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  1. Complex systems – many individual agents interacting and outcomes difficult to predict
  2. complexity (Pickering 2010): even a few simple minimal agents acting in relation to one another can generate an eectively indenite range of performances.

Complexity is the science of emergence

Spontaneous self-organization (organization with no central conductor) found all over nature

Complex systems all over nature have somehow acquired ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance – the edge of chaos. The components of the system never lock into place yet never dissolve into turbulence either. the edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. the edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive.

Self-organization is the most powerful force in biology and living systems operate at the edge of chaosEvolution always seems to lead to the edge of chaos

  1. Them that has, gets – domino effect once tipping point hits leads to cascades and often winner-take-all systems

  2. The crucial skill is insight. The ability to see connections

  3. At some fundamental level that Brian Arthur didn’t yet understand, the phenomena of physics and biology are the same

    1. Self-organization found everywhere! – positive feedback, increasing returns, lock-in (more niches dependent on a technology, the harder it is to change that technology until something vastly better comes along), unpredictability, tiny events that have immense consequences all seem to be a re-requisite for life itself

  4. Must look at world how it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be

  5. Essence of science lies in explanation more than prediction

  6. Increasing returns prominent when marginal cost is minimal (software for example)

  7. Nearly everything and everybody caught up in non-linear web of incentives, constraints and connections

  8. Innovations never happen in a vacuum and often come from someone who is outside the field

  9. Catalysis everywhere and life wouldn’t be possible without it – molecules could have catalyzed the formation of other molecules so that those in the web would have taken over. The web would keep growing and would have catalyzed its own formation, it would become an autocatalytic set – order for free

    1. Autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own creation and evolution by growing more and more complex over time and will also experience booms and busts from small changes

  10. Complex adaptive systems – characterized by perpetual novelty; dispersed, hierarchical, learn / adapt / evolve, anticipate the future

    1. Can never get to equilibrium as new opportunities are always being created by the system – always unfolding, always in transition

  11. Emergence is hierarchical – building blocks at one level combining into new blocks at a higher level. Hierarchies are one of the fundamental organizing principles of the world. Found everywhere because a well-designed hierarchy is an excellent way of getting some work done without any one person being overwhelmed or having to know everything. Also, utterly transforms a system’s ability to learn, evolve and adapt – can reshuffle building blocks and take giant leaps. Can describe a great many complicated things from relatively few building blocks