COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF ORDER AND CHAOS 1st Edition

This was a decent book. I emphatically recommend this in preference to Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity: A Guided Tour." It has several benefits over her text. 1. It manages to stay on topic; 2. It has an interesting story arc to tell-- that of the researcher going through several steps to develop a model that is consistent with reality. It also demonstrates how academics/ intellectuals/ scientists have a vested interest in maintaining ideas in which they have an ego stake.
What, more specifically did we learn?
1. We got a taste of the concept of increasing returns and the failures of rational expectations theory (with respect to the limitations of Economics).
2. We learned about why the Second Law of Thermodynamics is often misunderstood/ misused in the context of trying to explain evolution.
3. p.140. The author gave us some very subtle observations about (1) the extreme specialization/ lack of overlap of the disciplines that makes interdisciplinary work difficult; (2) the nature of mathematics as it is used in Physics vs. Economics-- in the first case as a TOOL to build models that correspond to physical things but in the second more as a demonstration of intellectual prowess with explanatory power secondary.
There were a few things about which I had questions.
1. p. 39, Waldrop suggested that the proof of a theory was not in its predictive powers, but in its explanatory powers. But the thing is: theories can be made that explain anything. Isn't the proof of the pudding in predictive powers/ testability?
The author has also done a yeoman's work of making (what could/ should be) a highly mathematical topics something that has not a single graph or equation in it (and therefore very accessible to non mathematicians).

There was, however, a downside.

1. This book could have benefited from a "cast of characters" that was put either at the front or the back. There were just so many people involved in this that it was hard to keep them all straight.
2. I can see that the author had to choose between a straight recitation of facts related to cases involving complex systems and keeping a story arc for a popular audience. But a bit better of organization might have helped. There were quite a few topics discussed in here, and they all just got blurry (and that was 1/3 of the way into the book). Nor were they easy to relocate for rereading of points for which a reader might like further clarification/ to discuss with a friend. So, the author talked about economic systems, evolutionary biology (at the level of population genetics and then again at the level of the molecular self assembly of the first self-replicators).
3. There was not diagram/ graph the first in this book. I know that he was trying to keep it simple, but in point of fact, people who are liable to pick up a book about something like this could follow the arguments if they were made quantitatively and in more depth.
4. The book was too long. It was about 348 pages of text, and it feels like he could have said what he wanted to say in 200.

Verdict: This book is 20 years old this year. It is only worth a second hand purchase price. But a lot of the concepts are still interesting. It's not quite worth the time it took to read, but would have been if it were only 200 pages.

The storyteller makes no choice
soon you will not hear his voice
his job is to shed light
and not to master,

Hunter/Garcia Terrapin Station

I first became interested in things which just did not fit into my real world experience when I discovered, whilst quite young, that the weather forecast was not always correct in it's predictions. In Britain, talking about the weather as per Kate Fox, is an entry into conversation between strangers.

My passion was science and in particular, Astronomy, and I found the history of the subject fascinating.

Jump ahead a few years and I read for my first degree, in Economics. I found that the subject, based on the concept of rationality, did not match the facts and I found it hard to agree with Milton Friedman about the realism of models when the main purpose was predictability. I was skeptical too, of the economists claims to have some insight into policy either in terms of the National Plan, or the imposition of taxes such as sin taxes. My skepticism was not supported by the intellectual tools in my arsenal until a paper by Hayek entitled "The Use of Knowledge in Society" alerted me to a new way of thinking about economics which caused me to rethink my notion of economics as science into one of process. Going back to first principles of Adam Smith and before, I became more uncomfortable about contemporary economics and in particular the notion of equilibrium. Reading Adam Ferguson led me to rethink again about so-called economic actors and the notion of spontaneous orders.

A television show in Britain on Chaos and Anti-Chaos, prompted me to investigate further. Partly due to Geoff Hodgson's works on institutionalism and reading Darwin as well as behaviouralist authors I came across ideas of Gaia and thence to Chaos by Gleick. Almost to the present when I settled down to read this wonderful book, little did I realize this at the time.

The title is a bit of a misnomer as it really is about the establishment of an interdisciplinary research centre called the Santa Fe Institute, appropriately based in that city in New Mexico. The author combines fascinating stories of how the people came together to create such a unique body each being motivated by ideas, not necessarily recognized as aspects on complexity as such, which did not fit the mould that they were trying to be forced into.

The book is a toure de force on how these individuals pursued their ideas, thinking the unthinkable, talking to others who were like minded, being able to get in touch with specialists in disciplines who recognized that these people would perhaps be the ones to break the mould.

The stories of enthusiasm, determination, persistence of the individuals and finding the ability to speak across the divide of disciplines and recognize that their subject areas could be examined using methodologies which were similar and which undermined a lot of traditional ways of thinking about problems, are highly infectious. Almost an intellectual equivalent of bodice-rippers in romance novels. Similarly the book is fast paced in demonstrating how these avenues of study have opened up a veritable panorama of research programmes which are leading to fruitful outcomes.

I have been unhappy for years with the whole notion of economic forecasts and financial analysts forecasts, which when wrong (often) do not lead to unemployment. Similarly, I question the notion of rational human beings, meaning men, when consumers are women by a significant margin who use different criteria in any marketplace. The failure of prediction over the centuries has caused a lot of human misery and will probably cause more. I must concur with one notion in this book that economics should be more of a discipline seeking understanding of real economies.

Complexity shows how things change, how they evolve by what economic professionals call exogenous shocks which cannot be predicted by their modeling. Humans are affected by feelings, the weather and a host of other things which cannot be modeled or quantifies. This introduction to fascinating new ways in which to view the world has a lot of explanatory power in so many areas. It really is an outstanding work which I am going to reread almost immediately.

It is a long time since reading one book has generated so much enthusiasm for further study and rereading older works through new lenses. My only regret is that I never found it earlier.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.
William Blake.