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Complexity Explained
- ColinWright 6y agoI got three slides in and the "Swooshing!" was driving me nuts. I'm sure the content is fine, and the presentation is simply gorgeous. For me ... unusable. Edit: In the end, at the end, I found the PDF. It seems a little light on content, but I guess I'm not the audience. Not sure who the audience would be, though.
- FriedrichN 6y agoAt the end you can download a PDF. I must say I prefer that over the slow web page. To be honest I always leave a page immediately if it's way too fancy, especially when stuff starts moving and fading, I simply hate it.
- sliken 6y agoSame here, page up/down almost works, but misses text, gave up.
- ksec 6y agoAnother fine Example of we cant even do Web Pages, let alone Web apps. On Safari, simple scrolling makes the content unreadable.
- dredmorbius 6y agoDisabling JS helps. PDF: https://complexityexplained.github.io/ComplexityExplained.pdf https://complexityexplained.github.io/ComplexityExplained.pd... (Multiple languages available.)
- cabalamat 6y agoHaving read the pdf, I was underwhelmed. There doesn't appear to be any meat here, merely restatements of the obvious.
- trenchgun 6y agoMaybe this could be more useful for you? "An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications" https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2020/6105872/ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2020/6105872/
- dredmorbius 6y agoA far more appropriate title would be "Complexity: A very brief introduction to major themes with bibliography". The booklet is 20 pages covering aspects with a one-paragraph description, several examples as a bullet list, list of concepts, and two references for further readig. The title sets up rather greater expectations.
- 4gotunameagain 6y agoTurn off JS, fixed :)
- dredmorbius 6y agoToJ;F!
- tambourine_man 6y agoOn mobile Safari, navigation is fine. It’s probably a simpler versions of the desktop one.
- bpicolo 6y agoThey may want to add an option to have all the context in a single column, centered. This is hard to use on wide screens right now - it's kind of like watching a tennis match
- karmakaze 6y ago> Edit: In the end, at the end, I found the PDF. It seems a little light on content, but I guess I'm not the audience. Not sure who the audience would be, though. Thanks for that. I suspected as much. I'll wait to read something more serious, less market-y.
- uyt 6y agoFor the people suggesting reading the pdf or disabling JS, you're missing the point of this submission. 90% of the value is in playing with their interactive demos. (though all of them seem to be from https://www.complexity-explorables.org/ https://www.complexity-explorables.org/ so it might be better to go there directly instead)
- ColinWright 6y agoIf those links are the intent of this page, the "Swoosh! Swoosh!" is a great way to hide them. There's a maxim in publishing: Don't bury the lede.
- hawski 6y agoIt is so slow, that after the title slide I scrolled through three slides and stopped, because I thought something was wrong. Then the slide appeared and I realized I missed three slides, because of those animations being so slow and not at all correlated to how fast I scroll or how far I'm in.
- ddoeth 6y agoWhat really bothered me was that the animation only started when the new slide hit the top of the page. When I was not scrolling perfectly, the top most rows of text where already hidden.
- FriedrichN 6y agoI read the PDF, it looks great but it doesn't really contain that much information. It's all very abstract, which is fine since it's a booklet, but it doesn't offer much in how to go deeper into it.
- rawland 6y agoNice idea, however the readability/contrast... Author, please read: https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
- metalliqaz 6y agoThat's one issue. Another is how some people seem to think that you can only put one idea on the screen at a time, and users should scroll scroll scroll. Both OP and your link both commit that sin. Just put everything on one page and let my eyes do the moving.
- iFreilicht 6y agoHoly hell that website is awfully designed. Why does it try to snap my scrolling position to what it thinks is the right position? It doesn’t even work, it jumps around like hell, I try to click through the examples and it just kicks me to the bottom. This is exactly the same idiocy of bad and unaccessible design for aesthetic purposes that the site complains about. The irony is palpable.
- jmatthews 6y agomany of the examples are based from this site https://www.complexity-explorables.org/ https://www.complexity-explorables.org/ if you're looking for additional examples.
- ncfausti 6y agoThank you! This is why I read the comments on HN. I was thinking while reading that I'd like to find some good resources to explore complexity theory in more depth, this looks great. Side note: 14 people created something of value and distribute it for free, and still many of the comments here are just complaints about auto-scroll, websites, and JS. Pretty sad to see.
- khiner 6y agoCouldn’t agree more. I often read some top comments even before checking an article just to get a quick read on whether something is likely e.g. clickbaity. Reading the comments it seemed like there was some consensus that this was a page with mostly information that would be better presented in a flat form like a pdf rather than an interactive website... but it’s actually a super fun collection of interactive visualizations for some of the classic complexity examples, and it worked perfectly for me except for a kind of ostentatious fade-from-white effect on page load.
- khiner 6y agoAh I see. I was on mobile and didn't get the left/right swooshing, but do on desktop. I also find the left/right swooshing from the outside pretty clunky and unnecessary. But the content is really nice, and I personally appreciate a bit of fun in experimenting with content presentation. Esp. given the topic.
- ColinWright 6y ago> 14 people created something of value and distribute it for free, and still many of the comments here are just complaints about auto-scroll, websites, and JS. Or, to put it another way, 14 people created fantastic material with all sorts of genuinely wonderful animations, then put links to them on a page that was so annoying that potential readers clicked away before finding the useful and intriguing stuff that had been shared so freely. Pretty sad to see.
- dgb23 6y agoThe parametrized visualizations are fun and useful. They really help with the mental model and intuition. Also I didn’t know that field existed. Very interesting. One could imagine using visualization and generative testing for software systems to be a subject where this model could be applied.
- CraneWorm 6y agoIt covers how little it contains with how flashy it is.
- andrepd 6y agoCertain topics like "complexity theory" or even "artificial intelligence" attract this sort of thing. It's easy to appear that you're saying insightful things without actually saying anything at all.
- neuronic 6y agoI have an entire undergrad degree in complex systems theory, found it great and useful, yet in the instance of discussing this website I agree with you.
- andrepd 6y agoLikewise, I had a great deal of my studies occupied by quantum mechanics, yet it's also another topic that attracts cranks and people saying nothing of substance, at an alarming rate ;)
- id 6y agoIf I use the scrollbar or scroll too fast, I don't see any text.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoThis is not a very good overview of complexity. Instead read John Holland’s “Complexity: A Very Short Introduction” To dig deeper (and something that will apply directly to many here) I loved “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies” by Geoffrey West
- d0100 6y agoDeath by a thousand slide-ins
- pilingual 6y agoIf you are interested in complexity, Complexity Explorer from the Santa Fe Institute has courses and other resources available: https://complexityexplorer.org https://complexityexplorer.org
- robbmorganf 6y agoHow does complexity theory benefit real people? Unlike theories of physics or economics, it doesn't appear to describe how anything actually works, rather that things are just more complex than they seem. For instance, complexity theory just points out that the double pendulum is hard to predict without adding value, while controls theory was more useful by stabilizing the double pendulum. So what are some real-world benefits of complexity theory?
- bshanks 6y agoYou could ask the same question of calculus (or any theoretical domain of knowledge). The rules of derivatives and integrals don't, in themselves, give a model of any particular empirical system. But they are a tool/language that can be used to describe/build/evaluate models for systems. To give examples requires an agreement on exactly which domains of knowledge you consider to be part of "complex systems", so based on your question I'll assume that you consider chaos to be part of it. For example, the Poincaré-Bendixson theorem saves researchers time because they don't have to consider the possibility of chaos in 2D continuous state space models. For example, since we know that weather is a chaotic dynamical system, we can give up on the hope of ever being able to precisely predict the weather a year beforehand. This saves researchers from spending their time on impossible objectives.
- api 6y agoCritics say complexity has no predictive power. That’s the point. The field studies systems that are unpredictable by instead modeling them and studying how their conditions or parameters affect their behavioral characteristics.
- jananas 6y agoI second that. I see it as something to build intuition for "complex" problems. To make this more concrete: If you want to study the brain you can go the "biology" approach and describe neurons really well and build mathematical models for all the neuron types. Or you could do it the other way around with the "psychology" approach and put people/monkey/rats in an MRT. Both ways you learn important stuff but it will be hard to connect both worlds because simulation of enough neurons to predictive power over the outcome of an MRT is probably far fetched (although there are the human brain project or its US counterpart, the brain activity map project which attempt to do something like this). Complexity theory might help to learn how to close this gap. Things like synchronization (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Synchronization#Chaotic_systems http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Synchronization#Chaotic_...) or Self organized criticality (form the critical brain theory) could help distinguishing which parts of neuronal dynamics are due to biological restrictions and which form the function of the brain. With this knowledge one might be able to "dumb down" neuronal models enough to make large scale simulations without loosing to much of the processing dynamics. You might still not have predictive power then, but then again, complexity theory might help you to understand what the limitations of your approach are. The same intuitions could be applied to other things. Large scale power grids are also often hard to predict when not moving into a sure fail state. Being able to analyze how you stabilize these systems without basically dumping a lot of money on them is the way to go (Looking in the past, the money will probably not be spend). You could study the behavior of crowds and maybe make estimations on the safety large conventions build a "panic index" that calculates the risk of having something like at the Loveparade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster . Again - you would not be able to make a precise prediction of whats gonna happen but I'd say it'd even knowing if you have like a 0.5% Chance of a disaster would be worth knowing. (Of course, there are effective methods taught to prevent this disasters anyway. But sometimes you have new configurations that didn't occur in the past and you might catch these things with a simulation. I could be an additional approach)
- littlemtman 6y agoThis is a very cool blog, thanks for sharing, had no problems opening the page in chrome on windows.
- franze 6y agoI wrote the book "Understanding SEO"[1] with Systems Theory in mind. After the 1000 meeting w people talking about tips and tricks and competing theoretical constructs including bullshit and thoughtcancer constructs like "linkjuice, pagerank, pinguins, pandas, ..." I set out to build a bullshit free theory of SEO. For my own sake - otherwise I would have had to quit my job. And yeah "All models are wrong, but some of them are useful." Rephrased: It's a model, therefore it's wrong. But we'll, I deem it damn useful. [1] free for HN: https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news/ https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news/
- franze 6y agoMy inspiration for the book was the great works of Donella Meadows and Jerry Weinberg. Recommendations to anyone interested in Systems Thinking.
- moosebear847 6y agoWow.. love your clear and straightforward writing. And it's the first time I've felt I understand what SEO is and isn't (super secret magical sorcery). How come you would have had to quit the job wo this book?
- franze 6y agoProgress. I got clients via word of mouth and then worked with them to have a more structured & systematic way to think about SEO and online growth. Now I get most of my clients via the book. And I already start with them from a systematic baseline. ------ Or think of it the other way, imagine getting contracted to create a webapp and the first thing that you need to do is to explain how the internet works. Vs. Getting contracted and starting to talk about the advantages/disadvantages of different frameworks and app paradigms.
- hliyan 6y agoI recently had the (possibly flawed) epiphany that all behavior is emergent. If you think about it, all things that we consider objects are just semi-permanent aggregations of fundamental particles that we recognize and label as objects for convenience of thought. When the patterns in such aggregations are outside the space and time scales that allow human minds to recognize them, the only label available is "complex".
- jameal 6y agoI'm curious how this epiphany came to you. This strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist concept of the Five Aggregates, which describe five elements that combine to make up our existence: Physical form -> Sensation -> Perception -> Mental formations -> Consciousness
- hliyan 6y agoI was just trying to understand what people mean when they say that "consciousness is an emergent property", which always felt like a hand-wavy explanation. I was weighing that explanation against panpsychism and then this thought emerged.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI'm wondering which sort of consciousness is under scrutiny. We know when we're conscious and unconscious. E.g. Awake vs Asleep. Even animals exhibit that dichotomy. The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they understand when they look silly? Do they recognize themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic. It's important to know which one is intended since they are so very different, at least in their distribution among living creatures.
- hliyan 6y agoAwareness, definitely. I'm using consciousness in the same sense Julian Jaynes used it (he used to call the other form "reactivity", a term that never quite caught on).
- melomal 6y agoI really appreciate the effort on this, after 8+ years of SEO it can get a little hectic to say the least. But honestly. Truthfully. Backlinks are all you need to rank. I've been white/black/grey hat SEO and each and every time, buying a bunch of solid backlinks (a.k.a. you get what you pay for) and within 2 weeks I am on page 1 and still rocking. For 246k keyword too. Spend a bit of time running some searches these days and since the two major algo updates in Dec/Jan all rules have basically gone out of the window.
- cabalamat 6y agoDidn't read due to annoying web design. Can someone summarise?
- goodmachine 6y agoComplexity theory is interesting and useful. However, because it's approximately descriptive, rather than accurately predictive, the field is haunted by quantum woo merchants, grand metaphysical unifiers, quasi-ecological musings and Buddha-lite pantheism. Which is neither interesting nor useful, except perhaps as a sociological phenomenon. Discuss.
- trenchgun 6y agoNothing to discuss for me. Agreed to both points.
- beaconstudios 6y agoI don't think there's anything wrong with thinking about the philosophical side of complexity theory, I do quite a lot and arguably fall into the second and fourth categories you've described. You are, of course, free to not be interested in metaphysical philosophy. Woo merchants latch onto anything science-sounding that they can, as they're trying to steal authority by use of jargon, so I don't think that's unique to systems science - but their influence is of course extremely toxic as they both kill people and erode the authority of the subjects they steal from.
- aogaili 6y agoHave you ever faced a problem or system so complex, that you tried to understand and gave up in frustration? Do you think there are systems out there completely beyond humanity grasp? that we won't even have an entry point to reason about them?
- hliyan 6y agoI've learned to think of understanding as a form of compression. The more recurring patterns there are in a system, the better we can understand them. The fewer such recurring patterns in a system, the harder it is to understand them. Fortunately for us, a lot of things in nature are recurrent.
- beaconstudios 6y agoAnd if you want to understand why they are recurrent, then you'll find the commonality in the shape of the system's components' causality - how they influence each other, often in loops. These are the subject of control theory, cybernetics (also a systems science), and systems dynamics (if you like maths).
- vonnik 6y agoSimulations are one of the ways we can see where complexity leads. The work of OpenAI on Dota show how RL can produce a successful emergent behavior in response to complexity.
- dstick 6y agoAny recommendations for books on the subject? I read Simply Complexity and hungry for more!
- gbolcer 6y agoDave Weinberger's Everyday Chaos. Also, the fbook Santa Fe Institute Complexity Explorer's group is a daily stop.
- nicholast 6y agoThis website was a neat resource. The whole point of complexity science is that there are domains with computational irreducibility where in order to estimate system behaviors we can not rely on formulaic models, in complexity science we instead make use of computer models via simulation to try and approach dynamics. As potential further reading, one of the cited authors gave a lecture on intersections of AI and complexity science that I captured in this blog post. https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/making-the-complex-coherent-d414908c6926 https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/making-the... Also recommend writings of any author affiliated with Santa Fe Institute, a lot of books to choose from.
- beaconstudios 6y agoAI originally grew out of complexity science, in the form of cybernetics - hence cybernetics' popular association with AI.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThe booklet quotes Herbert Simon, AI pioneer: "It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems... The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations."
- metalliqaz 6y agoOk look, another website that doesn't work on desktop. It's so frustrating that we seem to have lost any understanding of how to to put information on a screen.
- j4yav 6y agoIt doesn't seem to work on mobile either, for what it's worth. Very low contrast text and general weirdness that makes it hard to tell if it's working that way on purpose or not.
- khiner 6y agoFor me, it works on both desktop and mobile, chrome & firefox. I don't get the left/right swooshing on mobile, but do on desktop. Mac/iPhone
- mvolfik 6y agoI have no idea what this means, I love the visualizations though
- paulorlando 6y agoThis is great. I try to write about little pieces of this, but mostly from a perspective of new tech, policy, and history: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
- complexcomplex 6y agoI hope to see the end of LaTex only explanations. The site already has simulations so one must assume it has code that could codify those LaTex eqs. Perhaps a ‘things ever ___ should know about ___’ is needed for mathematicians and notation. Ala, “some disciplines use the same symbols for different functions” and “many symbols are intended to obfuscate details for ease of hand writing”. Perhaps this is meant as a collection of reference material and I am wrongfully assuming complexityexplained is trying to be educational material, but if the intended audience is people hoping to have complexity explained to them then I think code and its underlying abstractions are going to better explain to a higher percentage of people who click through than LaTex. Show both if you can.
- andrepd 6y agoWhen you say "LaTeX", do you mean... maths? I'm confused about what's your criticism.
- complexcomplex 6y agoI sniff an air of condescension; what’s your goals therein? Are you posturing your ‘maths’ knowledge? I thought I was explicit in my criticism of “notation only” explanations, but perhaps a positive example would be more explicit. https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython https://github.com/barbagroup/CFDPython This repo explains computational fluid dynamics (an example of a complex system!) from “what is a python function” to “2d Navier stokes”. It shows the work of how to discretize ‘latex beautified’ notation, shows the relationship between the computations and the notation, and even explains when their LaTex strays from “conventional use of notation” and why. The authors even throw in traditional handwritten board lecture videos if that helps you learn better. complexityexplained reads like it’s written by the Spider-Man points at Spider-Man meme.
- andrepd 6y agoThere was no such condescension. I'm still not sure of what you mean by "notation only explanations". Do you have a problem with standard mathematical notation? Or with explanations that involve mathematics at all? Can you give me an example of what you consider to be a "bad LaTeX explanation"? For what's worth, I find your link infinitely more confusing than the few pages of Landau which cover the same topic... ;) The explanation in your link is lost among details of implementation and python syntax, whereas a clear and lucid explanation in a good textbook like Landau lets you understand the actual physics of what's going on. Of course your mileage may vary, and at any rate a few animated graphs are very valuable as a complement to aid in that understanding. This is a relatively recent tool that should be embraced more.
- blindm 6y agoIf you are doing software engineering, Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework is worth a look. Considers complexity as one quadrant to deal with when making decisions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework
- ColinWright 6y agoOh, FFS. Now it's been pointed out[0] that there are links and animations embedding in the page. And there are! But their existence is beautifully hidden by the bloody annoying, horribly slow "Swoosh! Swoosh" of the animation. It's a perfect example of having potentially fantastic content, then making it really, really hard to notice. Urgh. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048154
- mattnewton 6y agoI honestly don’t know what you mean by the “swoosh” - the initial fade animation?
- ColinWright 6y agoWhen I first load the page I have to wait what is probably only 1/2 a second or so, but feels like an age, for the initial load to fade up. (I've timed it ... from hitting Ctrl-F5 to full text on the first page takes 3 seconds. It looks like the first 2 seconds are load, the last second or so is the "Fade Up".) The last thing on that page "above the fold" is the quotation: "There's no love in a carbon atom, No hurricane in a water molecule, No financial collapse in a dollar bill." – Peter Dodds I don't see the connection with a page about complexity. So I "PgDn" and the screen is initially empty, then text "swooshes" in from the right. I timed it, from the time I hit "PgDn" to the time the text stops moving is over a second. It feels an absolute age and breaks any flow of reading the content. It's easy to miss that there's an animation to trigger ... initially I missed it completely. When I find it I see it says: Jujujajaki networks: A dynamic network model that was designed to capture the emergence of community structures, heterogeneities and clusters that are frequently observed in social networks. I watch for over a minute and think: "Does it show that?" I can't see it. It's pretty, but it imparts no information to me at all. Again I hit "PgDn". Again the text "swooshes" in, this time from the left. And again, over a second to stop moving. It's taking an age, and already I'm fed up with the whole experience. Add that to the poor contrast and I'm not inclined to bother reading further. I'm starting to feel that the authors are more interested in showing their leet presentation skilz than they are in presenting the information itself. And so on. Does that help you understand my experience and why I found it frustrating?
- JackFr 6y agoI’m not sure I get the point. Cool animations, no details, no math. Profound quotes from heavy names but not math. Revolutionary, paradigm breaking stuff, but not really. Almost makes me long for a Stephen Wolfram press release.
- talentedcoin 6y agoI don’t understand the negativity here. I think this is a pretty cool site (when browsing on my iPhone at least).
- beefman 6y agoAll the actual content seems to be on this site http://www.complexity-explorables.org http://www.complexity-explorables.org
- jonsneyers 6y agoNeeds better contrast. The difference between text and background color is just too low, even for people with normal vision it is hard to read.
- justicezyx 6y agoThe Chinese translation of the title is a bit puzzling to me, as a Chinese mainlander lived in US: Complexity Explained is translated to "沒說你不知道", literally means "you wont know if I don't tell you". Generally "Explained" usually corresponds to "详解" But anyway, very good content. I am surprised that double-pendulum is a chaotic system. I thought it's possible to precisely predict its motion, because its apparent simplicity.