Honestly, one of the best things I learned when I was doing work on complexity with Stuart Kauffman was the idea of enabling constraints. The fact that in many

Honestly, one of the best things I learned when I was doing work on complexity with Stuart Kauffman was the idea of enabling constraints. The fact that in many circumstances putting constraints can actually lead to more complex and better situations when there is creation. Essentially, the enabling constraint has the effect of putting more of the creation on the line of criticality and thus suddenly you get far more creative growth. These EGA/VGA comparisons (this is the second I've seen so far) almost demonstrate this perfectly. It's really quite fascinating.