I've to give it to Taleb to bring some rather fundamental and obvious in hindsight insights to explicit clarity. Although one must not confuse anecdotes with st

I've to give it to Taleb to bring some rather fundamental and obvious in hindsight insights to explicit clarity. Although one must not confuse anecdotes with statistics, his writing style is gold. The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates.