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when it came to real-world complexities, the elegant equations and the fancy mathematics he’d spent so much time on in school were no more than tools—and limited tools at that. The crucial skill was insight, the ability to see connections.
Very true!
“The problem was one of timing,” he says. “If a government manages to cut back on births today, it will affect school sizes in about 10 years, the labor force in 20 years, the size of the next generation in about 30 years, and the number of retirees in about 60 years.
This is proved in China after its implementation of "one child" policy in 1980s
The Eighth Day of Creation,
They were successful because increasing returns make high-tech markets unstable, lucrative, and possible to corner—and because Japan understood this better and earlier than other countries. The Japanese are very quick at learning from other nations. And they are very good at targeting markets, going in with huge volume, and taking advantage of the dynamics of increasing returns to lock in their advantage.”
if he didn’t come up with a rigorous mathematical analysis of increasing returns, the wider economics community would never regard his theory as anything more than a collection of anecdotes.
the free-market ideal had become bound up with American ideals of individual rights and individual liberty: both are grounded in the notion that society works best when people are left alone to do what they want.
Those zillions of molecules have collectively acquired a property, liquidity, that none of them possesses alone. In fact, unless you know precisely where and how to look for it, there’s nothing in those well-understood equations of atomic physics that even hints at such a property. The liquidity is “emergent.”
Very interesting point!
the complexity arises because you have a great many of these simple components interacting simultaneously. The complexity is actually in the organization—the myriad possible ways that the components of the system can interact.
Can this be applied in the situation of China now?
it meant that life could indeed have bootstrapped its way into existence from very simple molecules. And it meant that life had not been just a random accident, but was part of nature’s incessant compulsion for self-organization.
Catalyst Is the key for this self evolutionary process, but how did catalyst evolve
“Tai chi teaches you to absorb attacks and immediately come back with a counter hit,” he says. “I thought I might need that. For keeping yourself grounded under fire, there’s nothing better than practicing slow-motion martial arts.
Interesting!
The space of possibilities is too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum. The most they can ever do is to change and improve themselves relative to what the other agents are doing. In short, complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty.
The autocracy hurts the adaptive capacity
science showed you how a few simple laws could produce the enormously rich behavior of the world. “It really delights me,” he says. “Science and math are the ultimate in reduction in one sense. But if you turn them on their heads, and look at the synthetic aspects, the possibilities for surprise are just unending. It’s a way of making the universe comprehensible at one end and forever incomprehensible at the other end.” At
the “undecidability theorem” proved by the British logician Alan Turing back in the 1930s. Paraphrased, the theorem essentially says that no matter how smart you think you are, there will always be algorithms that do things you can’t predict in advance. The only way to find out what they will do is to run them.
And we can do it because prediction isn’t the essence of science. The essence is comprehension and explanation.
This is in line with the great investors' mindset!
Ecosystems, economies, societies—they all operate according to a kind of Darwinian principle of relativity: everyone is constantly adapting to everyone else.
