❄️Systems Thinking: On Uniformity (Quotes)

"Causation is defined by some modern philosophers as unconditional uniformity of succession, e.g., existence of fire follows from putting a lighted match to the fuel." (William K Clifford, Energy and Force", 1873)

"The simplicity of nature which we at present grasp is really the result of infinite complexity; and that below the uniformity there underlies a diversity whose depths we have not yet probed, and whose secret places are still beyond our reach." (William Spottiswoode, [Report of the Forty-eighth Meeting of the British Association for the, Advancement of Science] 1878)

 "[…] the simplicity of nature which we at present grasp is really the result of infinite complexity; and that below the uniformity there underlies a diversity whose depths we have not yet probed, and whose secret places are still beyond our reach." (William Spottiswoode, 1879)

"The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience." (William K Clifford, "Lectures and Essays", 1879)

"It is difficult to give an idea of the vast extent of modern mathematics. The word 'extent' is not the right one: I mean extent crowded with beautiful details - not an extent of mere uniformity such as an objectless plain, but of a tract of beautiful country seen at first in the distance, but which will bear to be rambled through and studied in every detail of hillside and valley, stream, rock, wood and flower [...]" (Arthur Cayley, [address before the meeting of the British Association at Southport] 1883)

"If we start with the assumption, grounded on experience, that there is uniformity in this average, and so long as this is secured to us, we can afford to be perfectly indifferent to the fate, as regards causation, of the individuals which compose the average." (John Venn, The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundation and Province of the - Theory of Probability, Chance, Causation, and Design", 1887)

"Physics has progressed because, in the first place, she accepted the uniformity of nature; because, in the next place, she early discovered the value of exact measurements; because, in the third place, she concentrated her attention on the regularities that underlie the complexities of phenomena as they appear to us; and lastly, and not the least significant, because she emphasized the importance of the experimental method of research. An ideal or crucial experiment is a study of an event, controlled so as to give a definite and measurable answer to a question - an answer in terms of specific theoretical ideas, or better still an answer in terms of better understood relations." (Thomas H Morgan, "The Relation of Biology to Physics", Science Vol. LXV (1679), 1927)

"A Weltanschauung [worldview] is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place [...] the worldview of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfillment of which is relegated to the future." Sigmund Freud, "New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis", 1932)

"To the grand primary impression of the world power, the immensities, the pervading order, and the universal flux, with which the man of feeling has been nurtured from the old, modern science has added thrilling impressions of manifoldedness, intricacy, uniformity, inter-relatedness, and evolution. Science widens and clears the emotional window. There are great vistas to which science alone can lead, and they make for elevation of mind." (J Arthur Thomson, "The Outline of Science" Vol. 4, 1937)

"[…] in the world of immediate experience, the world of things is there. Trees grow, day follows night, and death supervenes upon life. One may not say that relations here are external or even internal. They are not relations at all. They are lost in the indescriptibility of things and events, which are what they are. The world which is the test of all observations and all scientific hypothetical reconstruction has in itself no system that can be isolated as a structure of laws, or uniformities, though all laws and formulations of uniformities must be brought to its court for its imprimatur." (Donald C May & George H Mead, "The Philosophy of the Act", 1938)

"For the state centralisation is the appropriate form of organisation, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favourable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could but be a curse by weakening its power of decision and systematically repressing all immediate action. [...] Organisation is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies." (Rudolf Rocker, "Anarcho-Syndicalism", 1938)

"Science [...] involves active, purposeful search; it discovers, accumulates, sifts, orders, and tests data; it is a slow, painstaking, laborious activity; it is a search after bodies of knowledge sufficiently comprehensive to lead to the discovery of uniformities, sequential orders or so-called 'laws'; it may be carried on by an individual, but it gains relevance only as it produces data which can be added to and tested by the findings of others." (Constantine Panunzio, "Major Social Institutions", 1939)

"Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level." (Aldous L Huxley, "Essay", Daedalus, 1962)

"Theories are usually introduced when previous study of a class of phenomena has revealed a system of uniformities. […] Theories then seek to explain those regularities and, generally, to afford a deeper and more accurate understanding of the phenomena in question. To this end, a theory construes those phenomena as manifestations of entities and processes that lie behind or beneath them, as it were." (Carl G Hempel, "Philosophy of Natural Science", 1966)

"In the definition of a coordinate system we have required that the coordinate neighborhood and the range in Rd be open sets. This is contrary to popular usage, or at least more specific than the usage of curvilinear coordinates in advanced calculus. For example, spherical coordinates are used even along points of the z axis where they are not even 1-1. The reasons for the restriction to open sets are that it forces a uniformity in the local structure which simplifies analysis on a manifold" (there are no 'edge points') and, even if local uniformity were forced in some other way, it avoids the problem of. spelling out what we mean by differentiability at boundary points of the coordinate neighborhood; that is, one-sided derivatives need not be mentioned. On the other hand, in applications, boundary value problems frequently arise, the setting for which is a manifold with boundary. These spaces are more general than manifolds and the extra generality arises from allowing a boundary manifold of one dimension less. The points of the boundary manifold have a coordinate neighborhood in the boundary manifold which is attached to a coordinate neighborhood of the interior in much the same way as a face of a cube is attached to the interior. Just as the study of boundary value problems is more difficult than the study of spatial problems, the study of manifolds with boundary is more difficult than that of mere manifolds, so we shall limit ourselves to the latter." (Richard L Bishop & Samuel I Goldberg, "Tensor Analysis on Manifolds", 1968)

"The machine rules. Human life is rigorously controlled by it, dominated by the terribly precise will of mechanisms. These creatures of man are exacting. They are now reacting on their creators, making them like themselves. They want well-trained humans; they are gradually wiping out the differences between men, fitting them into their own orderly functioning, into the uniformity of their own regimes. They are thus shaping humanity for their own use, almost in their own image." (Paul A Valéry, "Fairy Tales for Computers", 1969)

"The figures which excite in us the ideas of beauty seem to be those in which there is uniformity amidst variety. […] What we call beautiful in objects, to speak in the mathematical style, seems to be in compound ratio of uniformity and variety: so that where the uniformity of bodies is equal, the beauty is as the variety; and where the variety is equal, the beauty is as the uniformity." (Francis Hutcheson,"An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design", 1973)

"In various fields of knowledge the problem of the relationship between cause and condition is solved in different ways, depending mainly on the complexity of the relationships that are being studied, their uniformity or, on the contrary, the distinctness and comparative importance of separate factors." (Alexander Spirkin, "Dialectical Materialism", 1983)

"An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment" (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state" (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it." (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)" (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)

"Theories are usually introduced when previous study of a class of phenomena has revealed a system of uniformities. […] Theories then seek to explain those regularities and, generally, to afford a deeper and more accurate understanding of the phenomena in question. To this end, a theory construes those phenomena as manifestations of entities and processes that lie behind or beneath them, as it were." (Carl G Hempel, "Philosophy of Natural Science", 1966)

"Limiting factors in population dynamics play the role in ecology that friction does in physics. They stop exponential growth, not unlike the way in which friction stops uniform motion. Whether or not ecology is more like physics in a viscous liquid, when the growth-rate-based traditional view is sufficient, is an open question. We argue that this limit is an oversimplification, that populations do exhibit inertial properties that are noticeable. Note that the inclusion of inertia is a generalization - it does not exclude the regular rate-based, first-order theories. They may still be widely applicable under a strong immediate density dependence, acting like friction in physics." (Lev Ginzburg & Mark Colyvan, "Ecological Orbits: How Planets Move and Populations Grow", 2004)

"Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work." (Donella H Meadow, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

❄️Systems Thinking: On Turbulences (Quotes)

"[...] the influence of a single butterfly is not only a fine detail - it is confined to a small volume. Some of the numerical methods which seem to be well adapted for examining the intensification of errors are not suitable for studying the dispersion of errors from restricted to unrestricted regions. One hypothesis, unconfirmed, is that the influence of a butterfly's wings will spread in turbulent air, but not in calm air." (Edward N Lorenz, [talk] 1972)

"Although we expect to find eddies in turbulent flow, we do not know when any specific eddy will come into being or die away . We cannot yet predict how eddies interact. Similarly, we know as a general rule that any particle within a turbulent flow gets knocked about in an aimless fashion by the swirls, so that it describes an erratic meandering path, but at any given moment we cannot predict the precise location or velocity of the particle." (Peter B Stevens, "Patterns in Nature", 1974)

"The analysis of turbulence in terms of probability reveals several interesting things about eddies. For instance, the average eddy moves a distance about equal to its own diameter before it generates small eddies that move, more often than not, in the opposite direction. Those smaller eddies generate still smaller eddies and the process continues until all the energy dissipates as heat through molecular motion." (Peter B Stevens, "Patterns in Nature", 1974)

"Turbulence forms the primordial pattern, the chaos that was 'in the beginning'." (Peter B Stevens, "Patterns in Nature", 1974)

"In a real experiment the noise present in a signal is usually considered to be the result of the interplay of a large number of degrees of freedom over which one has no control. This type of noise can be reduced by improving the experimental apparatus. But we have seen that another type of noise, which is not removable by any refinement of technique, can be present. This is what we have called the deterministic noise. Despite its intractability it provides us with a way to describe noisy signals by simple mathematical models, making possible a dynamical system approach to the problem of turbulence." (David Ruelle, "Chaotic Evolution and Strange Attractors: The statistical analysis of time series for deterministic nonlinear systems", 1989)

"Now, the main problem with a quasiperiodic theory of turbulence (putting several oscillators together) is the following: when there is a nonlinear coupling between the oscillators, it very often happens that the time evolution does not remain quasiperiodic. As a matter of fact, in this latter situation, one can observe the appearance of a feature which makes the motion completely different from a quasiperiodic one. This feature is called sensitive dependence on initial conditions and turns out to be the conceptual key to reformulating the problem of turbulence." (David Ruelle, "Chaotic Evolution and Strange Attractors: The statistical analysis of time series for deterministic nonlinear systems", 1989)

"Turbulence, or chaos, is not universal but comes and goes. Chaos may emerge from order, but order may also emerge from chaos." (J Barkley Rosser Jr., "From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities", 1991)

"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"The internet model has many lessons for the new economy but perhaps the most important is its embrace of dumb swarm power. The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment. When things happen fast and furious, they tend to route around central control. By interlinking many simple parts into a loose confederation, control devolves from the center to the lowest or outermost points, which collectively keep things on course. A successful system, though, requires more than simply relinquishing control completely to the networked mob." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)

"Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work." (Donella H Meadow, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

"Complexity theory shows that great changes can emerge from small actions. Change involves a belief in the possible, even the 'impossible'. Moreover, social innovators don’t follow a linear pathway of change; there are ups and downs, roller-coaster rides along cascades of dynamic interactions, unexpected and unanticipated divergences, tipping points and critical mass momentum shifts. Indeed, things often get worse before they get better as systems change creates resistance to and pushback against the new. Traditional evaluation approaches are not well suited for such turbulence. Traditional evaluation aims to control and predict, to bring order to chaos. Developmental evaluation accepts such turbulence as the way the world of social innovation unfolds in the face of complexity. Developmental evaluation adapts to the realities of complex nonlinear dynamics rather than trying to impose order and certainty on a disorderly and uncertain world." (Michael Q Patton, "Developmental Evaluation", 2010)

❄️Systems Thinking: On Diversity (Quotes)

"Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure - the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple." (Thomas H Huxley, "A Lobster; or, the Study of Zoology", 1861)

"[…] the simplicity of nature which we at present grasp is really the result of infinite complexity; and that below the uniformity there underlies a diversity whose depths we have not yet probed, and whose secret places are still beyond our reach." (William Spottiswoode, 1879)

"Any system that insulates itself from diversity in the environment tends to atrophy and lose its complexity and distinctive nature." (Gareth Morgan, "Images of Organization", 1986)

"There are a variety of swarm topologies, but the only organization that holds a genuine plurality of shapes is the grand mesh. In fact, a plurality of truly divergent components can only remain coherent in a network. No other arrangement-chain, pyramid, tree, circle, hub-can contain true diversity working as a whole. This is why the network is nearly synonymous with democracy or the market." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdependence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability... the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.(Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change" (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos." (Andy P Hargreaves & Michael Fullan, "What’s Worth Fighting for Out There?", 1998)

"However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. " (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)

"A heuristic is a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new" (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions." (Scott E Page, "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies", 2008)

"A perspective is a map from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word." (Scott E Page, "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies", 2008)

"Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work." (Donella H Meadow, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

"[...] diverse, connected, interdependent entities whose behavior is determined by rules, which may adapt, but need not. The interactions of these entities often produce phenomena that are more than the parts. These phenomena are called emergent." (Scott E Page, "Diversity and Complexity", 2010)

"If we can understand how to leverage diversity to achieve better performance and greater robustness, we might anticipate and prevent collapses." (Scott E Page, "Diversity and Complexity", 2010)

"The exploding interest in network science during the first decade of the 21st century is rooted in the discovery that despite the obvious diversity of complex systems, the structure and the evolution of the networks behind each system is driven by a common set of fundamental laws and principles. Therefore, notwithstanding the amazing differences in form, size, nature, age, and scope of real networks, most networks are driven by common organizing principles. Once we disregard the nature of the components and the precise nature of the interactions between them, the obtained networks are more similar than different from each other." (Albert-László Barabási, "Network Science", 2016)

❄️Systems Thinking: On Consequences (Quotes)

"A strict materialist believes that everything depends on the motion of matter. He knows the form of the laws of motion though he does not know all their consequences when applied to systems of unknown complexity." (James C Maxwell, [Letter to Mark Pattison] 1868)

"The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Only a modern systems approach promises to get the full complexity of the interacting phenomena - to see not only the causes acting on the phenomena under study, the possible consequences of the phenomena and the possible mutual interactions of some of these factors, but also to see the total emergent processes as a function of possible positive and/or negative feedbacks mediated by the selective decisions, or choices," of the individuals and groups directly involved." (Walter F Buckley, "Sociology and modern systems theory", 1967)

"Communication theory deals with certain important but abstract aspects of communication. Communication theory proceeds from clear and definite assumptions to theorems concerning information sources and communication channels. In this it is essentially mathematical, and in order to understand it we must understand the idea of a theorem as a statement which must be proved, that is, which must be shown to be the necessary consequence of a set of initial assumptions. This is an idea which is the very heart of mathematics as mathematicians understand it." (John R Pierce, "An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals & Noise" 2nd Ed., 1980)

"Everywhere […] in the Universe, we discern that closed physical systems evolve in the same sense from ordered states towards a state of complete disorder called thermal equilibrium. This cannot be a consequence of known laws of change, since […] these laws are time symmetric- they permit […] time-reverse. […] The initial conditions play a decisive role in endowing the world with its sense of temporal direction. […] some prescription for initial conditions is crucial if we are to understand […]" (John D Barrow, "Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"An internal model allows a system to look ahead to the future consequences of current actions, without actually committing itself to those actions. In particular, the system can avoid acts that would set it irretrievably down some road to future disaster ('stepping off a cliff'). Less dramatically, but equally important, the model enables the agent to make current 'stage-setting' moves that set up later moves that are obviously advantageous. The very essence of a competitive advantage, whether it be in chess or economics, is the discovery and execution of stage-setting moves." (John H Holland, 1992)

"Third, social systems exhibit a conflict between short-term and long-term consequences of a policy change. A policy that produces improvement in the short run is usually one that degrades a system in the long run. Likewise, policies that produce long-run improvement may initially depress behavior of a system. This is especially treacherous. The short run is more visible and more compelling. Short-run pressures speak loudly for immediate attention. However, sequences of actions all aimed at short-run improvement can eventually burden a system with long-run depressants so severe that even heroic short-run measures no longer suffice. Many problems being faced today are the cumulative result of short-run measures taken in prior decades." (Jay W Forrester, "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems", 1995)

"There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media." (Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society", 1996)

"These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdependence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability... the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly.(Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Delay time, the time between causes and their impacts, can highly influence systems. Yet the concept of delayed effect is often missed in our impatient society, and when it is recognized, it’s almost always underestimated. Such oversight and devaluation can lead to poor decision making as well as poor problem solving, for decisions often have consequences that don’t show up until years later. Fortunately, mind mapping, fishbone diagrams, and creativity/brainstorming tools can be quite useful here." (Stephen G Haines, "The Managers Pocket Guide to Systems Thinking & Learning", 1998)

"[...] synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system’s components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates." (J-C Spender, "Organizational Knowledge, Collective Practice and Penrose Rents", 1999)

"Bounded rationality simultaneously constrains the complexity of our cognitive maps and our ability to use them to anticipate the system dynamics. Mental models in which the world is seen as a sequence of events and in which feedback, nonlinearity, time delays, and multiple consequences are lacking lead to poor performance when these elements of dynamic complexity are present. Dysfunction in complex systems can arise from the misperception of the feedback structure of the environment. But rich mental models that capture these sources of complexity cannot be used reliably to understand the dynamics. Dysfunction in complex systems can arise from faulty mental simulation-the misperception of feedback dynamics. These two different bounds on rationality must both be overcome for effective learning to occur. Perfect mental models without a simulation capability yield little insight; a calculus for reliable inferences about dynamics yields systematically erroneous results when applied to simplistic models." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"The robustness of the misperceptions of feedback and the poor performance they cause are due to two basic and related deficiencies in our mental model. First, our cognitive maps of the causal structure of systems are vastly simplified compared to the complexity of the systems themselves. Second, we are unable to infer correctly the dynamics of all but the simplest causal maps. Both are direct consequences of bounded rationality, that is, the many limitations of attention, memory, recall, information processing capability, and time that constrain human decision making." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"What is a mathematical model? One basic answer is that it is the formulation in mathematical terms of the assumptions and their consequences believed to underlie a particular ‘real world’ problem. The aim of mathematical modeling is the practical application of mathematics to help unravel the underlying mechanisms involved in, for example, economic, physical, biological, or other systems and processes." (John A Adam, "Mathematics in Nature", 2003)

"Feedback and its big brother, control theory, are such important concepts that it is odd that they usually find no formal place in the education of physicists. On the practical side, experimentalists often need to use feedback. Almost any experiment is subject to the vagaries of environmental perturbations. Usually, one wants to vary a parameter of interest while holding all others constant. How to do this properly is the subject of control theory. More fundamentally, feedback is one of the great ideas developed" (mostly) in the last century, with particularly deep consequences for biological systems, and all physicists should have some understanding of such a basic concept." (John Bechhoefer, "Feedback for physicists: A tutorial essay on control", Reviews of Modern Physics Vol. 77, 2005)

"In short, synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system's components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates." (J-C Spender, "Organizational Knowledge, Collective Practice and Penrose Rents", 2009)

"Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system’s efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will. Complexity in a system tends to increase that system’s inefficiency; the greater the number of variables, the greater the probability of those variables clashing, and in turn, the greater the potential for conflict and disarray. Because more can go wrong, more will. That is why centralized systems are inclined to break down quickly and become enmeshed in greater unintended consequences." (Lawrence K Samuels,"Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"A key discovery of network science is that the architecture of networks emerging in various domains of science, nature, and technology are similar to each other, a consequence of being governed by the same organizing principles. Consequently we can use a common set of mathematical tools to explore these systems." (Albert-László Barabási, "Network Science", 2016)