Linear Minds in a Nonlinear World Linear relationships are easy to think about: the more the merrier. Linear equations are solvable, which makes them suitable for textbooks. Linear systems have an important modular virtue: you can take them apart and put them together again—the pieces add up. Nonlinear systems generally cannot be solved and cannot be added together.… Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.… That twisted changeability makes nonlinearity hard to calculate, but it also creates rich kinds of behavior that never occur in linear systems.
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