Ada Lovelace Quotes

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else

I think the first thing is to recognize a mistake that Obama made. And others have made in thinking that you can revolutionize a system that's unbelievably complex and interlinked, one-sixth of the economy. That was a mistake because whenever you change one thing, it changes 80 other things, and now if you're changing everything at once, you have no idea what the outcome is going to be and you get all of these unintended side effects.

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.

You can't change anyone else but people do change in relationship to your change. All relationships are a system, and when any one part of a system changes, it affects the other part.

One thought cannot awake without awakening others.

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

All things arise in unison. Thereby we see their return.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it.