Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) Paperback

"Simplexity" analyses various things and deduces how they are either simple or complex, the purpose being that we should look a little deeper into things before making consequential decisions. Sounds like pretty much common sense, and it is to a degree, but the book does highlight some scientific insights which might help the reader in approaching some situations. Here are some items which the book presents which I think are worthwhile:

1. It is the region between order and disorder which gives complexity. For instance, a piece of copper pipe can be thought of as a simple piece of frozen solid, but it gets more complex as a network of plumbing in a skyscraper, and extremely compex at the subatomic level.

2. Any system must be seen at all levels before determining if it is complex.

3. The stock market may seem complex, but major changes in it come more from some bland pieces of information, rather than from some catastrophic news events.

4. With experiments involving how people will divide up money, they show that we "appear to be wired for justice".

5. Although human behavior can't be mathematized, it is influenced thusly. For example, 1.3M people die in auto accidents globally, yet something as simple as well placed speed bumps could reduce that amount quite significantly, since there is about an 80% death rate when accidents happen above 35mph.

6. Fads spread faster rather than by first influencing the most popular people first, but by first influencing a smaller number of people but those having a close relationship with the originator.

7. Politically, it is better to market ideas about a candidate which voters already think, than by breaking bigger, more surprising things. Hence, a simple approach is more effective in such situations.

8. Complicated work skills appear at some of the least prestigous jobs. For instance, truck drivers must process visual, tactile, auditory and cognitive skills all instantaneously.

9. Animals have about 1B heartbeats per lifetime, influenced by the mass of the animal. Based on that, humans should only live to age 20 or so, but they are the exception because they use their brains to "game the system".

10. Since humans survive by converting carbs to CO2 + H2O + energy, perhaps inorganic substances share overlapping similarities with humans since CO2 and H2O also are associated with them, like with cities compared with humans.

11. Zipf's Law - certain mathematical patterns appear as how often centain words and terms show up in text. Therefore, maybe similar patterns show up elsewhere, like income, size of corporations and urban populations. They do seem to do so.

12. "Probability neglect" - people seem to fear a catastophic event (terrorist attack) rather than a more chronic one (climate change) when the chronic one can cause greater harm. Apparently, there are two systems for analyzing risk, automatic (feelings) and more thoughtful (experience).

13. "Availability heuristic" - the better able it is to summon an image of a dangerous event, the easier it is to be afraid of it.

14. In the computer world, it has been said "there are two kinds of people, software engineers and those who are afraid of them".

15. Muhammad Yunnis, who pioneered microloans, showed that surgical strikes, so to speak, are more effective in reducing poverty, but that involves complex analysis.

16. The Pareto principle applies to an 80:20 rule when looking at income distribution, but also shows up in all sorts of things.

17. For the arts, complexity falls flat, but there is still a connection. Sure, in music, but also in art, reflective of nature's quasicrystals, which have seemingly symmetric patterns though they never repeat. Jackson Pollack's paintings exhibit the mathematical concept of fractals.

So, overall, if one wants to ponder how the mind works or might work better, there are some helpful thoughts here.

This book is clearly the work of a journalist. On the positive side, that means that Kluger has chosen interesting topics and he's written about them in a smooth and engaging way. But on the negative side, there are a host of problems, many of which have been pointed out by other reviewers:

- Kluger apparently coined the term "simplexity" himself. I haven't heard complexity researchers use the term, and Kluger gives it no meaningful definition or illustrations in this book. He doesn't even meaningfully distinguish between complicated and complex. The book title is thus essentially a gimmick.

- The topics Kluger covers are only loosely affiliated with complexity, and some hardly at all. At the same time, the majority of core topics in complexity theory recieve little or no mention in this book. And making matters worse, the topics Kluger does discuss aren't linked together in any coherent way. So this isn't really even a book on complexity, but instead closer to a random collection of (mostly) interesting topics.

- Kluger's understanding is often rather shallow, even by journalistic standards, and there are some outright errors in the book (eg, his short discussion on bridge design and construction is riddled with misunderstandings).

In short, this book has little to do with complexity and no new concept of "simplexity" is genuinely introduced, so the book's title is a severe case of false advertising, hence my 2 stars. For a proper introduction to complexity, I recommend Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell.

Early on, author Jeffrey Kluger notes the difficulty of pinning down what we mean by simplicity and complexity (Page 15): "Trying to distill all of this down to a working definition of just what simplicity is and just what complexity is has always been difficult." One approach--pure chaos and pure robustness at ends of a continuum. As one observer notes (Page 29): "It's the region between order and disorder that gives you complexity, not the order and disorder at the ends." That said, we still don't have a clear idea of the nature of the concept. The word that is the title of this book, simplexity. Simple things can quickly become complex and complex things can simplify. This book attempts to explore this.

Examples used: Groups of people tend to make better decisions than single individuals (e.g., guessing the number of jelly beans or investing clubs' ability to get a good return); traffic engineers trying to reduce traffic jams and major slowdowns by rather simple adjustments in traffic flow. A political example? Failed states and totalitarian states are very easy to model; they are pretty predictable. Multiparty states or Western democracies, on the other hand, are more complex. This facilitates openness in communication.

There are many intriguing and thought-provoking examples. But the final chapter does not pull things together; one ends with a sense of pastiche. In addition, there really aren't any principles presented to show how to handle complexity, how to gain leverage with respect to simplexity. So, thought-provoking but also a bit maddening.