he said, help to effect positive social change. They just had to get their hands dirty. “[O]nce Marshall had become the leading British economist”, says Jacob Viner, it was no longer “a common charge against economics that… all that it asked of men ‘is that they should harden their hearts’… the question of whether humane men could be devotees of the dismal science had ceased to be a live one”.

Quantum Computing for Everyone by Chris Bernhardt

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, discrete time, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, P = NP, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, selection bias, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

We also prove some amazing results concerning superdense coding, quantum teleportation, cloning, and error correction. Chapter 8. This is probably the most challenging chapter. In it we look at some quantum algorithms and show how quickly they can compute an answer compared to classical algorithms. To talk about the speed of algorithms we need to introduce various ideas from complexity theory. Once we have defined something called query complexity, we study three quantum algorithms and show that they are faster with respect to this type of complexity than their classical counterparts. Quantum algorithms exploit the underlying structure of the problem that is being solved. It is much more than just the idea of quantum parallelism—putting the input into a superposition of all possible states.

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The other question that we need to address is this: How many times do we need to run the quantum circuit? As we pointed out, in the worst-case scenario, we can keep running our qubits through the circuit and never get any useful information. However, this is extremely unlikely. We examine this idea in more detail in the next section. Complexity Classes In complexity theory, the main classification is between problems that take polynomial time to solve and those that need more than polynomial time. Polynomial time algorithms are regarded as being practical even for very large values of n, but non-polynomial time algorithms are regarded as being infeasible for large n.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

Boyle doesn’t identify who the ‘true philosophers’ were, but in another passage refers ‘to the generally owned rule about hypotheses, that “entia non sunt multiplicanda absque necessitate”’.20 You don’t need to understand Latin to recognise the edge of Occam’s razor. All of Boyle’s remaining criteria, in one way or another, look for simple solutions. His seventh principle states that ‘To frame a Hypothesis, one must see First, that it clearly Intelligible be.’ Comprehensible theories tend to be simple; and, conversely, errors in complex theories, such as alchemy, usually become apparent when they are explained in the simplest possible terms. Descartes had made a similar point, insisting that ‘a conception which springs from the light of reason alone; it is more certain than deduction itself, in that it is simpler.21 Boyle’s eighth principle comes with its own parsimonious razor.

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Boyle, like Occam, insisted that scientists should select the simplest theories that fit their data. Boyle’s simplicity criterion was absorbed into the science promoted by the Royal Society and from there incorporated into the modern scientific method. It remains with us today, though its origin is seldom acknowledged or even realised. Ask any scientist whether they would support a complex theory that accounts for their data when a simple one does the job just as well. They may pause for a moment to think, and ask you additional questions, such as whether you mean all the data; but, so long as you reply, ‘Yes, all the available data’, then they will concede that they always opt for the simplest explanation that accounts for all of the data.

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As the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann put it, Planck followed ‘the logic, an Occam’s Razor logic, to the quantum hypothesis’.2 Of course, Max Planck cited neither William of Occam nor his razor in his revolutionary paper. He did not need to. By this time, all scientists took their preference for simple solutions for granted despite the fact that most would have been hard-pressed to justify it. Opting for a complex theory when a simpler one will do the job is, to any modern scientist, simply unscientific. Yet, as we have discovered, this steadfast preference for simplicity within science is a relatively recent innovation and owes everything to William of Occam who blew away the dusty cobwebs of medieval doctrine to provide space for a leaner and sharper science.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

It is this second sort—an uncountable infinity—that Murphy says describes the full set of prices needed to engage in planning. Essentially, Cockshott, Cottrell, Marciszewski, Murphy and a handful of others had revived the long-dormant calculation debate but recast it as a problem for the field of computational complexity theory, a branch of theoretical computer science that seeks to classify the inherent difficulty of different sorts of problems, and the resources needed to solve them. In the same way that neuroscientists have in recent decades stolen debates over the theory of mind away from philosophers, complexity theorists and computer scientists are stealing this debate away from economists and political scientists.

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However, over the last two generations, a great many progressive thinkers (though certainly not all) have come from the academy, in particular from the humanities—history, law, philosophy, literature—and from the social sciences—sociology, anthropology, economics, political science. Any future Left that takes the question of planning seriously will also have to depend heavily upon talents from computer science, operations research, combinatorics and graph theory, complexity theory, information theory and allied fields. And the transformation needed if it is to be democratic, rather than technocratic, will have to be led by, not on behalf of, workers at Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and other transnationals. Humans have long relied on planning, from the simple distribution carried out by the first settled civilizations, to the complex calculations that undergird today’s corporate behemoths, to those rare instances, like war or disaster, when the rules of today’s complex economy are temporarily suspended and planning takes over on the grandest scales.

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

In fact, there is a million dollar prize offered by Clay Mathematics Institute for the first person to give a proof of whether or not P is the same set as NP, some people conjecture that the set of problems that quantum computers can solve in polynomial time contains all of P and also some problems not in P, but not all of NP. But this is a conjecture. The proof would have to show that P is not equal to NP. This area of the theory of computation dealing with the amount of time and storage needed to do computations based on the size of the input is known as complexity theory. These questions are not just of theoretical interest, but have important practical applications. Much of internet commerce requires secure ways of encrypting information. However, many of the current methods of encryption are based on methods that are conjectured, but not proven, to be exponentially difficult to crack.

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., 124 Brown, Gordon, 161 Busy beaver function, 119 Canonical systems, 62 Cantor, Georg, 12, 108, 111, 123 Cantor’s Theorem, 132 CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), 158 Cardinality, 124 computations, 140 real numbers, 136 Cells, 25, 43 Cellular automata, 82 Central Limit Theorem, 1 Central processing unit, 98 Chinese Room Argument, 158 Church, Alonzo, 16, 24, 62, 63, 71, 148 Church-Turing thesis, 61–62 Clay Mathematics Institute, 66 Code breaking, 147, 150, 153, 160 Collatz function, 80–81 Colossus, 153 Compiler, 98, 105, 156 Complement of a language, 33, 40 Complexity theory, 66 Computable function, 59, 120 Computable numbers, 141 Computational power, 12, 25, 63, 71, 101 Computing Machine Laboratory, 147, 153, 160 Concatenation, 38, 91 Configurations, 43, 46 Continuum hypothesis, 22, 139 Control unit, 98 Conway, John, 164 Cook, Matthew, 86, 103 Copeland, Jack, 160, 163 Correspondence problem.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

The postmodern assumption of a "constructed reality" goes nicely with the idea of con­ sciousness as a kind of artificial theater and not a direct apprehension of things in themselves. Semiotics and struc­ turalism both have roots in Levi-Strauss's research i nto uni­ versal mythology, which obviously has deep connections to the proj ect of evolutionary psychology. And De Landa has a mply demonstrated the fundamental alli ance between Deleuzian philosophy and complexity theory, an alliance that goes back to Deleuze's interest in the work of Nobel laureate (and founding co mplexity theori st) IIya Prigogine. And so i n climbing the l adder of consilience , we can't af­ ford to draw an arbitrary line at the sciences; too many pro­ ductive connections exist. If McLuhan is right and media are extensions of our central nervous system, then we need a theory of the central nervous system as much as we need a theory of medi a ; if the network technology we ' re creating N O T E S O N F U RT H E R R E A D I N G 2 09 takes the form of self-organizing systems, then we need the tools of complexity theory to make sense of those networks.

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If McLuhan is right and media are extensions of our central nervous system, then we need a theory of the central nervous system as much as we need a theory of medi a ; if the network technology we ' re creating N O T E S O N F U RT H E R R E A D I N G 2 09 takes the form of self-organizing systems, then we need the tools of complexity theory to make sense of those networks. But neither should we grant the sciences a de facto su­ premacy over the other levels in the interpretative model. In this book 's argument, neuroscience arrives at several key points to explain the interaction between media and mind, but it's certainly not correct to describe my argu ment as ul­ ti mately reducing everything down to the firing of neurons.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Thus he suggested that the world was made up of systems, groups of linked individuals who had a powerful impact on each other. The art of Complexity Theory, therefore, was to work out the original forms of the system and to calculate the particular dynamic that transformed them. Weaver’s work set out the template of the science of self-organised systems; in time, the ideas opened new avenues of enquiry in biology, technology, physics, cybernetics and chemistry. His fascination with systems became the language expressed in E. O. Wilson’s groundbreaking study of anthills and the development of his socio-biological ideas of the super-organism. Complexity Theory became central to the development of the packet-switch method that underpins the internet.

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It also shows that a larger animal is likely to live longer than a small one: for while most animals die at between 1–2 billion heartbeats, a chicken heart beats 300 times a minute, an elephant’s only 30 times. Kleiber found a direct relationship between size and life expectation. In his research West refined Kleiber’s original laws and attempted to find out why they worked. In 2005 West was named president of the Santa Fe Institute, the mecca of study in Complexity Theory, set up in the 1980s to explore the connections between physics, mathematics, computation and evolutionary biology (the institute is so multidisciplinary that even the novelist Cormac McCarthy has a desk in the facility). There, West turned his focus on the nature of cities, perhaps the greatest self-organising organism of all; the results would gain him the honour of being named one of Time magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

In the Pareto distribution, an important dynamic is that the effect (having more followers) is the cause of still more of the effect (having still more followers), which causes yet more effect, and so on. Since Pareto’s time, many scholars have studied the dynamics and implications of Pareto distributions, including those who work in complexity theory, who note that Gaussian distributions aren’t the only ones that appear in nature. Pareto distributions do as well. A favorite example for complexity theorists is the collapsing sand pile. Imagine on the above Pareto graph, the number of grains of sand dropped on a pile is measured on the vertical axis and the effect of each sand grain on the horizontal axis.

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., 30 business adaptation in, 129–130 proxies in, 49–53 business executives, 113 agenda for, 115–135 backgrounds of, 120–121 reductionism and, 121–122 business models, 27–29 business schools, 32, 174–176, 180 business siloes, 32, 122 business strategy, 175–176 butterfly effect, 81 buycotts, 189, 192 buying groups, 192 buy recommendations, 112–113 cable TV, 130, 131 Canada antitrust policies in, 55 financial system of, 138–142, 151 metaphor for, 26 voter registration in, 205–206 capital efficiency, 97–99 capitalism, 4, 12 See also democratic capitalism discontent with, 12–13 survival of, 210 capital markets, 50, 55, 85, 86, 99, 109–110, 112, 129, 155 capital-markets policy, 55 Cargill, 133 cash flows, 97–98 central limit theorem, 35, 60 certainty, teaching, 170–173, 181, 185 Chambers, John, 51–52 chaos theory, 81 Chavez, Cesar, 192 Chicago Board of Trade, 64, 90 chief executive officers (CEOs), 64, 86–88, 121, 155 See also business executives China, 151, 210 Churchill, Winston, 26 circuit-breaker system, 108 Cisco Systems, 51–52 citizens, 114 agenda for, 187–207 collective action by, 192–197, 207 engagement of, 198–201 interviews of, 147–148 model of, 145 passive, 198 purchasing power of, 188–192, 207 reciprocal political relationships and, 197–200 responsibility of, 189–190 voting by, 201–206 civil-law system, 105–106 Clayton Antitrust Act, 53 Clinton, Bill, 54 cloud computing, 131 clustered industries, 67–70 collapsing sand pile example, 61–62 collective action, 192–197, 207 college students, 172–173 commercial banks, 108 common-law system, 105–106 communism, 15 comparative advantage, 40–41, 56 compensation theory, 146 competition, 63–65, 131–135, 151 competition policy, 53–54 competitive advantage, 67, 71 Competitive Advantage of Nations, The (Porter), 17, 67 complex adaptive systems, 80, 176–178, 182, 211–212 See also natural systems complexity design for, 100–103 teaching about, 176–177 complexity theory, 61–62, 81 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 31, 78, 79 connectedness, 106–113 consensus estimates, 86, 87 Consensus Forecasts, 82 consolidation See also mergers industry, 71–73 consumer protection, 54 continuous adaptation, 82–83, 105–106 Contract with America, 198, 199 Costco, 125 Cowan, George, 177 Crawford, Cindy, 64, 65 creativity-intensive jobs, 68–70 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT), 45–46 customer experience, 117, 122–123 customer feedback, 130, 135 customer loyalty, 27–29, 48 customer value, 130 Dalio, Ray, 31 Darwin, Charles, 129–130 data directly observable, 178–181 interpretation of, 172, 178–179 Data Resources Inc.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

There is a rapidly-growing body of research into digital platforms, although with plenty of gaps remaining to fill. Appreciating the feedbacks, the self-reinforcing (or self-averting) phenomena, is likely to require a different approach to modelling and analysis. There are examples of alternatives already being used by some economists, such as complexity theory (Arthur 2021; Hidalgo 2021), agent-based modelling (Gallegati and Kirman 2012; Richiardi 2016) and connectionism (Schulze 2010). All involve computer-based approaches rather than the algebraic analysis economists have typically used, and are increasingly being adopted in economics—without there yet being a single new paradigm to dethrone the existing mainstream.

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., 1937, ‘Mr. Keynes and the “Classics”’; A Suggested Interpretation’, Econometrica, 5 (2), 147–159. Hicks, J. R., 1939, ‘The Foundations of Welfare Economics’, The Economic Journal, 49 (196), 696–712. Hicks, J., 1942, The Social Framework, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hidalgo, C. A., 2021, ‘Economic Complexity Theory and Applications’, Nature Review Physics, 3, 92–113, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-020-00275-1. Hirschman, Daniel, 2016, ‘Inventing the Economy Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDP’, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/120713.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Some scientists have attempted to establish general principles that might be relevant to all problems of organized complexity. The world center for this research is a spin-off from the U.S. nuclear research establishment at Los Alamos, located at Santa Fe in the mountains ofNew Mexico, and analysis undertaken there goes under the heading of complexity theory. 21 The hope is not to predict the future, but to gain a better understanding of the general properties of complex systems. We cannot know what the weather will be like next June 4. But meteorologists can give an indication of the average temperature to be expected and the likely range. They can assess the probability of rain and make contingent predictions-it is more likely to be sunny on June 4 if it was sunny on June 3.

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Height above sea level in Simon's example might equally be a measure of how well a species is adapted to its environment, or how effectively scarce resources are allocated between competing ends. Kauffman's conjecture is that common models and principles of self-organization describe phenomena as diverse as the emergence of life and the construction of social order. Complexity theory today occupies a strange, perhaps unique, position within the scientific canon. It has attracted the attention of scientists of exceptional distinction and creativity, yet stands somewhat outside the mainstream of professional knowledge. Economists are particularly skeptical. 27 As I shall describe in chapter 28, the analogy with physics is central to their thinking.

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., 256 definition of, 137 and economic rent, 290-301 emergence of, 146 examples of, 14, 137-52 information asymmetry effects, 232-33 and Pareto efficiency, 192-94,202,291, 319 and public goods, 341-42 rigging of, 150-51 in risk, 153-61 spontaneous order in, 152, 311 views of, 203, 206-7 virtual, 148-50, 156 See also antitrust laws; Arrow-Debreu model; coordination; market economy complexity theory, 131, 132, 134, 183 computers, 18, 108, 115 development of, 118-22, 267, 272-73, 306 standards, 161,351 Congo,12,31,282-83,354 conservatism, 11, 82, 198-201, 289-90, 321-22,324,335,338-39,344 consumer goods choice in, 88, 107 demand evolution, 141 imperfect information on, 222,223-27 Japanese manufacture, 64 reliance factors, 352 supply coordination, 127-28 vector comparisons, 186-87, 191 contracts, 11, 73, 74-76, 77, 352 convexity, 179-81 cooperation, 207,247-58 adaptive nature of, 219, 247, 255-56, 347 self-interest vs., 247-48, 250, 253, 255-56, 320 teamwork, 20, 252-53, 320 See also spontaneous order coordination, 126-28, 173-83,341,350-51 Arrow-Debreu model, 100, 134, 179, 181-83,232,259 and externalities, 259-65 theoretical developments, 207 See also competitive markets; spontaneous order copyright, 74, 89,272,273,274 corporations, 320, 334 adaptive vs. optimal behavior, 214-16 American business model, 79, 322, 342-44 centralized decision-making errors, 106-9, 114 competitive advantage, 88-90, 296-98 development of, 69, 78-79 executive rewards, 12-13, 77, 321,342 and new technologies, 79-81, 117-22 and pluralism, 115-24 regulation of, 87, 352 social responsibility of, 241-42,315-16 corruption, 5, 7, 12, 51, 96, 109,281 as adaptive behavior, 213, 218 and monopoly grants, 295 in poor states, 281,282-84 in Russian privatization, 288, 306, 307 Crick, Francis, 80, 267,274 Darwin, Charles, 126, 132,216,217,256 Debreu, Gerard, 179, 358.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The contract calls for individuals to surrender all rights (except self-defense) to the sovereign who, like the biblical Leviathan, is responsible only to God. Compared to a war of all against all, a sovereign presiding over the state is far superior and forms the basis for a rational society in which peace and prosperity are available on a mass scale. I have oversimplified the steps in Hobbes' complex theory, but the point is that his reasoning was Euclidean and his system mechanical. He began with metaphysical first principles and ended with an entire social structure. Moreover, because many political theorists consider Hobbes the most influential thinker of the modern age, the connection Hobbes made between politics and science is not dead yet.

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They are social follies and mental fantasies, driven by a curious phenomenon called the feedback loop. A Witch Craze Feedback Loop Why should there be such movements in the first place, and what makes these seemingly dissimilar movements play out in a similar manner? A helpful model comes from the emerging sciences of chaos and complexity theory. Many systems, including social systems like witch crazes, self-organize through feedback loops, in which outputs are connected to inputs, producing change in response to both (like a public-address system with feedback, or stock market booms and busts driven by flurries of buying and selling).

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Buckley to join his team in a television PBS debate on evolution and creation. (Buckley's PBS Firing Line show aired in December 1997, where it was resolved that "Evolutionists should acknowledge creation." The debate was emblematic of the new creationism, employing new euphemisms such as "intelligent-design theory," "abrupt appearance theory," and "initial complexity theory," where it was argued that the "irreducible complexity" of life proves it was created by an intelligent designer, or God.) For my money, however, the quintessential example of a smart person believing a weird thing is Frank Tipler, a professor of theoretical mathematics at Tulane University and one of the world's leading cosmologists and global general relativists.

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

The learning so innately programmed appears quite automatic, reliably resulting in creatures with similar abilities provided that they are allowed interaction with the world during development. Complexity theory suggests that learning is a hard problem, requiring vast computation to extract structure. Yet we learn so fast that we do not have time to do the requisite computation. This is possible only because creatures are preprogrammed to extract specific kinds of meaning. The bulk of the requisite computation, and thus the guts of the process from the point of view of complexity theory, went into the evolution of the genome. Empirical evidence shows that creatures are in fact programmed with specific inductive biases.

…

Turing's thesis gives us a precise language which we can use to discuss and model thought, the language of computer programs. This thesis, however, left us with some puzzles. A first important one is: what about this particular code causes it to understand? A second important one is: given that complexity theory has indicated that many computations are inherently time consuming, how does the mind work so amazingly fast? Computational learning theory has explained generalization as arising from Occam's razor. The most studied context is concept learning, where one sees a series of classified examples, and desires to learn a function that will predict correctly whether new examples are examples of the concept or not.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Recent efforts by NASA and by Rundle to measure fault stress through remote sensing systems like GPS satellites have shown some promise.76 Although the efforts are crude for the time being, there is potential to increase the amount of data at seismologists’ disposal and get them closer to understanding the root causes of earthquakes. • • • These methods may eventually produce some forward progress. If success in earthquake prediction has been almost nonexistent for millennia, the same was true for weather forecasting until about forty years ago. Or it may be that as we develop our understanding of complexity theory—itself a very new branch of science—we may come to a more emphatic conclusion that earthquakes are not really predictable at all. Either way, there will probably be some failed predictions first. As the memory of our mistakes fades, the signal will again seem to shimmer over the horizon.

…

., 185–88, 254–55 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 425–27 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 205, 206–7, 211 Central Park, 391, 391 CFOs, 359 Chadwick, Henry, 95 chaos, cone of, 139 chaos theory, 118–22, 124, 132, 162, 172, 195, 386 complexity theory vs., 386n Charleston, S.C., 150 chartists, 339–40, 341 Chavez, Eric, 99 chemistry, 114 chess, 10, 16, 262–64, 263, 265–66, 493–94 beginning of game, 268–71 birth of computers for, 265–66 databases for, 270, 277 endgame of, 268, 276–79, 285 forecasting in, 271, 289 heuristics for, 267, 269, 272, 273, 284, 286 midgame of, 268, 271–76, 285 pattern detection in, 281 as theoretically solvable, 267 ChessBase.com, 292–93 Chicago, Ill., 223–24, 225, 228, 230, 432 Chicago, University of, 227 Chicago Cubs, 63, 104 Chicago White Sox, 88 Chile, 144, 438 China, 189, 209, 400 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 375 Christchurch, New Zealand, 174 Christianity, 490 CIA, 51, 467 terrorism prevention by, 273, 424, 426, 433, 443, 510 CIBC Oppenheimer, 352 cigarette smoking, 254–55, 258 Cinema Rex theater, 425n Cirque du Soleil, 318 Citizens Bank Park, 286 Civil Aeronautics Administration, 123n Civil Protection Department, Italy, 143 Clarke, Richard, 425 Clauset, Aaron, 427, 431, 432, 437, 441, 442, 511–12 Clean Air Act, 400 Cleveland, Grover, 334 Cleveland Cavaliers, 239–40, 257 Clift, Eleanor, 48, 49, 50, 56 climate change, use of term, 376, 377n see also global warming Climategate, 408 Climatic Research Unit (CRU), 408 climatology, 131, 132, 370–411 Bayesian reasoning in, 371, 377–78, 403, 406–7, 407, 410–11 models of, 371, 380, 384–85, 401–6, 402 signal vs. noise in, 371–73 uncertainty in, 389–93, 390 Clinton, Bill, 55, 56, 433, 510 Clinton, Hillary, 59, 60, 252 clouds, 385, 386 CNN, 217 coal, 410 cognitive psychology, 227 Cole, USS, 422, 423 comets, 447 commerce, 10 Commerce Department, U.S., 123n commercial lending, 187 commodity prices, 186n, 202 common sense, 451 communism, 51 community cards, 299 compartments, in disease modeling, 220–21, 223 competition, 1, 16, 97, 106, 128, 189 in poker, 313 in the stock market, 313, 352, 364 in weather forecasting, 127–28, 131–37, 132 competitive advantage, 313–14 competitiveness, 97 complexity, of global warming forecasting, 382 complexity theory, 172–73, 368–69, 386 chaos theory vs., 386ncomputer age, 7–8 computers: chess played by, 261–62, 287–88; see also Deep Blue; Deep Thought; Fritz poker played by, 324 predictions and, 292 weather forecasting by, 116–18, 123–25, 289 condom fatigue, 222–23 cone of chaos, 139 Conference Board, 187 confidence, 46 accuracy and, 203 see also overconfidence confidence interval, see margin of error Congress, U.S., 19, 123n, 207, 408 low approval rating of, 188 see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

…

., 123n commercial lending, 187 commodity prices, 186n, 202 common sense, 451 communism, 51 community cards, 299 compartments, in disease modeling, 220–21, 223 competition, 1, 16, 97, 106, 128, 189 in poker, 313 in the stock market, 313, 352, 364 in weather forecasting, 127–28, 131–37, 132 competitive advantage, 313–14 competitiveness, 97 complexity, of global warming forecasting, 382 complexity theory, 172–73, 368–69, 386 chaos theory vs., 386ncomputer age, 7–8 computers: chess played by, 261–62, 287–88; see also Deep Blue; Deep Thought; Fritz poker played by, 324 predictions and, 292 weather forecasting by, 116–18, 123–25, 289 condom fatigue, 222–23 cone of chaos, 139 Conference Board, 187 confidence, 46 accuracy and, 203 see also overconfidence confidence interval, see margin of error Congress, U.S., 19, 123n, 207, 408 low approval rating of, 188 see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

., ‘Changes in Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Britain through the Life Course and Over Time: Findings from the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal)’, Lancet, vol. 382, no. 9907, 2013, pp. 1757–1856. 9 Laura Lindberg, John Santelli and Sheila Desai, ‘Understanding the Decline in Adolescent Fertility in the United States, 2007–2012’, Journal of Adolescent Health, vol. 59, no. 5, 2016, pp. 577–583. 10 Some readers will again be put in mind here of the ideas of complexity and chaos. These are useful analogies, I think, in their emphasis on the subtle, interactive power of small causal influences. One committed student of complexity theory who works as an advisor to government told me it is an uphill task to persuade ministers and others that they are not pulling levers on a simple machine. 11 Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie, Evidence Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing it Better, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. 12 In my more radical moments, I am not sure that causality exists as we usually think of it.

…

Index abstract formulas 141 Academy of Medical Sciences 133 adoption studies 41 aid, economic development 141 aid-effectiveness craze, the 153 alcohol consumption 180 AllTrials campaign 114–5 Altman, Doug 129–30 Amano, Yukiya 185 ambiguity 209–10 Amgen 111–2 Analysis (radio programme) 102 analytic validity 158, 263n18 anarchy 224 aphorisms 68–9, 149 apprenticeships 205–6 argument, beliefs and habits of 186 asthma 135 Attanasio, Orazio 225–9, 230 Autho, David 219–23 average knowledge 173 background influences 23–34 background norms, rejecting 24–5 bacon 161–3, 162–3 Banerjee, Abhijit 150–4, 157 Bangladesh 80–2, 82, 101–2, 158, 261n6 Bank of England 103, 216 Bank of Japan 103 Basbøll, Thomas 244–5 baseline data 165 base-rate neglect 176–7 basic laws 140 Bateson, William 245 BBC 88, 98 Beatles, the 52–3, 259n33 Begley, Glenn 111–7 behaviour context-specific 42–3 environmental cues 65–7 behavioural economics 157 Behavioural Insight Team 155, 156, 232 beliefs 60 contradictory 63–4 inconsistency of 60–6 justification 60–1, 63 manipulation 62–3 power of information on 66–8 self-contradiction 61–2 Berlin, Isaiah 199 betting, on knowledge 236–7 big causes, power of 35 big events causal intricacy 193–6 complexity 185–7 difficulty determining causality 188–96 power of circumstance 196–9 big picture, the 215–6 Bijani, Ladan 40–1 Bijani, Laleh 40–1 biographies 49 biological randomness 43–4 biomedical science, research standards 129–36 Bolsover 217–8 Boorstin, Daniel 17, 136, 138, 264n24 Booth, Charles 146–7 BP 211 brain, the 64 plasticity 56 self-justifying 83 breast cancer 45–6, 46 Brexit referendum 18–9, 20, 90, 214–8, 223–4, 241 Bunnings 77 Burckhardt, Jacob 255n20 Burke, Edmund 269n1 Burns, Terry 102–3 business decisions, failures 210–1 cancer 45–8 breast 45–6, 46 lung 174–5 risk 162–3, 166, 174–5 screening 132–3 Cancer Research UK 133 canned laughter 154–5 capitalism 118 Carillion 211 Carp, Joshua 123–4 Cartwright, Nancy 79, 79–82, 82, 193–4, 195, 202–3, 203–4, 263n18 causal instincts 123 causal interactions, complexity 239 causal intricacy 193–4 causal models 242–4, 243, 269–70n3 causal theorizing 212–4 causality assumption of 212–4 difficulty determining 188–96 existence of 276–7n12 hard 225–9 importance of 212 mechanical models 242–4, 243 in one person 48 cause and effect dependable 203–4 patterns of 23, 25–6, 26 supposed 248 unreliable 204 causes and causal influences 90, 94 competing 248 criminals 29 interaction 193–6 and luck 178 secret life of 8–11 simple 184–5 cells, biographical stories 47–8 certainty, desire for 235 Chadwick, Edwin 146–7 chance 14, 37–8, 247, 281n1 chaos theory 56–7, 276n10 Chater, Nick 59, 60, 63, 64–5, 66–7 Chernobyl disaster 185 child and adolescent development 23–6, 41–2 child mental health 206–7 childhood influences 23–5 delinquent boys 26–34 China, rise of 218–23, 279n19 choice, situated 31–3, 34 choice blindness 62 choices 60 Cialdini, Robert 154–5 Cifu, Adam 131–2 circumstances 70 power of 196–9 claims inflation 130 climate change 238–9 Clinton, Hillary 222 Cochrane Collaboration, the 189–90 cognition 64 cognitive biases 14 cognitive limitations 14, 214 Comaroff, John 107–8 common sense 69–70 comparative cost analysis 173 competence 236–7 complacency 237 complexity adding 244 big events 185–7 facing 15 hidden 184–201 of reality 245 complexity theory 276n10 complexity-avoidance 187 complications, hidden 187 Conan Doyle, Arthur 108 confidence 72 consistency 68–75, 202–4, 260n6, 260n8 constructive realism 17 consumer behaviour 77 context 41–2, 72, 101 context-specific behaviour 72 context-specific learning 42–3 control alternative to 248–9 elusiveness of 85–6 powers of 195 conviction 104 coping strategies 16–7, 225–46 adapting 230–3 betting 236–7 communicate uncertainty 237–9 embracing uncertainty 234–6 exceptions 244–5 experiment 230–3 governing for uncertainty 239–41 managing for uncertainty 241–2 metaphors 242–4 negative capability 234 relax 246 triangulation 233–4 use of probability 242 Corbyn, Jeremy 20 corporate power 241 cost/benefit analysis, cows 117–22 cows, cost/benefit analysis 117–22 Coyle, Diane 216, 262n12 Crabbe, John 85–7 credibility 238–9 credibility crisis 18 crime causes of 142–4 heroes and villains view 142 opportunist 144–5 reduced opportunity 144–5 theory of 142–6, 143 victims and survivors view 142–3 criminals causal influences 29 childhood influences 26–34 desisters 30 high rate chronics 30 life-course persistent offenders 28–9 life-courses 28, 236 variables 31 critical factors 83–5 crowds, wisdom of 149 cultural difference 79–82, 79–85 Daniels, Denise 43–4, 57 Darwin, Charles 50–1 data granularity 216–7 interpretation 98–100 Dawid, Philip 276–7n12 De Rond, Mark 198, 201 de Vries, Ymkje Anna 114 deadweight cost 205–6 debate 98 decision making 58–60 influences 32–3 situated choice 31–3 deep preferences 65 deeper rationale, construction of 60 Deepwater Horizon 211 defining characteristics 43 degrees of freedom 122–9 delinquent boys 26–34 dementia 176–7, 274n16 democracy 20 Deng Xiaoping 219 Denrell, Jerker 199, 201 desires 59 details importance of 49–54 neglecting 151–2 problem of 229 selective 26 determinism 28 development economics 150–3 developmental difference, sources of variation 9–11 developmental noise 10 difference 15 pockets of 214–24 Dilnot, Andrew 237, 275n3 disciplined pluralism 231 disorder 45 forces of 11–3 doubt 238 Down’s syndrome 166 drugs comparative cost analysis 173 impact 171–2 medical effect 167–9, 169, 170–4 non-responders 172 Numbers-Needed-to-Treat (NNTs) 168, 169, 170, 173–4 predictive weakness 170–3 duelling certainties 235 Duflo, Esther 83, 84, 141, 150–3, 157–8, 158–9, 230–1 ecological validity 263n18 economic development, aid 141 economic forecasting 92, 102–7 economic recovery 217–8 economics 233 economy, the 87–100, 91, 93, 94, 95 education 151–2, 206–7, 275– 6n7 Einstein, Albert 140–1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 68 enigmatic variation 13–6, 48 environment context 72 non-shared 37 shared 35 environmental influences 43–4 epidemiology 181 epigenetics 6–7 erratic influences 60 essential you, the 59–60 estimates 89–91, 96 European Central Bank 103 evidence 21 balance of 114 conclusive 186, 187 the Janus effect 121, 122–9 limitations of 117–22 statistical significance 137 strength of 137 evidence-based medicine 133–4 exceptions 214–24, 244–5 expectations 35 big 196 frustration of 15 of regularity 47, 202–4 unrealistic 182 experience, influence of 33, 34, 55–7 experiment 230–3 expertise, crisis of 18–9 experts, credibility crisis 18–9 external validity 101, 158, 263n18, 264n19 extreme performance 199 failure 204–11 fairness 66–7 false negatives 113–4 false positives 113–4, 122 falsification 245 family, changes of 41 farmer and a chicken, the 202–4 fate 30 fears, exaggerated 46 Financial Times 77 First World War 108 Fitzroy, Robert 50 flat mind, the 60, 60–8 Flaubert, Gustave 139 forecasting 109 former Yugoslavia 108 foxes 199 France 186–7 Freedman, Sir Lawrence 108, 109 freedom 236 Fukushima nuclear power station meltdown 185–7 fundamentals 141 identifying 153 further education 208–9 Galbraith, John Kenneth 110 Gartner, Klaus 87 Gash, Tom 142–3 Gates, Bill 199 GDP data 262n12 growth estimation 88–100, 91, 93, 94, 95, 262–3n14 local 214–5, 216, 218 Gelman, Andrew 124–5, 244 gene–environment interaction 6–7 general principles 140 generalities 174 generalization 76–8, 146, 152, 263n18 genes and genetics influence of 34–7, 39–41, 44, 45–7 overclaiming 134–5 power of 33, 45 genetic risk 45–7 genius, dangerous 212–4 genotype 8 Germany 185, 186, 188 Gillam, John 77 global financial crisis, 2008–9 104, 106, 210, 235 globalization 213 Gove, Michael 18–9 granularity 216–7 ground truth 217 groupthink 149 guarantees, lack of 160 Guardian 207 Gupta, Rajeev 117, 118 Haldane, Andy 216–7, 218 Harford, Tim 156–7, 237 Harris, Judith Rich 40–2, 72 Hayek, Friedrich 105–6 health screening 177 heart disease 163–6 hedgehogs 199 Henry (ex-delinquent) 32 Hensall, Abigail 39–40, 41 Hensall, Brittany 39–40, 41 herd mentality 154–5 hidden causes 35–8 hidden half, the coping strategies 225–46 ignoring 202–24 mystery of 35 power of 44–5 hidden trivia 8–9 hindsight 78 hindsight bias 83 history 107–8 lessons of 109 Homebase 76–7 Honda, US motorcycle market penetration 196–9 hubris 77 human sameness irregularity 45–9 limits of 34–45 human understanding, fundamentals 213 Human Zoo, The (radio programme) 60–6 humility 224, 248–9 IBM 199 ibuprofen 163–5 ideological divide 240 ideologies 9–10 idiosyncratic influence 53–4 ignorance 21, 107 disguising 242 the shock of 7 imagination 138 impulsive judgement, value of 149 incarceration rates, United States of America 222, 240, 280n10 incidentals, effect of 51–2 incoherency problem, the 149 inconsistency beliefs 60–6 justifiable 70–1 incredible certitude 209 Indian Express 117 individual differences 56 individuality conjoined twins 39–42 neurological foundation of 56 industrial policy 208 inflation 102–7 influences background 23–34 childhood 26–34 criminals 26–34 decision making 32–3 environmental 43–4 erratic 60 hidden 204 microenvironmental 8–9, 253–4n12 information power of 66–8 selective 66–7 Institute for Fiscal Studies 205–6 Institute for Government 208–9 intangible differences 253n11 intangible variation 10, 229 interaction, problems of 193–6 internal validity 101–2, 158 International Journal of Epidemiology 43 intuition 54, 204 Ioannidis, John 121, 133–6 irrationality, human 14 irregularity 94 disruptive power of 224 frustration of 15 human 45–9 influence 12 problem of 229 underestimating 214–24 Islamic State 108 it’s-all-because problem 91, 96 James, Henry 29, 56 James, William 141 Janus effect, the 121, 122–9 Johansen, Petter 62 Johnson, Samuel 214 Johnson, Wendy 71–2 Jones, Susannah Mushatt 162–3, 165 journalism 237–8 Juno (film) 193 Kaelin, William 130 Kawashima, Kihachiro 197 Kay, John 16, 68, 197, 231, 232 Keats, John 138–9, 234 Kempermann, Gerd 56, 57 Keynes, John Maynard 107, 271n9 Keynesianism 103 King, Mervyn 103, 104, 106, 110 Kinnell, Galway 28 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 86–7 Knight, Frank 107 Knightian uncertainty 107 knowledge 12–3, 170 advance of 20–1 average 173 betting on 236–7 credibility crisis 18 critical factors 83–5 failures of 19, 76–8, 79–82 fallibility of 248 generalizable 234 generalization 76–8 illusion of 136, 138 lessons of the past 102–7, 107–10 in medicine 182 negative capability 138–9 as obstacle to progress 17 obvious 82 paths to 136–9 plausibility mistaken for 132 practical 30–1 pretence of 105–6 probabilistic 160, 161, 163–4, 172–3 and probability 180 problem of scale 177–80 provenance 116 relevant 82–5 replication crisis 111–7 subverting 76–110 and time variations 87–100, 91, 93, 94, 95 transfer 37, 76–8, 83, 101–2 unknowns 85–7 validity 100–2 validity across time 107–10 weakest-link principle 79–82 Krugman, Paul 210 Lancet 225–6 Langley, Winnie 51, 165, 178 Laub, John 26–34, 42 law-like effects, claims about 21 learning styles 207 Leicester City Football Club 199–201 Leon (ex-delinquent) 31–2 Leyser, Ottoline 114 life, mechanics of 51 life-course persistent offenders 28–9 limits and limitations 16–7, 44, 75 base-rate neglect 176–7 of cleverness 278n14 individual level 174–6, 178–9, 181–3 lack of guarantees 160 marginal probabilistic outcomes 176–7 medical effect 167–9, 169, 170–4 on prediction 165–6 on probability 160–83 problem of scale 161–6, 174– 6, 177–80, 181–3 Liskov Substitution Principle 261n3 Little Britain (TV comedy) 192 Liu, Chengwei 198, 201 lives, understanding 29 location shift 264n20 Loken, Erik 124–5 long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCS) 190 luck 37–8, 48, 178, 198 lung cancer 174–5 Lyko, Frank 1, 2 machine mode thinking 151–2 Macron, Emmanuel 20 Manski, Charles 209, 235 Mao Zedong 218 marginal probabilistic outcomes 176–7 marmorkrebs 1–9, 4, 10, 12, 12–3, 22, 35, 81, 182, 252n2 Marteau, Theresa 65 Martin, George 52 May, Theresa 208 Mayne, Stephen 77 measurement 99–100 mechanical relationships 212, 242, 244 mechanical thinking 242–4, 243 media stigma 192–3 medical effect, drugs 167–9, 169, 170–4 medical reversal 131–3 medicine comparative cost analysis 173 knowledge in 182 non-responders 172 Numbers-Needed-to-Treat (NNTs) 168, 169, 170, 173–4 personalized 181–3 predictive weakness 170–3 probability and 167–9, 169, 170–4 memory 56, 102–7 Mendelian randomization 233 Menon, Anand 214–5 mental shortcuts 14–5 mere facts 202–3 meta-science 19, 20 methodological revisions 97–8, 120 mice 55 microenvironmental influences 8–9, 253–4n12 micro-irregularity 35–7 micro-particulars 128 Microsoft 147–50, 199 Miller, Helen 66–7, 67 mind, the flat 59–60, 60–8 shape 59 models and modelling 140, 242–4, 243, 269–70n3 moment when, the 52 morality, changing 108 More or Less (radio programme) 237 Munafò, Marcus 234 Nadella, Satya 147–8 National Survey of Family Growth 192 National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 191–2 nationalism 108 Nature 2, 112, 136, 168, 174 nature/nurture debate 3, 5–6, 9–10 negative capability 138–9, 234 neurology 58 New England Journal of Medicine 131–2 Newcastle upon Tyne 214 Newton, Isaac 140–1 noise 14 definition 10 developmental 10 as intellectual dross 11 re-appraisal of 11–3 non-shared environment 37 Nosek, Brian 129 noses 49–51 Nottingham 217 Numbers-Needed-to-Treat (NNTs) 168, 169 nurture, influence of 44 O’Connor, Sarah 217–8 Office for National Statistics 89, 92, 98, 99–100, 216 O’Neill, Onora 238 opinions 21, 59 order 11–2, 13 organ donation campaign 155–6 outside influence 44 overclaiming 134–5 overconfidence 21 overseas business expansion 76–8 Oxfam, sexual abuse scandal 210 Paphides, Pete 52–3 parental behaviour 41 parents, impact of 41 Parris, Matthew 63 parthenogenesis 1–2 particularism 271–2n15 particularity problem, the 93 past, the, lessons of 102–7, 107–10 pattern-making instinct 21 patterns 13 pendulums 57 perceptual systems 64 performance 72–5 personalized medicine 181–3 Peto, Richard 47–8 phenotypes 8 physiognomy, and character 50 plausibility 132 Plomin, Robert 43–4, 49, 57 pluralism 231–2 polarization 235 policy making 231–2 appraisal 277n4 chances of success 208 failures 204–9 governing for uncertainty 239–41 and probability 178–9 secret of 209 seminar 207–8 sequential changes 208 political assumptions, fall of 20 political beliefs 60–6 population validity 263n18 populism, rise of 20 poverty 240–1 Prasad, Vinayak 131–2 precision 183 predictability 28 predictive weakness 165–6, 170–3 preferences 59, 62 deep 65 priming 126–8 probabilistic knowledge 160, 161, 163–4, 170, 172–3 probability 54, 70, 107, 258n25, 272n2 advantages 177–80 base-rate neglect 176–7 difference in 30 fear of low probabilities 166 individual level 174–6, 178–9, 181–3 limits and limitations 160–83 marginal 176–7 medical effect 167–9, 169, 170–4 paradox 170 and policy making 178–9 predictive weakness 165–6 problem of scale 161–6, 174– 6, 177–80, 181–3 recognizing significance 161 risk evaluation 161–6 suggestion of knowledge 180 use of 242 usefulness 161 problems, conceptualizing 17 productivity growth 209–10 progress, knowledge as obstacle to 17 psychoanalysis 58 psychology 58 Pullinger, John 278n14 Pullman, Philip 37 quantification, risk and risk-taking 162–5 racism 125–6 radical uncertainty 106, 107 Radio, Andrew 102 rage to conclude, the 139 randomized controlled trials, value of 280n6 randomness, pure 9 Ranieri, Claudio 200–1 rationality 68, 260n6, 260n8 reality 230, 245, 254n14 reciprocity 155 reflection 65–6 regularity 73, 160 assumption of 212–4 expectations of 47, 202–4 search for 212, 230 statistical 240–1 replication crisis 18, 111–7, 117– 22, 129, 136, 138 Replication Project 129 research 111–39 balance of evidence 114 breadth 130 claims inflation 130 confidence in 115–6 credibility crisis 18 decision rules 136–9 depth 130 evidence-based medicine 133–4 false negatives 113–4 false positives 113–4, 122 fragility 128–9 freedom 122–9 half wrong 113, 115–6 the Janus effect 121, 122–9 limitations of 117–22 micro-particulars 128 multiple analyses 125–6 multiple conclusions 117–22 overclaiming 134–5 priming 126–8 redemption 20 replication crisis 111–7, 117– 22, 129, 136, 138 rigour 19 scepticism 115–6 standards 129–36 statistical significance 122 triangulation 138 validity 101–2 research-credibility crisis 18 rigour 19, 246 risk and risk-taking 70–1, 107, 186 alcohol consumption 180 cancer 162–3, 166, 174–5 communication of 133 evaluation 161–6 heart disease 163–6 quantification 162–5, 166 quantified 187 risk-perception 71 Rockhill, Beverly 181 Rolling Stone magazine 23 Rose, Geoffrey 175–6 Rowntree Joseph 146–7 Royal Bank of Scotland 211 Russell, Bertrand 202, 202–3 samples, validity 100–2 Sampson, Robert 26–34, 42, 236 sanitation 225–9 Santayana, George 109 scale, problem of 161–6, 174–6, 177–80, 181–3 scepticism 105, 115–6, 128, 206 schizophrenia 34–6, 256n10 Science 56 Scientific American 55 Scotland, Triple-P parenting programme 206 screening 132–3, 177 searing memory, doctrine of the 102–7 selection bias 244 self-understanding 67 Sense about 115 serendipitous events 43, 52–3 sex education, role of 189–90 short-term gene–environment interaction 7 significance, recognizing 161 Silberzahn, Raphael 125–6 Simmons, Joseph 122–3 situated choice 31–3, 34, 42 situations, appraisal of 72 sliding-doors moments 50 small differences, power of 56–7 small effects, influence of 49–54 small experiences, influence of 35–7 smartphones 97, 191 Smith, George Davey 50, 51, 234, 281n1 social contexts 31, 195 social media 191 social mobility 240–1 social policy 195 social proof 154–6 social reformers 146–7 social science, utility of 146–50 special theory of relativity 140–1 Spiegelhalter, David 180, 244–5 spontaneous interaction 9 stagflation 103 statins 171 statistical regularities 240–1 statistical significance 122, 137 stents, use of 131 stories and storytelling 25–6, 53–4, 244–5, 247, 248, 258n25, 258n27 structural forces 54 Sun, the 51 support factors 194 Surfers Against Sewage 70–1 surgeons, skills 73–4 system 1 thinking 149 systematic forces 54 systems-level thinking 153 Tamil Nadu 79–82, 101–2 Tangiers, Morocco 84 technology, changing 108 Teen Mom (TV show) 193 teenage pregnancy rate decline in 184, 188–96 estimates 275n3 terrible simplifiers 255n20 Tesco 77, 211 Thaler, Richard 157 theories 140–59 analytic validity 158 arguments about 150–4 of crime 142–6, 143 development economics 150–3 fitness 157 implementation 152 limitations 157 and practice 141 refining 156–7 relevance 157–8 social science 146–50 tension in 154–9 using 156–7 ‘thick’ description 86 time, validity across 107–10 Time magazine 193 time variations, and knowledge 87–100, 91, 93, 94, 95 The Times 63 toilets 225–9 Toshiba 211 trade-offs 190–1 trends 54 trials 156 triangulation 138, 233–4 Triple-P parenting programme 206–7 trivia, importance of 84–5 true uncertainty 107 Trump, Donald 20, 218, 222, 223–4 trust 238 trust deficit 218 trustworthiness 238 Tufte, Edward 139 turning points, variety 49–54 TV crime shows 143, 143 twins and twin studies conjoined 39–42 identical 34–7, 39, 256n10 Tyson, Mike 23, 23–6 Tyson, Rodney 24–5, 255n3 Uhlmann, Eric 125–6 uncertainty 89–90, 100, 209– 12, 254n14 admitting 238 communicating 237–9 data 89–91 embracing 234–6 erratic 93 governing for 239–41 Knightian 107 language of 238 managing for 241–2 in medicine 167–9, 169, 170–4 perpetual 230 radical 106, 107 true 107 uncertainty laundering 268n33 understanding hidden half of 13 limiting effects on 14 limits of 54 unemployment 221–2, 263n17 unintended consequences 105, 229 United States of America China trade 220–3 incarceration rates 222, 240, 280n10 labour market 221 minimum wage 266–7n10 unemployment 221–2 universal gravitational attraction, theory of 140–1 unknowns 85–7, 206 unusual, the 195 upbringing 23–5 Uyeno, Lori 47 validity across time 107–10 analytic 158, 263n18 ecological 263n18 external 101, 158, 263n18, 264n19 internal 101–2, 158 knowledge 100–2, 107–10 population 263n18 research 101–2 samples 100–2 values 59, 232 variation, sources of 5–8 Volkswagen, diesel emissions scandal 211 Wall Street Journal 219 Wallace, Alfred Russel 259n33 Walmart 77 Watts, Duncan 68, 69, 147–50 weakest-link principle 79–82 Wedgwood, Josiah 50–1 Wellington, Duke of 51 Wesfarmers 76–7 West Germany, motorcycle thefts 142–4 Western, Bruce 54 Wilson, Harold 99 World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 79 World Health Organization 162 world picture 63–4 Wright, Sewall 253n11

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

This is why, in many ways, the choice of Paul Van Riper to head the opposing Red Team was so inspired, because if Van Riper stood for anything, it was the antithesis of that position. Van Riper didn’t believe you could lift the fog of war. His library on the second floor of his house in Virginia is lined with rows upon rows of works on complexity theory and military strategy. From his own experiences in Vietnam and his reading of the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Van Riper became convinced that war was inherently unpredictable and messy and nonlinear. In the 1980s, Van Riper would often take part in training exercises, and, according to military doctrine, he would be required to perform versions of the kind of analytical, systematic decision making that JFCOM was testing in Millennium Challenge.

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Do you accept the argument that we are completely oblivious to our unconsciously motivated behavior (like the disturbing IAT results that show 80 percent of test takers have pro-white associations)? Is this just a convenient excuse to justify our biases? Chapter 4 / Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory 17. Van Riper believed that strategy and complex theory were inappropriate and futile in the midst of battle, “where the uncertainties of war and the pressures of time made it impossible to compare options carefully and calmly.” What other “work” situations discount rational analysis and demand immediate “battlefield” decision making? 18. Can one ever really prepare for decisive, rapid-fire scenarios?

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Notes for Chapter Nineteen DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP Irving Wladawsky-Berger, “The MIT Distributed Leadership Forum,” blog post, November 23, 2009, http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2009/11/the-mit-distributed-leadership-forum.html. ADAPTIVE TENSIONS Bill McKelvey, “Improving Corporate IQ,” published in the Workshop on Managerial Implications of Complexity Theory in the Network Economy, July 14, 2001. JOHN BOYD & MORAL AUTHORITY A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America’s War on Terror, by Daniel Ford (CreateSpace, 2010). JOHN MACKEY & TRUST “John Mackey: Want trust? Let people be their whole selves,” MIX TV, http://www.managementexchange.com/video/john-mackey-want-trust-let-people-be-their-whole-selves.

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The Service profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value By James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger, Free Press, 1997. The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works By Ricardo Semler, Portfolio Hardcover, 2004. Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory By Neil Johnson, Oneworld, 2009. Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition By Ronald S. Burt, Harvard University Press, 1995. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production By Taiichi Ohno and Norman Bodek, Productivity Press, 1988.

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Boyd was widely read in the scientific literature of the time and picked up easily on developing theories which used simple propositions to explain complex phenomena. From these he drew language and insights to describe the sort of conflicts that interested him. From Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics to Murray Gell-Mann’s complexity theory emerged some core themes about the interaction of parts within systems, adaptation to changing environments, and outcomes that seemed indeterminate but were not beyond explanation. The conclusions for practical strategists that emerged from these theories rarely did justice to the elegance of the originals, and could lead to the suspicion that the main result was to develop more impressive language for matters that were already well understood.

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The conclusions for practical strategists that emerged from these theories rarely did justice to the elegance of the originals, and could lead to the suspicion that the main result was to develop more impressive language for matters that were already well understood. Many of the emerging themes were present, for example, in Schelling’s writings. The most important contribution of complexity theory was to underline the importance of considering individual actors as part of complex systems, so that they must always be assessed in relation to their environment, which was adapting to them as they adapted to it. Problems arose with an inability to adapt. “Chaos theory” explained how systems in which cause and effect were supposedly known, and in which strategic calculations might be assumed to be reliable, could nonetheless turn into disorderly systems marked by apparently random effects.

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In an article he coauthored, published in 1999, claims were made about the role of the book in translating the key themes in organizational studies, to the point of describing it as an accessible version of Weick.13 They addressed the issue of whether it was possible to simplify without being simplistic. Even if the situation demanded complex theories, managers would not find them interesting and so good theory would not affect practice. The article claimed immodestly that In Search of Excellence succeeded by saying “pretty much everything there was to say about behavior in organizations and got it right, by virtue of the experts cited.” Ideas of learning organizations, bounded rationality, narratives, and agenda-setting could all be found, with key theorists getting mentioned.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Furthermore, the idea that a completely deterministic process can produce results that are completely unpredictable is of great importance, as it provides an explanation for how the world can be inherently unpredictable while still based on fully deterministic rules.68 However, I am not entirely surprised by the idea that simple mechanisms can produce results more complicated than their starting conditions. We've seen this phenomenon in fractals, chaos and complexity theory, and self-organizing systems (such as neural nets and Markov models), which start with simple networks but organize themselves to produce apparently intelligent behavior. At a different level, we see it in the human brain itself, which starts with only about thirty to one hundred million bytes of specification in the compressed genome yet ends up with a complexity that is about a billion times greater.69 It is also not surprising that a deterministic process can produce apparently random results.

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Extensive databases are methodically cataloging our exponentially growing knowledge of the brain.3 Researchers have also shown they can rapidly understand and apply this information by building models and working simulations. These simulations of brain regions are based on the mathematical principles of complexity theory and chaotic computing and are already providing results that closely match experiments performed on actual human and animal brains. As noted in chapter 2, the power of the scanning and computational tools needed for the task of reverse engineering the brain is accelerating, similar to the acceleration in technology that made the genome project feasible.

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But certain details are critical in decoding the principles of operation of the brain, which compels us to distinguish between them and those that comprise stochastic "noise" or chaos. The chaotic (random and unpredictable) aspects of neural function can be modeled using the mathematical techniques of complexity theory and chaos theory.16 ·The brain uses emergent properties. Intelligent behavior is an emergent property of the brain's chaotic and complex activity. Consider the analogy to the apparently intelligent design of termite and ant colonies, with their delicately constructed interconnecting tunnels and ventilation systems.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This would provide a detailed quantitative valuation of traffic patterns and the attractiveness of specific locations as well as other metrics that are crucial for planning purposes such as in successfully developing new areas of a city or deciding on the placement of new malls or stadiums. The leading advocate for developing the concept of the fractal city and integrating ideas from complexity theory into traditional urban analysis and planning has been Mike Batty, who runs the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. His work has focused primarily on computer models of the physicality of cities and urban systems. He is enthusiastic about the concept of cities as complex adaptive systems and has consequently become a major proponent of developing a science of cities.

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These sorts of general properties, which are characteristic of social networks, lead to the result that the shortest path between nodes is on average a relatively small number and that this number is essentially independent of the size of the population, so that the six degrees of separation is approximately the same across all communities. Furthermore, it turns out that the modular structure is typically self-similar so that many characteristics of small-world networks satisfy power law scaling. Steve Strogatz is an eclectic applied mathematician at Cornell University who uses ideas from nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory to analyze and explain a broad range of fascinating problems. For example, he has done some lovely work showing how crickets, cicadas, and fireflies synchronize their behaviors and more recently extended it to show why London’s Millennium Bridge was dysfunctional.11 This latter problem has some interesting lessons for the science of cities, and I want to digress to explain it.

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I feel extraordinarily fortunate and privileged to have been able to spend a number of very productive years in such a marvelous place, stimulated by like-minded colleagues from every possible corner of academia. The ambience and character of SFI are perhaps best captured by the British science writer John Whitfield, who in 2007 wrote: The institute was intended to be truly multidisciplinary—it has no departments, only researchers. . . . Santa Fe and complexity theory have become almost synonymous . . . the institute, now situated on a hill on the town’s outskirts, must be one of the most fun places to be a scientist. The researchers’ offices, and the communal areas they spill into for lunch and impromptu seminars, have picture windows looking out across the mountains and desert.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Without awareness of their own biases, these scientists—hoping to understand how the human mind works, how we think, and how machines might learn from all of humanity—had drastically limited their pool of data to those who look and sound just like them. The following year, the group gathered on the top floor of Dartmouth’s math department and researched complexity theory, natural language simulation, neural networks, the relationship of randomness to creativity, and learning machines. On the weekdays they met in the main math classroom for a general discussion before dispersing to tackle the more granular tasks. Professors Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw came up with a way to discover proofs of logical theorems and simulated the process by hand—a program they called Logic Theorist—at one of the general sessions.

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See also China Chinese Communist Revolution, Centennial of, 223 CHINOOK, 39 Clarke, Arthur, 35 Climate change: consequences of in catastrophic scenario of future, 228–229; G-MAFIA addressing in optimistic scenario of future, 171–172 Cloud: data storage, 88–89; hardware limitations and, 89; primary providers, 88. See also Azure Cloud Code of Conduct, call for establishment of AI worker, 256 Coinbase, 87 Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), 93 Complexity theory, 30 Congressional Research Service, 247 Construction and building industries: in optimistic scenario of future, 165 Consumerism, acceleration of AI projects and, 98 Conway, Melvin, 106 Conway’s Law, 106; Big Nine and, 107; examples, 103–108; negative effects, 107–108 Cook, Tim: on future of privacy, 95.

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh

call centre, complexity theory, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, p-value, personalized medicine, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, systematic bias, systems thinking, the scientific method

Classical management theory: the notion that ‘mainstreaming’ a change within an organisation requires a systematic plan to make it happen. The vision for change must be shared amongst a critical mass of staff, and must be accompanied by planned changes to the visible structures of the organisation, to the roles and responsibilities of key individuals, and to information and communication systems. 6. Complexity theory: the notion that large organisations (such as the UK National Health Service) depend critically on the dynamic, evolving, and local relationships and communication systems between individuals. Supporting key interpersonal relationships, and improving the quality and timeliness of information available locally are often more crucial factors in achieving sustained change than ‘top-down’ directives or overarching national or regional programmes.

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Index absolute risk reduction (ARR) absolutism absorptive capacity (organisations) academic detailing accessible standards ‘accountability culture’ accuracy ACP PIER additional risk adult learning advertising, DTCA advice for patients AGREE instrument allocation concealment, CONSORT checklist analysis of variance anecdotes DTCA anti-inflammatory drugs, non-steroidal anticoagulant therapy applicability clinical guidelines appraisal, critical, see critical appraisal ARR (absolute risk reduction) aspirin, meta-analyses assessment ‘blind’ clinical guidelines methodological quality needs assumptions, unquestioned avoidable suffering baseline data, CONSORT checklist baseline differences behavioural learning bias expectation selection systematic work-up (verification) biological markers of disease ‘blind’ assessment blinding, CONSORT checklist blobbogram, see forest plot bluffing, deliberate boundaries fuzzy organisational break-even point browsing, informal Caesarean section, see induced delivery CardioSource care, quality of care pathways, integrated (critical) case systematic bias case reports case studies ‘caseness’ causation tests for CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) CHAIN (Contact, Help, Advice and Information Network) ‘champions’ cheating with statistical tests checklist CONSORT context-sensitive QADAS systematic reviews data sources choice, informed cholesterol hypercholesterolaemia Cinderella conditions citation chaining classical management theory clinical applicability clinical decision-making clinical disagreement clinical evidence clinical freedom clinical guidelines implementation clinical heterogeneity clinical prediction rules ‘clinical queries’ clinical questions clinical trials non-randomised controlled RCT, see randomised controlled trials CME (continuing medical education) Cochrane, Archie Cochrane Collaboration Cochrane EPOC, see EPOC group cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) cohort studies systematic bias collection of data collective knowledge common sense comparable groups COMPASEN format completeness of follow-up complex interventions complexity theory confidence intervals diagnostic tests conflict of interest consistency CONSORT statement RCTs Contact, Help, Advice and Information Network (CHAIN) context context-sensitive checklist context-specific psychological antecedents quality improvement case studies receptive context for change continuing medical education (CME) continuous results control group controlled clinical trials, non-randomised controlled trials, randomised, see randomised controlled trials correlation correlation coefficient Pearson cost analysis cost cost-minimisation ‘cost per case’ counting-and-measuring perspective covariables criteria, stringent critical appraisal pre-appraised sources qualitative papers critical care pathways cross-sectional surveys cumulative meta-analyses current practice cut-off point DALY (disability-adjusted life year) data baseline collection dredging paired pooled skewed databases DARE EPOC primary studies systematic reviews TRIP see also sources, resources decision-making evidence-based evidence-based practice shared therapy deduction deep venous thrombosis (DVT) deliberate bluffing delivery, induced design complex interventions RCT research studies ‘detailers’ detailing, academic diabetes qualitative research shared decision-making yoga control diagnosis diagnostic sequence diagnostic tests validation ‘dice therapy’ dichotomy qualitative direct costs direct-to-consumer-advertising (DTCA) disability-adjusted life year (DALY) disagreement, clinical discourse analysis ‘doing nothing’ Donald, Anna ‘dose dredging, data ‘drug reps’ drug treatments drugs, see also therapy, treatments duration of follow-up DVT (deep venous thrombosis) DynaMed EBM, see evidence-based medicine economic analyses editorial independence education for patients educational intervention, specific effective searching efficacy analysis eligibility criteria embodied knowledge endpoints, surrogate epilepsy EPOC Group ethical considerations drug trials QALYs RCTs ethnography Evans, Grimley evidence application on patients formalisation hierarchy of level of ‘methodologically robust’ evidence-based decision-making evidence-based guidelines evidence-based medicine (EBM) criticisms essential steps reading papers web-based resources ‘evidence-based organisation’ evidence-based policymaking evidence-based practice expectation bias ‘expert opinion’ harmful practices explanation of results surrogate endpoints explanatory variables explicit methods explicit standards external validity ‘eXtra’ material Eysenck, Hans F-test falsifiable hypotheses federated search engines ‘female hypoactive sexual desire’ focus groups focusing, progressive follow-up forest plot formalisation of evidence formulation of problems freedom, clinical fuzzy boundaries ‘geeks’ general health questionnaire, SF-36 general psychological antecedents generalisability CONSORT checklist GIDEON (Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network) GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) GOBSAT (good old boys sat around a table) ‘gold standard’ test good clinical questions Google Scholar Grimshaw, Jeremy Grol, Richard group relations theory groups comparable focus subgroups guidelines as formalised evidence implementation practice SQUIRE guiding principles Guyatt, Gordon hands-on information hanging comparative harmful practices ‘expert opinion’ health professionals evidence-based practice shared decision-making health-related lifestyle Helman, Cecil ‘here and now’ heterogeneity hierarchy of evidence pharmaceutical industry traditional histogram holistic perspective human factor human resources HYE (Healthy Years Equivalent) hypercholesterolaemia ‘hypoactive sexual desire’, female hypothesis, null ‘illness scripts’ implementation clinical guidelines guidelines IMRAD format inadequate optimisation inception cohort incremental cost independence, editorial indirect costs individualised approaches induced delivery inductive reasoning industry, pharmaceutical, see pharmaceutical industry infertility informal browsing information ‘jungle’ information needs informed choice ‘informed consent’ intangible costs integrated care pathways ‘integrated’ EBM teaching inter-rater reliability internet-accessible format interventions complex CONSORT checklist cost analysis effect of meta-analyses organisational simple specific educational interview qualitative research see also questionnaire invited review items (questionnaire) iterative approach journalistic review ‘jungle’, information Kappa score knowledge, collective knowledge managers laboratory experiments learning organisation least-squares methods ‘length of stay’ level of evidence lifestyle, health-related likelihood ratio nomogram literature searching long-term effects longitudinal survey looking for answers ‘lumpers and splitters’ mammogram management theory, classical Marinker, Marshall marketing masking, see blinding Maskrey, Neal McMaster Health Utilities Index Questionnaire mean inhibitory concentration (MIC) mean (statistical) measurements mechanistic approach mediator/moderator effect medicine evidence-based, see evidence-based medicine ‘narrative-based’ Medline systematic reviews meta-analyses aspirin interventions methodological quality assessment problematic descriptions systematic reviews ‘methodologically robust’ evidence mixed method case study motorcycle maintenance multiple interacting components n of 1 trial ‘narrative-based medicine’ narrative interview NAHA (National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts) National Guideline Clearinghouse needs assessment negative predictive value ‘negative’ trials neonatal respiratory distress syndrome NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) NNT (number needed to treat) nomogram, likelihood ratio non-diseases non-medical factors non-medical treatments non-normal data, see skewed data non-parametric tests non-randomised controlled clinical trials non-significant results, relevant non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) normal distribution ‘normal range’ normative orientation Nottingham Health Profile null hypothesis 30 objective of treatment one-stop shopping online material online tutorials, effective searching operational orientation opinion leader opportunity samples, questionnaire research option grids organisation, evidence-based organisational boundaries organisational case studies organisational interventions original studies original study protocol CONSORT checklist OSIRIS patient trial other-language studies outcome measures ‘outcomes research’ outliers p-value paired data papers economic analyses guidelines meta-analyses methodological quality qualitative research quality improvement case studies questionnaire research reading rejection systematic reviews ‘trashing’ participants qualitative research spectrum of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) patients advice or education for evidence application patient’s perspective ‘typical’ viewpoint withdrawal from studies Pearson correlation coefficient peer review per-protocol analysis personal digital assistants (PDAs) personal experiences perspective counting-and-measuring holistic patient’s researcher’s pharmaceutical industry evidence-based practice ‘grey literature’ pharmacokinetic measurements pharmacotherapy (PHA), see drug treatments philosophical-normative orientation PIER, see ACP PIER pilot trial piloting, questionnaire research ‘placebo’ effect clinical research studies methodological quality point-of-care resources policymaking evidence-based pooled data populations cohort studies guidelines qualitative research questionnaire research sub- positive predictive value post-test probability postal questionnaire practical-operational orientation practice, evidence-based practice guidelines pre-appraised sources pre-test probability precision prediction rules, clinical preliminary statistical questions prenatal steroid treatment press cutting prevalence primary studies PRISMA statement probability pre-/post-test problem formulation process evaluation professional behaviour prognosis progressive focusing PROMs (patient-reported outcome measures) prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test protocols original study protocol per-protocol analysis protocol-driven approach Psychiatry Online psychological antecedents, context-specific psychometric studies psychometric validity PubMed purposive sample Q-TWIST QADAS (Quality in Diagnostic and Screening tests) checklist QALY (quality-adjusted life year) QOF (Quality and Outcomes Framework) qualitative research quality methodological trial design quality improvement case studies quality improvement cycle ‘quality of care’ quality of life PROMs ‘queries’, clinical questionnaire ‘questionnaire mugger’ questionnaire research SF-36 general health questions good clinical preliminary statistical QUORUM statement quota sampling frame r-value random samples, questionnaire research randomised controlled trials (RCTs) checklist CONSORT statement cumulative meta-analyses hierarchy of evidence systematic bias rating scale measurements reading papers ‘real-life’ circumstances receptive context for change recruitment dates, CONSORT checklist reflexivity regression (statistical) rejection, papers relevant non-significant results reliability, inter-rater reporting format, structured reports, case reproducible tests research design ‘outcomes’ qualitative questionnaire research question researcher’s perspective secondary resources, Point-of-care respiratory distress syndrome, neonatal response rate retrospective subgroup analysis reviews clinical guidelines peer systematic Richard, Cliff risk, additional risk risk difference, see absolute risk reduction role preference safety improvement case studies sample size CONSORT checklist sciatica scientific jargon screening mammogram tests SD (standard deviation) search engines, federated searching effective literature secondary research clinical guidelines selection bias semi-structured interview sensitivity sensitivity analysis sequence generation, CONSORT checklist SF-36 general health questionnaire shared decision-making significance, statistical simple interventions skewed data snowball samples, questionnaire research social cognition social movement ‘social stigma’ ‘soft’ science Someren, Van sources pre-appraised synthesised specialised resources specific educational intervention specificity spectrum of participants ‘splitters and lumpers’ sponsors and stakeholders SQUIRE guidelines stages of change models stakeholders standard current practice standard deviation (SD) standard gamble measurements standardisation standards, explicit and accessible statin therapy statistical questions, preliminary statistical significance statistical tests appropriate evaluation statistics STEP (safety, tolerability, efficacy, price) steroid treatment, prenatal stratified random samples stringent criteria stroke anticoagulants meta-analyses methodological quality structured reporting format studies case cohort design in-/exclusion of participants organisational case original protocol other-language ‘patients’ primary process evaluation psychometric research question (un)original validation withdrawal of patients subgroups, complex interventions retrospective analysis subjective judgements subpopulations surfactant treatment surrogate endpoints surveys cross-sectional literature longitudinal Swinglehurst, Deborah synopses synthesised sources systematic bias systematic reviews databases evaluation evidence-based practice systematically skewed samples t-test table, two-by-two tails target population target variable X2-test tests diagnostic ‘gold standard’ non-parametric PSA reproducible screening statistical theoretical sampling therapy anticoagulant CBT decision-making ‘dice’ NSAID statin see also treatments therapy studies, trial design thrombosis, DVT time trade-off measurements traditional hierarchy of evidence transferable results ‘trashing’ papers Treasury’s viewpoint treatments drug non-medical objective of prenatal steroid see also therapy trials design n of ‘negative’ non-randomised controlled clinical pilot randomised controlled, see randomised controlled trials triangulation TRIP tutorials, online TWIST two-by-two table ‘typical’ patients underfunding ‘unoriginal’ studies unquestioned assumptions validation clinical guidelines diagnostic tests validity external psychometric variables explanatory statistical regression verification bias viewpoint of economic analyses ‘washout’ periods web-based resources, EBM Whole Systems Demonstrator work-up bias WTP/WTA (Willingness to Pay/Accept)

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

., 2009a, “Computational and Dynamic Complexity in Economics,” in Handbook of Research on Complexity, ed. J. Barkley Rosser Jr. (Chelten ham, UK: Edgar Elgar), 22–25. 27. John Horgan, 1997, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (New York: Broadway Books), 303; see also Neil Johnson, 2009, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications). 28. Paul Ormerod, 2012, Positive Linking: How Networks Can Revolutionise the World (London: Faber and Faber). 29. Ibid., x. 30. Ibid., xi. 31. Malcolm Gladwell catalogs numerous events and trends that occur for seemingly inexplicable reasons. Linking such diverse subjects as fashion trends or crime to the patterns with which epidemics develop, his work illustrates precisely the nonlinear and opaque nature of twenty-first-century risk that we intend to study in the course of this book.

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“Rising Income Inequality: Technology, or Trade and Financial Globalization?” IMF Working Paper 185. International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. Accessed 3 February 2013. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/wp08185.pdf. Jervis, Robert. 1997. System Effects. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Neil. 2009. Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. Johnson, Simon. 2009. “The Quiet Coup.” Atlantic Magazine, May. Accessed 16 October 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/. Jorgenson, Andrew K., J. Kelly Austin, and Christopher Dick. 2009. “Ecologically Unequal Exchange and the Resource Consumption / Environmental Degradation Paradox: A Panel Study of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–2000.”

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice by Casey Rosenthal, Nora Jones

Amazon Web Services, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, complexity theory, continuous integration, cyber-physical system, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, hindsight bias, human-factors engineering, information security, Kanban, Kubernetes, leftpad, linear programming, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, node package manager, operational security, OSI model, pull request, ransomware, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software as a service, statistical model, systems thinking, the scientific method, value engineering, WebSocket

Finding new ways to disseminate it throughout the organization will always be on my mind. I think more generally you could say the same thing about shared context and the value of finding common ground. Leadership Is an Emergent Property of the System What I find fascinating about systems thinking and complexity theory is that it applies to everything. When I realized that leadership within an organization could be looked at through this lens, it blew my mind. It’s important to note that when I talk about the word “leadership” in this context, I’m not talking about people or a team of people who “lead others.”

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Many of the challenges we deal with in distributed systems can be mapped to challenges within an organization, and at some point ownership and accountability ultimately end up on the shoulders of the system’s leader. Moving your organization forward Dr. James Barker is a professor and researcher at Dalhousie University, specializing in organizational safety, leadership theories, and complexity theory. He describes leadership as an emergent property of the system that moves the organization forward. I love this definition. It frames leadership as decision making within bounded context. A leader is one who makes a given choice that they become accountable for. This definition aligns well with pushing context and decision making out to the edges, to the “sharp end,” the practitioners, the people who understand the most about the trade-offs they make every day.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Not just Napoleon but the humblest medieval peasant had only to sneeze in order to affect something which changed something else which, after a long chain reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors failed to be your ancestor and became somebody else's instead. I'm not talking about 'chaos theory', or the equally trendy 'complexity theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous. When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers.

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The author is drunk on metaphor, captivated by the idea of the helix, which misleads him into seeing connections which do not illuminate the truth in any way. Calling it poetic science is too kind: it is more like theological science. Recently my incoming mail has registered a sharp rise in the normal load of 'chaos theory', 'complexity theory', 'non-linear criticality' and similar phrases. Now I'm not saying that these correspondents lack the faintest, foggiest clue what they are talking about. But I will say it's hard to discover whether they do. New Age cults of all kinds cure swimming in bogus scientific language, regurgitated, half-understood (no, less than half) jargon: energy fields, vibration, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, quantum consciousness.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along. Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (‘Aren’t we all, in a very real sense, uncertain?’), Fuzzy Logic (‘Yes, it’s OK for you to be fuzzy too’), Chaos and Complexity Theory (the butterfly effect, the platonic, hidden beauty of the Mandelbrot Set – you name it, somebody has mysticized it and turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on ‘quantum healing’, not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology.

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., (i) Coevolutionary arms race, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Competition For opposite sex, (i), (ii) Survival of macromutations in absence of, (i) Within species, causing extinction, (i) Complexity (see also Genome: Information content of) As information content, (i) Increase in, (i) Complexity theory, Misuse of, (i) Computer, (i), (ii), 157 (see also Virus, Computer) Convergence Modern physics and eastern mysticism, (i) Science and religion, (i), (ii) Conway Morris, Simon, (i), (ii), (iii) Cooperation, Evolution of, (i) Copying, see Fidelity under Gene, Meme Creationism ‘Intelligent design’, (i), (ii) Young Earth Creationism, (i) Creationists Propaganda of, (i), (ii) Refusing to debate with, (i), (ii) Regrettable gift of punctuated equilibrists to, (i) Creator, The Added to later editions of Origin, (i)f Litters genomes with pseudogenes, (i) Treats genomes of newts capriciously, (i) Crick, Francis, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Cronin, Helena, (i), (ii) Crow, James, (i)f Croze, Harvey, (i), (ii) Crystals Alleged magical properties of, (i) Self-assembly of, (i) Structure of lattices, (i) Cultural relativism, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Cultural Studies, (i) Culture, (i), 151 (see also Meme) Culturgen, (i), (ii) Cupitt, Don, (i) Curie brothers, (i) Cuvier, Georges, (i) Darwin, Charles, (i), (ii) His coining of ‘Devil’s Chaplain’, (i) His disagreement with Wallace, (i) His encyclopaedic knowledge, (i) His near anticipation of Fisher on sex ratios, (i) His near discovery of Mendelism, (i) His ‘other’ theory, see Sexual selection His timeless achievement, (i) His Victorian outlook, (i), (ii) His views on race, (i), (ii) Not against punctuationism, (i) On worms, (i) Darwinism Coining by Wallace, (i) Core, (i) Incompatibility with blending inheritance, (i) Moral implications of, (i) Opposing as human being, (i) Universal, (i), (ii), (iii) Data Compression of, (i) Independent, (i) Davies, Paul, (i) Dawkins, Juliet, (i), (ii), (iii) Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty, (i) Death, Forecasting, (i) Deleuze, Gilles, (i) Delius, Juan, (i) Dennett, Daniel, (i), (ii)f, (iii), (iv), (v) On memes, (i)f, (ii), (iii) Descent of Man, The, (i), (ii) Design, Illusion of, (i), (ii) Determinism, see ‘Genetic determinism’ Development (see also Embryology) Coding for complex life cycles, (i) Complex recipe-like effects of genes on, (i), (ii), (iii) Embryonic, Evolutionary change in terms of, (i) Point at which foetus ‘becomes human’, (i) Rubber band and blanket analogy for, (i) Devil’s Chaplain, A, (i), (ii) Diamond, (i), (ii) Diamond, Jared, (i) Diamond, John, (i), (ii), (iii) Digger wasp, (i) Disraeli, Benjamin (as typewriter transubstantiated), (i) DNA Duplicating, (i) Fingerprinting, (i) Information content of, (i), (ii) Junk, (i), (ii) National database, (i) Parasitic, (i), (ii) Selfish, (i)f, (ii) Sequencing, (i) Viral, (i), (ii) Dobzhansky, Theodosius, (i), (ii) Dog, (i) Dolly (sheep), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Double-blind trials, (i), (ii), (iii) Double Helix, The, (i) Douglas-Hamilton, Iain and Oria, (i) Düsing, Carl, (i) Eberhard, W.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

It is a straightforward process, using methods such as inductive logic programming,44 to create programs that propose new concepts and definitions in order to identify theories that are both accurate and concise. At present, we know how to do this for relatively simple cases, but for more complex theories the number of possible new concepts that could be introduced becomes simply enormous. This makes the recent success of deep learning methods in computer vision all the more intriguing. The deep networks usually succeed in finding useful intermediate features such as eyes, legs, stripes, and corners, even though they are using very simple learning algorithms.

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For a much better explanation of quantum computation, see Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing since Democritus (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 34. The paper that established a clear complexity-theoretic distinction between classical and quantum computation: Ethan Bernstein and Umesh Vazirani, “Quantum complexity theory,” SIAM Journal on Computing 26 (1997): 1411–73. 35. The following article by a renowned physicist provides a good introduction to the current state of understanding and technology: John Preskill, “Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond,” arXiv:1801.00862 (2018). 36. On the maximum computational ability of a one-kilogram object: Seth Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation,” Nature 406 (2000): 1047–54. 37.

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics by Don Hanlon Johnson

BIPOC, clean water, colonial rule, complexity theory, conceptual framework, deep learning, emotional labour, epigenetics, imposter syndrome, liberation theology, mass incarceration, microaggression, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, W. E. B. Du Bois, working poor

For other men, the physical body overrides the emotional self; relationships bring up unprocessed material around intimacy, where the emotional self is not yet ready to be engaged in sexuality. This leads to dissociative sexual experiences or sexual experiences that require intoxicants in order to be successful. Morin’s complexity theory helps explain the impact of life on gay men and how they see themselves in the larger world: Self-organizing beings—which on our planet, are essentially living beings—are systems that are not only not closed (protecting their own integrity and their identity) but also open to their environment, from which they derive matter, energy, information, and organization.

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and questions of lineage, 161–165 who decides group membership, 175–178 black people books authored by prominent, 229 on double consciousness in the U.S. of, 186 blackness, identifying with, 176–177 blessings (iré), cowry shell divination, 47–48 blue, as color of the West, 55 bodily practices. see also Japanese society, bodily practices as alienation from authentic self, 203–204 body as authentic self in, 204 constriction and release in, 82–83 rarely valued as theme of academic study, 202 somatics as new field of, 204–208 body accessing in somatic practice, 189 in autism. see autistic embodiment Babaylan and decolonizing of, 191 beginning of embodiment, 252–253 and body politic, 12–16 derivation of word, 10 and environment in epigenetics, 257–259 impact of life on gay men, 262–264 as interconnected process, 133–135 learning how to hold e, 243 as process, 133 reframing as resource and teacher, 86 returning to African ways of embodiment, 244 soma-cultural perspective on. see balance, seeking via 5Rhythms somatics and the social, 201–204 white people and safety of, 237–240 working with other autistics, 116 body politic, and body, 12–16 body practices, social change and, 9–12 body privilege, in gay community, 267–268 Bodynamics, reservoir theory, 268 bonsai tree metaphor, gay men, 254–255, 275 borderlands body and body politic, 12–16 democratic sensibility, 5–9 disoriented and vulnerable wanderers in, 4 from division to creation, 1–3 making bodies and social change, 9–12 shared suffering, 3–5 somatics, 16–19 Bowen, Bill, 265 Bowlby, John, 56 bracketing, mental vs. bodily, 206 brain causing dyspraxia in autistics, 96–97 cortical neurons in autistic, 91 epigenetic research on, 259 neuroplasticity of autistic, 106–107 in protogay child, 261–262 Brainspotting, pattern theory, 266 bullying childhood experiences of racism via, 232–233 most autistic children subjected to, 102 preventing by learning aikido, 106 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), AIAN nations eligibility for benefits, 26 C Cabbage Patch doll, 166–167 California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), 82–83 Call of the Wild (London), 255 caregivers, attachment to our, 56 cathexis point, reservoir theory, 268–269 Catholic imperialism, 185–186, 187–189 Catholicism, red color in, 51 celibacy, Gandhi’s pleas for, 13 centering, and autistic students/clients, 116–117 chachayotes (ankle rattles), Danza Azteca, 52 Chang, Iris, 213–214 chant (oli), Hula Kahiko traditions, 60–61 chaos, rhythm of 5Rhythms and, 36–37 defined, 31 leads to catharsis, then to lyrical, 37–38 somatic sense of self, 40–42 Chemsex, 270 children, South as direction of, 64–66 Chinese-American civil movement, 213–214 CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies), 82–83 clients, autistic, 116–117 closing the Gap, 145–147 cognition, autistic neurobiology and, 90 collective Gap, 135–139 collective wounding, depression, 144–145 colonialism colonization in Philippines, 184–189 decolonization in Philippines. see decolonization, somatics of Gandhi on purging body of effects of, 13 Gandhi’s analysis of, 15–16 hiding Lukimi practices during, 45 integrating oppression into somatics, 184 coming out process breaking free as gay man, 255 how gay men come into being, 257 increasing resiliency via, 274 Coming to America movie, 244 communal organization, 5–8 community breaking free as gay man and, 256 creating new social order, 2–3 double consciousness from loss of, 187 gay man expressing embodiment in, 274 joining Soul Sistah Circle, 172 complexity theory, Edgar Morin, 263 Connections (Roth), 41 consecrated beaded necklace/flag (eleke), Lukimi, 48–49 constriction, and release, 82–84 constructionist worldview, 21 containment, direction of west and, 56 cooperative communal organization, 5–8 Core Energetics, reservoir theory, 268 cortical neurons, autistic brain, 91 cowry shell divination (diloggun reading), 45–46 cowry shell diviner (oriate), 47–48 creation,, from division to, 1–3 creativity, difference essential to, 1–2 Crutcher, Terrance (killing of), 172 cultivation, narratives of in this book, 12 cycle of inquiry, somatic sense of self, 40–41 D dance of 5Rhythms. see 5Rhythms practice asking permission of ancestors to, 60–61 of autistic embodiment, 99–100, 103, 110–111, 114 between body and world, 133 changing bodily practice of, 9 feeling in sync with external universe, 50 freedom via, 25 with the Gap, 123–126, 135–139, 146–147 healing divided mind and body, 17, 25 as process of lifelong learning, 23 shaping infant into adult, 11 West African. see West African dance danzante, Danza Azteca and, 52–53 de-armoring, autistics, 117 decolonization, somatics of accessing depth through Babaylan, 189–192 accessing length through Bahala Na, 194–196 accessing width through Kapwa, 192–194 collective dignity, collective responsibility, 196–197 DeGruy, Joy, 87, 235 de-historicizing the body, 210–212, 213 democracy creating inclusive social order, 5–6 European Enlightenment subordinated, 7–8 in fifth-century BCE Greece, 6 long struggle of, 6–7 nurturing individual/collective healing, 8–9 welfare of others in, 7 depression from childhood abuses, 259 family lineage of, 144 in gap between wounding/healing, 124–125 as individual and collective, 144–145 isolation in, 143–144 toying with death in, 130–131 despair, kapwa as anchor for deep, 194 determination in face of uncertainty (bahala na), 195–196 Dewey, John, 8–9 DiAngelo, Robin, 153–154 difference, essential to creativity, 1–2 dignity, collective, 196–197 diloggun reading (cowry shell divination), 45–46 diversity autism and human neurodiversity, 90 creating new out of, 2 soma-cultural perspective on, 21–22 division, to creation from, 1–3 DNA markers, passing trauma through epigenetic, 235, 236 dolls, in biracial childhood, 166–167 double consciousness of black people in U.S., 186 of Filipinos after generations of colonialism, 187 drugs, influence on gay somatic life, 269–270 drums, 244–245 Du Bois, W.E.B., 186, 191, 229 dual attention cultivating mindful presence, 107 quality of expansiveness in, 109 work with autistic students and clients, 117 Duncan, Isadora, 206 dununba (largest dun), 244 dununfola (player of drums), 245 dununs (three drums), 244 dyspraxia in autistic individuals, 96–97 neuroplasticity supplanting, 107 shaming young autistics for lack of physical aptitude, 103 E Ealom, Tayla. see social wounds/personal transformation Earth direction of South as element of, 64 rhythm of flowing and Mother, 33–34 East, direction of the, 51–53 Eastern philosophy, mind-body issue in, 11 ebbo prescriptions, cowry shell divination, 48–49 Ebonics, 234 ecstasy, in sexual experiences/expression, 36–37 efun (used in ceremony for protection), 60 elders, North as direction of, 59 Eleggua, as living energy in Lakimi, 49 eleke (consecrated beaded necklace/flag), Lukimi practice, 48–49 Emancipation Proclamation, 222 embodiment autistic. see autistic embodiment gay men and therapeutic, 271–276 gay men seek to explain their, 257 reawakening for gay men, 255 relationship of protogay boy to, 261 EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), pattern theory, 266 Emergent Strategy (Brown), 80, 84 emotion, ethnic origin and, 152 empire, oppression of, 184 engagement, somatic sense of self, 40–41 ennvrkvpv (in the middle) sexual orientation, 28 Enriquez, Virgilio, 189, 195 environment autistic embodiment and, 115 and body in epigenetics, 257–259 embodied experience shaped by, 230 expanding/contracting and, 81–84 gay men profoundly shaped by, 255 molded into different shapes by our, 275 White people’s social, 153 whole body interaction with, 131–132 epigenetics genetic theory and, 257–259 how gay men come into being, 257 passing trauma through DNA markers, 235, 236 physical environment and, 269 Erotic Mind (Morin), 272 Europe, Reich addressing social devastation in, 13–14 European Enlightenment, 7–8, 10 expansiveness as quality of akido, 109 working with other autistics, 117 experience characteristics of, 207–208 disconnection of thought and, 206 environment shapes our embodied, 230 as a flow, 207 learning from history, 208–210 nature of autistic, 90–91 peace education grounded in, 208–210 trauma manifests in embodied, 236 unexamined framework of bodily, 206 Worldwork field dynamics and, 212–213 Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (Gendlin), 206–208 experiential psychology, 212–216 external experience (labas), kapwa and, 194 eye contact, autistics and, 95–96 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), pattern theory, 266 F fable-like story (patakí), cowry shell divination, 47 fallow field concept, rhythm of stillness, 38–39 family origins, biracial child, 161–162 fascism, Reich’s analysis of, 14–16 Faye, Oumou, 245 field dynamics, Worldwork, 212–213 flowers, South as direction of, 64 flowing, rhythm of 5Rhythms and, 32–34 defined, 31 exploring somatic sense of self, 40–42 For Harriet, online community, 175 Foster, Kimberley, 175 Francis-Ecoffey, Stephanie. see black and white: biracial in America freedom letting go of chaos for, 38 requires body practices, 14 Freudian psychology U.S. colonial rule in Philippines and, 186–187 Wilhelm Reich shaped by, 14 Fukuma, Yoshiaki, 208–209 G Gandhi, Mohandas, 12–16 Gap closing, 145–147 collective, 135–139 definition of, 123 and I, 123–134 structuring, 139–143 gay coming out as, 33 what it means to be, 22–23 gay men, somatic psychotherapy and beginning of embodiment, 252–253 beginning to work with, 253–257 bibliography, 276–282 coming into being, 257–265 genetic theory and epigenetics, 257–259 how I got here, 251–252 overview of, 249–250 physical psychoeducation, 265–266 protogay boy, 260–261 protogay child, 261–265 revisiting epigenetics, 269–271 somatic theory, 266–269 therapeutic embodiment and, 271–276 Gendlin, Eugene, 61, 131–132, 206–208 genetic theory, and epigenetics, 257–259 The Great Turning, awaits us, 146 Greece, democracy in in fifth-century BCE, 6 grief colonialism and undigested, 188 exploring using rhythm of staccato, 35 healing by turning slowly towards wound, 146–147 from impacts of racism, 122, 139, 144–145 kapwa as anchor for deep, 194 living in white supremacist culture and, 170–172 role of Babaylan in guidance through, 190 as turning point in healing process, 3, 190 Griffin, Susan, 6–7, 202, 210 guilt creating personhood without, 183 of having caused pain to others, 79 undoing fat hatred in order to process, 81 Gutierrez, Francisca, 65 Gutiérrez.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Of course, sometimes the natural sciences themselves encountered something commensurable to a crisis in their own fields of endeavor—think of dark matter and dark energy, or the breakdown of causality in the 1920s—but they didn’t respond by evasive maneuvers and suppressing its consideration, as did the economists. In retrospect, appeals to science will be seen to have proven a bit of a red herring in coming to terms with the current crisis. Physical complexity theory or neuromysticism or dark matter won’t save us now. In the heat of battle, economists purported to be defending “science’”when, in fact, they were only defending themselves and their minions. Lesson 4: The failure of the economics profession is a saga of social disfunction The completeness of the [orthodox] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery.

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“Reporting Science and Conflicts of Interest in the Lay Press,” PLoS One 12 (December 2007): e1266. Cooke, Kristina, and Emily Flitter. “Economists Display Little Interest in Ethics Code,” Reuters, July 8, 2011, at http://ca.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idCATRE7673XK20110708. Cooper, Melinda. “Complexity Theory after the Crisis: The Death of Neoliberalism or the Triumph of Hayek?” Journal of Cultural Economy 4 (2011): 371–85. Cooper, Melinda. “Foucault, Neoliberalism and the Iranian Revolution,” in Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, eds., The Government of Life: Michel Foucault and Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

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See also Vroman, “Allusions to Evolution,” and Mirowski, Machine Dreams, on the origins of the “cyborg sciences.” 76 Cooper, Life as Surplus; Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life. 77 See, for instance, McKinnon, Neo-liberal Genetics; Ridley, The Agile Gene and The Rational Optimist; Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain; and my review of the latter book in Technology and Culture, 2012. 78 Cooper, “Complexity Theory after the Crisis”; Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resistance.” 79 This subtle ontological move and its relationship to political action is best illustrated by the neoliberal response to global warming, discussed in chapter 6. 80 Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, p. xiii. 81 Neoliberals tend to perceive democracy as desirable only insofar as democratic institutions encourage the development of the economic system they advocate.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

Instead, in general systems theory, a system is characterized by the interactions of its components and the nonlinearity of those interactions. In other words, we take the totality and the complexity of interactions into account simultaneously. Potpourri: General systems theory has a lot in common with chaos theory and complexity theory. Chaos theory addresses the study of complex dynamical systems (i.e., systems that follow a fixed rule over time), where the system is highly dependent on Bringing It All Together initial conditions. This means that very slight fluctuations in the initial conditions can radically affect the end state of the system.

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., 131 bounded rationality, 98, 100 Boyce, Rick, 10 brand, 6, 14–15, 25, 69–70, 74, 95, 103, 111–122, 126–127, 129–130, 140–142, 144, 201, 207, 221, 223, 225 brand advertising, 126 Brand attitude, 116 brand awareness, 113 brand equity, 114 brand familiarity, 116 brand image, 1, 14–15, 70, 103, 112–114, 117, 120, 141 Brand recall, 114, 117 Brand recognition, 113, 117 Brand relationship, 114–115, 117 273 274 Index Brand trust, 116–117 branded keyphrases, 119–120, 141, 183, 187 branded terms, 41, 69–70, 186 branding, xiii, 16, 65, 69, 103, 106, 111–114, 116–118, 120–121, 126, 128–129, 131, 135, 140–142, 149, 171, 177, 190, 199, 203, 207–209, 213, 227 Brewer, Jeffrey, 11 Brin, Sergey, 206, 217–218 Broder, Andrei, 44 Brooks, Nico, 76–77 Bullington, Brett, 12 butterfly effect, 205 buying decision, 98–99, 130 buying funnel, 86, 93–98, 101, 103–106, 129–130, 210, 213 Capitani, 74 Caples, John, 127 CA$HVERTISING, 125 causation, 153 caveat emptor, 179 chaos theory, 204 check-in applications, 224 choice set, 71, 79, 94, 120, 130 Choice uncertainty, 99 classic advertising appeals, 124 click fraud, 167–168, 170, 221 Click potential, 76 clickthrough lift, 124 click-through rate, 24, 74–75, 178, See€clickthrough rate, 14–15 The Cluetrain Manifesto, 129 Commercial Alert, 21 communication process, 32–33, 36, 54, 86, 101–103, 105–106, 111, 207, 210, 213 communication theory, 86 complexity theory, 204 comScore, 152 concept of chunking, 42 concept of technological innovation, 5 consumer behavior, xiii, 86, 89, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 105–106, 129 consumer buying behavior, 98, 103 consumer buying process, 94, 98, 100–101, 104, 106 consumer decision making, 86, 93–95, 101, 105, 208, 213 consumer purchasing behavior, 86 consumer search process, 48, 90, 93, 98 consumer searching, 41, 47, 63, 86–87, 90, 93, 95, 98–99, 210 consumer searching behavior, 41, 86, 95, 210 content targeting, 19 context, ix, x, xiii, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 11, 32–33, 36, 43, 69, 86, 88, 91–92, 97, 100–103, 106, 112, 114–115, 119, 126–128, 131, 157, 159–164, 166, 177, 187, 212, 217, 220, 224, 226 contextual advertising, xii, 19, 225 Conversion potential, 76 Corporate branding, 112 Correlation, 153 Credence goods, 39–40 creditability, 150 Culliton, James, 131 curiosity, i, ix, x, xiv, 46, 125 Customer brand image, 120 customer market segmentation, 120 Database of Intentions, 31 dayparting, 184, 186 Delhagen, Kate, 12 determinants, 92–93, 98, 118 Direct Hit Technologies, 21 direct response, 126 direct response advertising, 126 Doc Seals, 129 dominate, 125 east, 22, 24, 72 ebay, 179 Ebbinghaus, H., 74 economic theory, 49, 91 effectiveness, 24, 35, 113, 118, 145, 149, 151, 159, 170, 180, 210 efficiency, 62, 151, 170, 180, 210 empirical methods, xii erosion, 159–160 escape, 125 Esch, F.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Kolmogorov complexity theory encapsulates it this way: Something is random when you cannot explain how to derive a sequence using any fewer than the number of elements in the sequence itself. This definition of complexity meshes with our everyday, lay use of the term. We say that a car is more complex than a bicycle, and surely it takes a far larger set of instructions to build a car than a bicycle. Information theory can be applied to organizational systems like the file and folder hierarchy on your computer, or to org charts in a company. And, according to Kolmogorov complexity theory, if the org chart can be described by a small number of simple rules, the company is said to be highly structured.

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Sustained concentration and effort is most effective not when fragmented into little pieces by multitasking, but when apportioned into big focused chunks separated by leisure, exercise, or other mentally restorative activities. Multitasking results from information overload, trying to attend to too many things at once. When the many things we’re attending to require a decision, how much information do we need to make optimal decisions? Optimal complexity theory states that there is an inverted U function for how much information or complexity is optimal. Too little is no good, but so is too much. In one study, experimenters simulated a military exercise. Players in the simulated game were college students in teams who were either invading or defending a small island country.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

I am convinced that if [the price system] were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Hayek’s paper, which anticipated many of the ideas of what would coalesce into complexity theory later in the twentieth century, highlighted that the actions of individual members could generate information that was highly valuable to the entire crowd. What’s more, this information often can’t be gleaned from observing a small number of members: you’ll never learn the price of tin by watching just a couple of miners or metalworkers.

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., 310–11 as response to inherent incompleteness of contracts, 314–17 solutionism’s alternatives to, 297–99 TCE and, 312–15 and technologies of disruption, 307–9 Compass Fund, 267 complements (complementary goods) defined, 156 effect on supply/demand curves, 157–60 free, perfect, instant, 160–63 as key to successful platforms, 169 and open platforms, 164 platforms and, 151–68 and revenue management, 183–84 Stripe and, 173 complexity theory, 237 Composite Fund (D. E. Shaw), 267 composition, musical, 117 computational biology, 116–17 computer-aided design, 119–20 computers (generally) and Go, 3–6 origins of programming, 66–67 and standard partnership, 31 concentration, sales/profits, 311–12 confabulation, 45n conference venues, 189 confirmation bias, 57 Confucius, 1 connections, human, 122–24 consciousness, 120 construction sites, drones for mapping, 99 consumer loyalty and, 210–11 consumer surplus, 155–56, 159, 161, 164, 173 content, crowd-created, 8, 234 content platforms, 139 contracts blockchain and, 291–95 and failure mode of decentralized things, 317–19 inherent incompleteness of, 314–17 contributions, to open-source software, 242–43 coordination costs, 313–14 Cope, David, 117, 119 Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), 147n core in centrally planned economies, 235, 236 as counterpart to the crowd, 15 crowd as, 230–31 crowd as independent of, 271–75 DAO vs., 303 handling of bad actors, 234 leveraging of crowd by, 260–70 libraries as, 230 mismatching of problem to, 256–58 Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, 72 “Corporal Coles hand,” 273–74 counterfeit goods, 290 Cowen, Tyler, 208–9 Craigslist, 138–39 Crawford, Kate, 52 creative destruction, 330 creativity definitions of, 113 human connection in digitized world, 122–24 limits of computers’ contributions, 119–22 machines and, 110–19 other forms of computer-aided activity vs., 119–22 credit cards, 214–16 credit scores, 46–47 CRISPR, 258 CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, 271–72 Crocker, F.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

Reflections on the motive force of life In chapter 2 we peered inside a steam engine to discover that its motive force involved capturing the random motion of the sea of billiard-ball-like molecules and directing the molecular turbulence toward driving the piston within the cylinder. We then asked whether life can be entirely accounted for by the same “order from disorder” thermodynamic principle that drives steam engines. Is life just an elaborate steam engine? Many scientists are convinced that it is, but in a subtle way that needs a little elaboration. Complexity theory studies the tendency of certain forms of random chaotic motion to generate order through the phenomenon of self-organization. For example, as we have already discussed, the molecules within liquids are moving entirely chaotically, yet when your bathtub is draining the water spontaneously flows around the drain in an orderly clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

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clownfish, see anemonefish cockroaches collagen: biomolecule collagenase action, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 dinosaur fossil, 3.1, 9.1 role structure, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 tadpole tail, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 collagenase: enzyme, 3.1, 3.2 how it works, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 jaws, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 role, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 structure, 3.1, 3.2 tadpole tail compass, avian entanglement mechanism, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, epl.1 magnetic sense, 1.1, 1.2, 6.1, 6.2 magnetite question radical pair reaction, 6.1, 6.2 role of light Schulten’s work Wiltschkos’ work compass, chemical, 1.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 compass, conventional compass, inclination, 1.1, 1.2, 6.1, 6.2 compass, quantum compass, radical pair, 6.1, 6.2 compass, sun, 6.1, 6.2 complexity theory computational theory of mind computers, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 viruses Condon, Edward consciousness: binding problem, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 emergence EM field theories explanations function hard problem ideas, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 ion channels, 8.1, 8.2 mechanics of thought Penrose-Hameroff theory quantum mechanical phenomenon, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 sense of “self,” what is it?

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

For instance, he shows, mathematically, that if we represent systems of relations by a graph, the key to generating a small-world phenomenon (which epitomizes a networking logic) is the presence of a small fraction of very long-range, global edges, which contract otherwise distant parts of the graph, while most edges remain local, organized in clusters.100 This accurately represents the logic of local/global networking of innovation, as documented in this chapter. The important contribution of the complexity theory school of thought is its emphasis on non-linear dynamics as the most fruitful approach to understanding the behavior of living systems, both in society and in nature. Most of the work of the Santa Fe Institute researchers is of a mathematical nature, not an empirically based analysis of natural or social phenomena.

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Capra shows how cutting-edge research in areas as diverse as cell development, global ecological systems (as represented by the controversial Gaia theory, and by Lovelock’s “Daisyworld” simulation model), neuroscience (as in the work of Gerald Edelman or Oliver Sacks), and studies on the origins of life based on emerging chemical network theory, are all manifestations of a non-linear dynamics perspective.102 Key new concepts, such as attractors, phase portraits, emergent properties, fractals, offer new perspectives in making sense of observations of behavior in living systems, including social systems – thus paving the way for a theoretical linkage between various fields of science. Not by reducing them to a common set of rules, but by explaining processes and outcomes from the self-generating properties of specific living systems. Brian Arthur, a Stanford economist with the Santa Fe Institute, has applied complexity theory to formal economic theory, proposing concepts such as self-reinforcing mechanisms, path dependency, and emergent properties, and showing their relevance in understanding the features of the new economy.103 In sum, the information technology paradigm does not evolve toward its closure as a system, but toward its openness as a multi-edged network.

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Cappelli, Peter (1997) Change at Work, New York: Oxford University Press. —— and Rogovsky, Nicolai (1994) “New work systems and skill requirements”, International Labour Review, 133(2): 205–20. Capra, Fritjof (1996) The Web of Life, New York: Random House. —— (1999a) Personal communication, Berkeley, October. —— (1999b) “Complexity theory”, unpublished presentation at the University of California, Berkeley, November. Carey, M. and Franklin, J.C. (1991) “Outlook: 1990–2005 industry output and job growth continues slow into next century”, Monthly Labor Review, November: 45–60. Carnoy, Martin (1989) The New Information Technology: International Diffusion and its Impact on Employment and Skills.

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

It took him several years to work up the nerve to say publicly what he really thought.b The linguists William Stokoe of Gallaudet University (for the deaf), Gordon Hewes, and Roger Westcott edited one of the classics of late-twentieth-century liguistics, Language Origins, in 1974—with the proud claim that they had filled in a gap in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.c And on they came, linguists and anthropologists intent upon shoring up Chomsky’s great edifice with evidence…the gestural theory…the big brain theory…the social complexity theory…and…and… …and more and more scholars sat at their desks just like junior Chomskys trying to solve the mysteries of language with sheer brainpower. The results were not electrifying. Nevertheless, Chomsky had brought the field back to life. In February of 1967—bango!—Chomsky shot up clear through the roof of their little world of linguistics and lit up the sky…with a twelve-thousand-word excoriation of America’s role in the war in Vietnam entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”

Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw

complexity theory, finite state, functional programming, index card, web application

Exercise 27: Memorizing Logic Today is the day you start learning about logic. Up to this point you have done everything you possibly can reading and writing files, to the terminal, and have learned quite a lot of the math capabilities of Python. From now on, you will be learning logic. You won't learn complex theories that academics love to study, but just the simple basic logic that makes real programs work and that real programmers need every day. Learning logic has to come after you do some memorization. I want you to do this exercise for an entire week. Do not falter. Even if you are bored out of your mind, keep doing it.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

., 248–49 Chaos (Gleick), 70, 234 chaos theory, 67, 134, 301–2, 304 Chase Financial Policy, 163–64 Chicago Board of Options Exchange, 145 Chicago Board of Trade, 40 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 145, 194, 219,227–28, 230 Chicago Tribune, 35–36 Cisco Systems, 261–62, 262–63, 278, 284 Citrin, Robert, 362n. 17 Clinton, Bill, 244 CNA Financial, 125 Coca-Cola, 270–71 coin-flip game, 26, 212–13 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 314 Collins, Jim, 284 Colorado Springs, Colorado, 35–36 Columbia Business School, 211 Columbia University, 47–48 Commodities Corp., 223–24 commodities market, 20, 39–40, 69–72, 133, 145, 194–95 Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 244 Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments (Smith), 22 competition, 160, 181, 353–54n. 25 complexity theory, 134, 301–2, 304 Complexity (Waldrop), 302 computers, 29, 86–87, 99–101, 204, 219, 224, 232, 234, 303–4 The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Engels), 369n. 1 conglomerates, 120, 166 Convertible Hedge Associates, 218 Cootner, Paul, 71, 134, 223 corporations, 4, 14, 66, 137, 153–55, 159–61, 351–52n. 2 Corrigan, Gerald, 243 Council of Institutional Investors, 272–73 Cowles, Alfred, III, 35–39, 42, 43, 51–52, 55, 68, 70, 98, 111, 323 Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, 37, 51–53, 65, 76–78, 89, 341n. 9 Cowles Foundation, 55, 58 credit default swaps, 314 credit markets, xii, 317 currency markets, 92–93, 145, 236, 241, 250 Darwin, Charles, 9 De Bondt, Werner, 187, 201, 206, 296 Debreu, Gerard, 77–78, 150, 344n. 9 debt, 25, 170, 313–15 decision theory, 177–78 deflation, 11, 19–20 DeLong, Brad, 251 demand curves, 39 Department of Applied Economics (Cambridge), 64 deregulation, 152, 258, 320 derivatives, xii, xiv, 150–52, 220–21, 235, 236–37 dice games, 27.

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See also rational market hypothesis and agency costs, 162 and behavioral finance, 299–300 and the Chicago School, xiii, 101–5 and contrary evidence, 224–25 and corporate finance, 355n. 38 described, 153 and Fama, 97, 206–7 and finance, 202–6 and Friedman, 93 and Graham, 119–20 and information availability, 182 and Jensen, 107 and market anomalies, 304 and market crashes, 228, 232 and Mills, 320 and mutual funds, 125, 130, 131 origin of, 43, 73 and portfolio theory, 54–55, 57 and psychology, 201–2 resistance to, 105–7, 269–70 and risk, 139 and Samuelson, 73 and security analysis, 366n. 29 and Shiller, 196–98 and Shleifer, 247 and stock market bubbles, 315 and takeovers, 166–68 taxonomy of, 101 testing, 190, 194–95 “Efficient Markets: Theory and Evidence” (Fama), 104 Einstein, Albert, 7, 50, 66 Ellis, Charley, 130, 131 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), 272, 290 Employee Retirement Security Act, 137–38 endogenous change, 305–6 endowment effect, 294 Engel, Louis, 97–98 Engels, Friedrich, 369n. 1 Engle, Robert, 139 Enron, 267, 283 environmental risk, 185 equilibrium theory and the Arrow-Debreu framework, 77–78 and asset pricing, 87 background of, 9–12 and behavioral finance, 301 and complexity theory, 304–6 and derivatives, 237 and intrinsic values, 193 and Keynesian economics, 35 and mathematics, 49–50 and Pareto’s Law, 349–50n. 2 and Reder, 89–90 and Samuelson, 61 equity risk premium, 141–43, 263–64 Erhard, Werner, 285, 319 Erhard Seminars Training (est), 285 event study method, 102 exchange rates, 92–93, 200, 250 executive compensation, 164–65, 274–79, 279–80, 284–85 expected utility, 51–52, 54, 75, 80, 176–77, 193 experimental economics, 188–90 Fallows, James, 365n. 8 Fama, Eugene, 323 and Alexander, 72 and Asness, 259–60 and behavioral finance, 295–96, 296–97, 298, 299–300 and the Chicago School of Economics, 96 and computing, 99–100 and the efficient market hypothesis, 101, 103–5, 193–94, 204, 206–8 and equity risk premium, 263 and experimental economics, 190 and the Journal of Financial Economics, 201 and Mandelbrot, 70, 134 and market crashes, 232 satirical depiction of, 287–88 and Shleifer, 248, 252 and stock price momentum, 209–10 and value stocks, 225 Fannie Mae, 313 Farmer, J.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Many have noticed, these decades, that there seem to be fewer long-duration projects, even though there is growing wealth to invest in such work. Kevin Kelly once raised the question at a dinner with complexity scientists. In friendly but acerbic terms they mocked the ambitions of The Long Now Foundation. Kelly paraphrased their argument: Since complexity theory shows that even the fairly near future is inherently unpredictable, any polygenerational plan will guess wrong about what a future generation wants or needs. Suppose a previous generation had expended great effort planning for dirigible ports around the world in the year 2000! Inevitable technology obsolescence and economic discounting renders any long-term return of value impractical.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo

complexity theory, messenger bag, placebo effect

The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, identifying those that have fulfilled their purpose, expressing your gratitude, and bidding them farewell, is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life. The yardstick by which you judge is your intuitive sense of attraction, and therefore there’s no need for complex theories or numerical data. All you need to do is follow the right order. So arm yourself with plenty of garbage bags and prepare to have fun. Start with clothes, then move on to books, papers, komono (miscellany), and finally things with sentimental value. If you reduce what you own in this order, your work will proceed with surprising ease.

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

Engineers learn a variety of skills during their training, first in university classes and then in on-the-job training working on real-world projects. Most important is to learn general principles. In engineering that includes the laws of physics and engineering principles of a particular discipline. In computing that would mean computer science principles such as algorithms, data structures, and complexity theory, as well as the principles of software engineering. In any field, it is important to develop a feel for how things are done. If software applications follow expected norms and are consistently designed, the skillful developer can often intuit the structure and behavior of a new system without searching piles of manuals.

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What’s applicable and appropriate in one layer is not necessarily appropriate at the other layer, but you also can’t deny the reality of the other layers. James: That’s the whole concept of emergent systems. That’s what science is all about and language is all about. That’s one of the concepts from the concept of complexity theory. You get the sense of emergence, and there’s no one fundamental layer. Certainly people have understood that in computing for a long time. You have multiple layers, and no one of them is the true layer. When you say the pattern movement has left itself very narrow on purpose, do you think it’s stuck at one layer when it should address the whole stack?

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I really think too many programmers have worried about making things run fast in the wrong places. It’s been an obsession in this field for years and years. Even though computers have gotten so much faster, that doesn’t matter. They’re still obsessed with what I’ll call the micro-optimizations. They don’t know complexity theory, they don’t understand the “order-of” stuff, but they’re worried about little, itty-bitty speed improvements. I wrote a subroutine package and then I went and profiled it. You can’t always guess where you need to optimize, you’ve got to go measure, and then you fix those problems. One subroutine took 30% of the time.

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

.… Gribbin's straightforward approach leads the layman through the maze of scientific babble and ideas without either complicating or oversimplifying matters.” —Katrina Dixon, The Scotsman (U.K.) “Writing in his clear prose style, Gribbin introduces the general reader to the mysterious world of high-energy physics—a formidable task because of the complex theories involved; nevertheless, he translates these ideas into a readable, enjoyable narrative. His extensive historical treatment of physics research from the foundation work done in the 19th century to the latest concepts of superstrings is remarkable. Gribbin takes the reader to a world of multidimensions—a fictionlike picture—where scientists are trying to merge the forces of the universe in a grand unified theory called supersymmetry.”

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Oxford University Press, 2013. Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. Anchor, 2003. Bodie, Zvi, Alex Kane, and Alan J. Marcus. Investments and Portfolio Management. McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2011. Bousquet, Antoine, and Simon Curtis. “Beyond Models and Metaphors: Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking, and International Relations.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 24, no. 1 (2011): 43–62. Boschma, Ron, and Ron Martin. “The Aims and Scope of Evolutionary Economic Geography. Utrecht University (Jan. 2010). Boyd, Danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.

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The Big Ideas of Lee Kuan Yew. Straits Times Press, 2014. Jennings, Ken. Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Scribner, 2012. Jervis, Robert. System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life. Princeton University Press, 1999. Johnson, Neil. Simple Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory. Oneworld, 2010. Kagan, Robert. Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Vintage, 2007. Kagan, Robert A. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Harvard University Press, 2003. Kahn, Matthew E. Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

The design of a jet engine, for example, involves more than one hundred variables and requires satisfying dozens of constraints. Evolutionary algorithms used by researchers at General Electric were able to come up with engine designs that met the constraints more precisely than conventional methods. Evolutionary algorithms, part of the field of chaos or complexity theory, are increasingly used to solve otherwise intractable business problems. General Motors applied an evolutionary algorithm to coordinate the painting of its cars, which reduced expensive color changeovers (in which a painting booth is put out of commission to change paint color) by 50 percent.

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A $1,000 personal computer (in 1999 dollars) can perform about a trillion calculations per second.4 Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain—20 million billion calculations per second.5 Unused computes on the Internet are being harvested, creating virtual parallel supercomputers with human brain hardware capacity. There is increasing interest in massively parallel neural nets, genetic algorithms, and other forms of “chaotic” or complexity theory computing, although most computer computations are still done using conventional sequential processing, albeit with some limited parallel processing. Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the human brain through both destructive scans of the brains of recently deceased persons as well as noninvasive scans using high resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of living persons.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

Some sat so still, no one could tell whether they were alive or dead. Research institutions gathered statistics about the causes of the sudden migration, but soon the number of dead bodies exceeded the means to collect and bury them. Yunus began to dread his own lectures. “What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches outside my lecture hall?” he asked himself. “Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me.” It was Yunus’s opinion that “Economists spend their talents detailing the processes for development and prosperity, but rarely reflect the origin and development of poverty and hunger.”

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

And positivity during your efforts doesn’t mean coating yourself or others in a thick glaze of sugar. In fact, a particular recipe—a golden ratio of positivity—leads to the best results. In research she carried out with Marcial Losada, a Brazilian social scientist who uses mathematical models and complexity theory to analyze team behavior,12 Fredrickson had a group of participants record their positive and negative emotions each day for four weeks.* She and Losada calculated the ratio of positive to negative emotions of the participants—and then compared these ratios with the participants’ scores on a thirty-three-item measurement of their overall well-being.

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

It’s worth noting in passing that the previous construction is not proven to be nonparallelizable. Besides the product-of-two-primes problem, its security rests on no one knowing how to perform the repeated modular squaring in parallel. This problem is tied up with the “P vs. NC” problem in computational complexity theory and is outside the scope of this chapter. Similar to the better known “P vs. NP” problem, which concerns the question, “Which problems are easy?” the P vs. NC problem asks, “Which problems are parallelizable?”[56] Fungible micropayments All of the micropayment schemes we have previously described are nonfungible.

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Our discussion is not meant as exhaustive, yet it provides some examples of various cryptographic primitives and technologies used for electronic cash: public key encryption, hash functions, digital signatures, certificates, blinding functions, proofs of knowledge, and different one-way and trap door problems based on complexity theory. The list reads like a cryptographic cookbook. Indeed, the theoretical foundations of digital cash—and the design of systems—have been actively researched and developed over the past two decades. Only in the past few years, however, have we begun to see the real-world application of micropayments and digital cash, spurred by the growth of the Internet into a ubiquitous platform for connectivity, collaboration, and even commerce.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

I became particularly interested in a theoretical aspect of computer science that was, at its heart, designed to make fast decisions in an atmosphere of great uncertainty and finite time. My focus was a computer science puzzle known as graph coloring. No, I wasn’t coloring graphs with crayons. Graph coloring is part of computational complexity theory in which you must assign labels, traditionally called colors, to elements of a graph within certain constraints. Think of it this way: Imagine coloring the U.S. map so that no state sharing a common border receives the same color. What is the minimal number of colors you would need to accomplish this task?

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

There is also a fascinating and possibly even more important flip side of chaos: that the repeated application of the same simple rules which lead to chaotic behavior, starting from organized regular motion, can sometimes lead from bland, structureless form to the emergence of beautiful and complex patterns—that we can get order and complexity where there was none before. You start with something without structure, allow it to evolve, and you begin to see structure and patterns spontaneously emerging. This idea has led to the spawning of new academic disciplines known as emergence and complexity theory, which are beginning to play a major role in many diverse areas, from biology to economics to artificial intelligence. FREE WILL When it comes to what all this has to say about the nature of free will (and therefore about the Paradox of Laplace’s Demon), there are still many different philosophical views and the issue is far from resolved.

On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky

Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, complexity theory, dark matter, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, language acquisition, launch on warning, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Which picture of himself does John prefer <which picture of himself> b. Which picture of John does he prefer <which picture of John> The binding principles apply on these richer representations giving the right result: the anaphor is bound by the name in (51a), the name cannot enter into a coreference relation with the c-commanding pronoun in (51b). No complex theory of reconstruction is needed, and the empirically correct result is achieved by simply tracing “movement” back to its elementary computational components (on the adjustments needed to get appropriate operator-variable structures at LF see Chomsky (1993), Fox (2000), Rizzi (2001b); on the fact that it is 43 On nature and language apparently sufficient to bind only one occurrence of the anaphor in (51a) see the references just quoted, and also the discussion in Belletti and Rizzi (1988); on the different behavior of arguments and adjuncts under reconstruction, Lebeaux (1988)).

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, Astronomia nova, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Richard Feynman, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

14 Its publication notwithstanding, he had never stopped working on the Principia. He was preparing a second edition. He scoured Greek texts for clues to his belief that the ancients had known about gravity and even the inverse-square law. He contemplated new experiments and sought new data for his complex theory of the moon’s motions. Besides correcting printer’s errors, he was drafting and redrafting whole new sections, refining his rules for philosophy. He struggled with the inescapable hole in his understanding of gravity’s true nature. He twisted and turned: “Tis inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact,” he wrote one correspondent.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, David Sedaris, East Village, Easter island, Great Leap Forward, index card, means of production, rent control

The bet had been the sole reason for our visit, and the resulting insufferable tour of Buildings A through D taught us never again to express an interest in our father’s workplace. My own scientific curiosity eventually blossomed, but I knew enough to keep my freakish experiments to myself. When my father discovered my colony of frozen slugs in the basement freezer, I chose not to explain my complex theories of suspended animation. Why was I filling the hamster’s water beaker with vodka? “Oh, no reason.” If my experiment failed, and the drunken hamster passed out, I’d just put her in the deep freeze, alongside the slugs. She’d rest on ice for a few months and, once thawed and fully revived, would remember nothing of her previous life as an alcoholic.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

We’re more comfortable behaving as if our cities are merely complicated. Increasingly, they are not. Notes 1 Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander, Cognitive Architecture: Designing For How We Respond to the Built Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015). 2 Ibid. 3 Neil Johnson, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017). 2 Incremental Growth Take a tentative step in the dark. If you do not run into something, you just gained knowledge. If you hit a wall, the incremental nature of your advance gives you wisdom without much lost. Now take an abrupt leap in the dark.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

In her book, Tannen claims that from early childhood, women and men are socialized to live in two opposing cultures with two opposing sets of values, so they grow up to understand things differently. Not better or worse, just different. As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections. Another, more complex theory suggests that women’s conversational style has developed as a coping strategy that reflects their position in our culture. This argument is inspired by Janet Holmes, who suggests that our society requires women to be the emotional laborers—shoulders to cry on, carriers of sympathetic burdens.

The Planet on the Table by Kim Stanley Robinson

complexity theory, Kim Stanley Robinson, Murano, Venice glass

“But there is no close security guarding the banks containing old art books. No one expects them to be tampered with.” “It’s astonishing,” I said with a wave of my fork, “it is baroque, it is byzantine in its ingenuity!” “Yes,” she said. “Beautiful, in a way.” “However,” I pointed out to her, “you have no proof— only this perhaps over-complex theory. You have found no first edition of a book to confirm that the computer-generated volumes add Heidi’s painting, and you have found no physical anachronism in the painting itself.” Gloomily she clicked her fork against her empty salad bowl, then rose to refill it. “It is a problem,” she admitted.

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy

Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator

It’s a good idea to aim to build upon this success by targeting these keywords further, or targeting related keyphrases. Look for synonyms that you may not already be using (bump/lump, mouth/lip), and update your content accordingly. Ranking highly for your target keywords There are endless complex theories on just how a site ranks highly on search engines. Some of those theories have no basis at all. The truth is, nobody except little robots at Google knows just how a site ranks higher than another. What we do know is that the content of a page, how the page is coded, and the authority of other pages that link to a page – especially for the topic in question – are the most powerful dictators of how well a page ranks on search engines.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

In this chapter, we present a new reality-based framework for cultural change that creates and reinforces a discipline of execution. This approach is practical and completely linked to measurable business results. The basic premise is simple: cultural change gets real when your aim is execution. You don’t need a lot of complex theory or employee surveys to use this framework. You need to change people’s behavior so that they produce results. First you tell people clearly what results you’re looking for. Then you discuss how to get those results, as a key element of the coaching process. Then you reward people for producing the results.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

But it is not true. Part Three shows that if we discard the narrative of unaffordability and take steps now to accelerate economic growth and to ensure that the benefits of that growth are shared more fairly, we can create an attractive future for coming generations. Seeing the solutions doesn’t need any complex theory. It just needs us to open our eyes to the facts. We can see what works and what doesn’t work, both in our own history and by looking around the world. Then we just need to make sure we do what works. Far from there being no alternative to our current plight, there is a wide spectrum of different forms of capitalism available to us – and some of them work much better than others.

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

Oddly, The New York Times still placed a negative spin on that success in its headline ‘Eclipse 4 seconds late here, but a brilliant show’.10 The complexities of the Solar System are now understood to such a degree that computers can predict eclipses to within one second, an accuracy level that is unlikely to improve. This stagnation is not due to the need for better computers, or other complex theories, or more sinister-looking men on rooftops. The rate at which the Earth spins, about 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds per revolution, is slowing down because of the braking effect of the gravitational pull of the Moon. Thus a day will be longer in the future, and we cannot predict by how much because the rate is decreasing erratically.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Kathy’s simple rules journey began when she and Shona Brown began studying the strategies of technology-based companies as Shona worked on her dissertation. They were searching for fresh ideas that would break away from the stale paradigms of traditional strategy and organization theory. They found those ideas at the “edge of chaos” in complexity theory, and penned Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. This project became a precursor to the simple rules research. Kathy is also indebted to another former PhD student, Professor Chris Bingham of the University of North Carolina. Chris was the perfect research partner, and together they pushed forward insights into how simple rules are learned and why they work so well.

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, driverless car, Edward Jenner, germ theory of disease, helicopter parent, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, placebo effect, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, wikimedia commons, Y2K

Don’t worry, though, you can still find reproductions on the Internet. The Orgone Box Not long after the downfall of rectal dilators, a psychologist with an entrancing philosophy about sexual energy emerged to influence Western culture. Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a member of the second wave of post-Freud psychoanalysts, developed a complex theory about a universal life force he called “orgone,” the same universal life force acupuncturists might refer to as “qi,” or simply “The Force” to Star Wars enthusiasts. Reich argued that orgone was present in all living matter and that many diseases were the result of orgone flow being either restricted or not available in sufficient quantities.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

It would be some two centuries later, with the development of computers with massive computational prowess, until equations that would have taken a stadium full of people working for hundreds of years to solve could be solved in a matter of seconds. Relatively precise solutions to the three-body problem were demonstrated. A new field known by various names, including nonlinear dynamics, fractals, chaos, or complexity theory, began to emerge. The concept of the butterfly effect, whereby a flutter of a butterfly wing might cause a massive change in the weather countries away, became common knowledge. In short, it was now understood that everything affects everything else in multifaceted, often unpredictable ways.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

The underlying models just aren’t getting that much better, and when the underlying models are more complicated, they very often are not more persuasive to the typical research economist. I would sum up the blend as follows: (a) much better data, (b) higher standards for empirical tests, and (c) lots of growth in complex theory but not matched by a corresponding growth in impact. Mathematical economics, computational economics, complexity economics, and game theory continue to grow, as we would expect of a diverse and specialized discipline, but they are if anything losing relative ground in terms of influence. Economics is becoming less like Einstein or Euclid, and more like studying the digestive system of a starfish.

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes

Asperger Syndrome, behavioural economics, classic study, complexity theory, epigenetics, Higgs boson, intermodal, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, phenotype, social intelligence, the built environment, theory of mind, twin studies

There is always tension in Darwinian evolutionary models between variant generation and faithful retention (Campbell, 1974), but, to the extent that metacognitive social learning strategies support detailed and accurate copying, they are likely to help cultural evolution, rather than the smart choices of a succession of individual agents, to produce complex theories, artifacts, and practices.2 CONCLUSION In the first section, I surveyed evidence that information is encoded for long-term storage by the same cognitive processes when the learning is either social or asocial—that is, when learning is and is not influenced by contact with another agent. This view is no longer controversial.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Meanwhile, sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics. Economists suffer from physics envy over their inability to neatly model human behavior. An informal, incomplete grammar of the English language runs over 1,700 pages. Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields, we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that’s so, we should stop acting as if or goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.27 Data is unreasonably effective—seductively so, even.

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

It is important to note that ’t Hooft would never have approached the problem if Veltman had not been obsessed with it, even as most others gave up. The notion that one might ultimately extend the techniques that Feynman and others had developed to tame quantum electrodynamics to try to understand more complex theories such as spontaneously broken Yang-Mills theory was simply viewed as naïve by many in the field. But Veltman stayed with the project, and he wisely found a graduate student who was also a genius to help him. It took a while for ’t Hooft’s and Veltman’s ideas to sink in and the new techniques ’t Hooft had developed to become universally adopted, but within a year or so physicists agreed that the theory that Weinberg, and later Salam, had proposed, made sense.

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

The horror that could be caused by nuclear weapons (and the fear that any use would lead to extensive use) deterred nuclear-weapons nations from using their ultimate weapons against each other. It also deterred nations, both nuclear-armed and not, from doing anything that might provoke a nuclear response. Strategists developed complex theories about nuclear deterrence. Herman Kahn developed a typology with three distinct classes of nuclear deterrence in his works in the 1960s. His theories and analyses were widely studied by civilian and military leaders in both the United States and the Soviet Union. His clear, matter-of-fact writing about the likely scope of destruction in books like On Thermonuclear War (1960) and Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) undoubtedly helped to deter nuclear war.

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

In these three- to four-day programs for adults and seven- to eight-day programs for teens, stargazers find themselves observing, photographing, and electronically imaging various celestial objects through professional-grade telescopes, devising theories on globular clusters, and identifying near-Earth asteroids that only astronomy professors usually know about. The enthusiastic teacher, Don McCarthy, the University of Arizona professor who heads the programs, is so much fun (he has a whole collection of music about stars—for example, from Annie, Phantom of the Opera, and Cats) and has such a knack for explaining complex theories that past campers keep coming back year after year. In fact, Lisa Roubal, codirector of the program, jokes that she practically has to beg Astronomy Camp alumni to wait a year before returning so there will be room for new campers. Astronomy Camp, which has been going strong since 1988, takes place at Mount Lemmon, a mountaintop observatory just north of Tucson.

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Anthropocene, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

An alternative is to apply the Bonferroni method, and demand a P-value of 0.05/25,000, or 1 in 500,000, for the most extreme GP; for Shipman this would have occurred in 1984, when he had 105 deaths compared to the 59.2 that would be expected, an excess of 46. But even this would not be a reliable procedure to apply to all the GPs in the country. For the second problem is that we are carrying out repeated significance tests, as each year’s new data are added on and another test performed. There is some remarkable but complex theory, known by the delightful term ‘the Law of the Iterated Logarithm’, that shows that if we carry out such repeated testing, even if the null hypothesis is true, then we are certain to eventually reject that null at any significance level we choose. This is very worrying, as it means that if we keep testing a doctor for long enough then we are guaranteed to eventually think we have found evidence of excess mortality, even if in reality their patients are not subject to any excess risk.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

He and two coauthors recently name-checked a well-known article called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which “examines why so much of physics can be neatly explained with simple mathematical formulas such as F = ma or E = mc2. Meanwhile, sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics.” “Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields,” they wrote, “we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that’s so, we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.” Learning and human cognition are definitely among the “related fields.”

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

A corollary is that circuit function is fully decomposable (given complete data) into neat sequences of causes and effects. In this sense, circuits resemble Laplacian models of classical mechanics, with circuit elements exerting purely local effects on each other and with connections mediating specific causal roles. In contrast, modern approaches from complexity theory and network science emphasize that global outcomes are irreducible to simple localized causes, and that the functioning of the network as a whole transcends the functioning of each of its individual elements. One key concept is that of “emergence.” Emergence builds on the basic observation that collective interactions among the elements of complex networked systems often give rise to new properties that do not exist at lower levels of organization.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

After all, we can have the community of our dreams only if we are willing to become the kind of person that community needs. 1 Through online research, I was aware of the accusation before my visit and even attempted to interview disgruntled former members. The only evidence I found for the accusation were some highly eccentric beliefs and a charismatic leader. I found, however, no coercion. 2 Dieter Duhm, The Sacred Matrix, Belzig, Germany: Verlag Meiga, 2008. 3 Rooted in complexity theory, sociocracy views social organizations as analogous to ecosystems: self-organizing and self-correcting through feedback loops. See John Buck and Sharon Villines, We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, Sociocracy.info, 2007. 4 Jeff Merrifield, Damanhur: The Story of the Extraordinary Artistic and Spiritual Community, Santa Cruz, CA: Hanford Mead Publishers, 2006, p. 121. 5 See Marshall B.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

An alternative is to apply the Bonferroni method, and demand a P-value of 0.05/25,000, or 1 in 500,000, for the most extreme GP; for Shipman this would have occurred in 1984, when he had 105 deaths compared to the 59.2 that would be expected, an excess of 46. But even this would not be a reliable procedure to apply to all the GPs in the country. For the second problem is that we are carrying out repeated significance tests, as each year’s new data are added on and another test performed. There is some remarkable but complex theory, known by the delightful term ‘the Law of the Iterated Logarithm’, that shows that if we carry out such repeated testing, even if the null hypothesis is true, then we are certain to eventually reject that null at any significance level we choose. This is very worrying, as it means that if we keep testing a doctor for long enough then we are guaranteed to eventually think we have found evidence of excess mortality, even if in reality their patients are not subject to any excess risk.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Dirección General de Estadística, ed. 1955. Tercer censo agrícola ganadero y ejidal, 1950. Mexico City: Dirección General de Estadística. Disney, Anthony R. 2009. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire. Vol 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dodds, Joseph. 2011. Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. London: Routledge. Doherty, Brian, Matthew Paterson, Alexandra Plows, and Derek Wall. 2003. “Explaining the Fuel Protests.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5, no. 1: 1–23. Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard. 1996.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

That is the sin of greedy reductionism, but notice that it is only when overzealousness leads to falsification of the phenomena that we should condemn it. In itself, the desire to reduce, to unite, to explain it all in one big overarching theory, is no more to be condemned as immoral than the contrary urge that drove Baldwin to his discovery. It is not wrong to yearn for simple theories, or to yearn for phenomena that no simple (or complex!) theory could ever explain; what is wrong is zealous misrepresentation, in either direction. Darwin's dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate,9 promising to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision. Its being the idea of an algorithmic process makes it all the more powerful, since the substrate neutrality it thereby possesses permits us to consider its application to just about anything.

…

Kauffman's new book, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993), summarizes and extends the research he has been engaged in for several decades, and lets us see for the first time how he himself places his ideas in the context of the history of the field. Many have heralded him as a Darwin-slayer, finally driving that oppressive presence from the scene, and doing it, moreover, with the flashing blade of {221} brand-new science: chaos theory and complexity theory, strange attractors and fractals. He himself has been tempted by that view in the past (Lewin 1992, pp. 40-43), but his book bristles with warnings, fending off the embrace of the anti-Darwinians. He begins the preface of his book (p. vii) by describing it as "an attempt to include Darwinism in a broader context": Yet our task is not only to explore the sources of order which may lie available to evolution.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

We picked among the arrows—and it was out of sheer self-interest—the one bearing for our little perch in the universe. But all the others are made of the same gossamery stuff. And gossamery is the right word. No matter how physicists and information theorists dealt with it, whether by using Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics, Shannon’s equation, complexity theory, or Planck’s energy-frequency relationship, and no matter how exact the quantifications, it always was, and could not escape being, something ethereal. Well, no longer. The astonishing experiments with quantum-computing molecules dealt with in the preceding chapter give us an almost palpable experience.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Getting the public finances into balance should be the overwhelming priority of fiscal policy. Taxation is necessary; but because it tends to disincentivise wealth creation and work, it should be kept as low as possible. Within each of these propositions lurks many a disagreement among academic economists, often informed by subtly complex theory and detailed empirical evidence. But it is not hard to find these views expressed in public debate; and they have dominated the practice of policy-making over recent years. The orthodox model provides an attractively simple framework for thinking about economics and policy. It combines the mathematical elegance of neoclassical microeconomics with plausible claims about the macroeconomy.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Dawes (1999), in fact, makes the stronger argument that human “cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story.” 16. For example, a preference for simplicity in explanations is deeply embedded in the philosophy of science. The famous Ockham’s razor—named for the fourteenth-century English logician William of Ockham—posits that “plurality ought never be posited without necessity,” meaning essentially that a complex theory ought never to be adopted where a simpler one would suffice. Most working scientists regard Ockham’s razor with something close to reverence—Albert Einstein, for example, once claimed that a theory “ought to be as simple as possible, and no simpler”—and the history of science would seem to justify this reverence, filled as it is with examples of complex and unwieldy ideas being swept away by simpler, more elegant formulations.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

Brent, Joseph, 1993, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brocas, I., and J. Carillo, eds., 2003, The Psychology of Economic Decisions: Vol. 1: Rationality and Well-being. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brock, W. A., and P.J.F. De Lima, 1995, “Nonlinear Time Series, Complexity Theory, and Finance.” University of Wisconsin, Madison—Working Papers 9523. Brock, W. A., D. A. Hsieh, and B. LeBaron, 1991, Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, and Instability: Statistical Theory and Economic Evidence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Brockman, John, 1995, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

William Robinson, “Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 160. 7. Krippner, “The Financialization of the American Economy.” 8. Richard Deeg and Mary O’Sullivan, “The Political Economy of Global Finance Capital,” World Politics 61 (2009): 731–763. 9. Bill Maurer, “Complex Subjects: Offshore Finance, Complexity Theory, and the Dispersion of the Modern,” Socialist Review 25 (1995): 113–145. 10. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. 11. Michael Parkinson, Certificate in International Trust Management, 4th ed. (Birmingham, UK: Central Law Training, 2004), 3. 12.

Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Lopez de Prado

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, G4S, Higgs boson, implied volatility, information asymmetry, latency arbitrage, margin call, market fragmentation, market microstructure, martingale, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, traveling salesman

I have no doubt in my mind, econometrics is a primary reason economics and finance have not experienced meaningful progress over the past 70 years (Calkin and López de Prado [2014a, 2014b]). For centuries, medieval astronomers made observations and developed theories about celestial mechanics. These theories never considered non-circular orbits, because they were deemed unholy and beneath God's plan. The prediction errors were so gross, that ever more complex theories had to be devised to account for them. It was not until Kepler had the temerity to consider non-circular (elliptical) orbits that all of the sudden a much simpler general model was able to predict the position of the planets with astonishing accuracy. What if astronomers had never considered non-circular orbits?

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

But curiously, when we see human history as part of the larger history of the biosphere and the universe, the distinctive features of our species stand out more clearly. Today, scholars in many different fields seem to be converging on similar answers to the question of what makes us different. When you see sudden, rapid changes like this, start looking for tiny changes that have huge consequences. Complexity theory and the related field of chaos theory are full of changes like this. Often, they are described as butterfly effects. The metaphor comes from the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who pointed out that in weather systems, tiny events (the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, perhaps?) can get amplified by positive feedback cycles, generating a cascade of changes that may unleash tornadoes thousands of miles away.

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

There are almost no other historical examples of so strange a performance as this use/nonuse of calculus. To get something of its flavor, we have to imagine far-fetched scenarios. Think, for instance, of a genius who grew up using Roman numerals but then invented Arabic numerals. And then imagine that he conceived an incredibly complex theory that relied heavily on the special properties of Arabic numerals—the way they make calculations easy, for instance. Finally, imagine that when he presented that theory to the world he used no Arabic numerals at all, but only Roman numerals manipulated in obscure and never-explained ways. Decades after the Principia, Newton offered an explanation.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

There’s a distant, roaring sob and another crash. “Who’d have thought he had it in him?” “Whose side are you on, Ade? What have you been selling these bastards? I expect I’ll be dead by dusk, so you can tell me.” “I told you, but you didn’t listen. There is no conspiracy. The movement is an emergent phenomenon. It’s complexity theory, not ideology. The cloud wants to instantiate an ambassador, and events conspire to find a suitable host and get some godvomit down his throat.” Ade nods at him. “Now the cloud wants the ambassador to commune with something on the American continent, and there you are. How do I know the cloud wants this?

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

In 1795 he managed to secure work as a clerk in a cloth-making concern and, a few years later, as a traveling salesman. In 1826 he finally settled in Paris. Fourier’s first book appeared in 1808; his second not until 1822. These as well as his subsequent works received little attention, thanks to his terrible writing style. Only late in life did he gain a following, but he remained a reclusive bachelor whose complex theories of passionate attraction were cosmically distant from his personal practices.25 Fourier persistently preached that his version of utopia could come about only in small communities whose inhabitants actually knew one another, not in big cities filled with anonymous masses. He asserted the economic and moral superiority of agriculture over manufacturing.