IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book. We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist. I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.
Shame this thread is dominated by that single sentence on nonfiction. Some books I enjoyed this year: * The Player of Games - http://amzn.com/0316005401 * A Guide to Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - http://amzn.com/B0040JHNQG * The Emperors Handbook - http://amzn.com/0743233832 * The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future - http://amzn.com/0393088693 * Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work - http://amzn.com/B009JU6UPG * Chaos: Making a New Science - http://amzn.com/0143113453 * Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American…
It's been a while, but I remember many experiments being presented in Gleick's book ( The double pendulum being a chaotic system, or the paper showing how it was impossible to predict the distance between two points in a structure after steching and folding it) The gist being that some systems are much more sensitive than others to initial variables - and these are what we call chaotic. For the double pendulum, for example, you try to release the pendulum from the same point, with 0 force - no matter how precise you are, there will be variability in the position, air pressure, temperature,…
I've skimmed Gleick's book before and my feeling is that it's a high level overview of the subject without much content in either explaining the underlying math, the motivation behind it or giving some deeper insight into the subject, at least at a level that I would consider valuable. I'm probably being too pejorative, but these books (like GEB or the like) are something I consider "feel good" books that give the illusion of understanding rather than any real insight. They're great for motivating people to learn more and popularizing mathematics as something to be valued but I find them to…
Well, I'd always had a love of fractals, without ever truly comprehending how the underlying maths worked. Same goes for cosmology -- utterly fascinated by the outputs, but didn't really understand the actual mechanisms thereof. So during the trip, I used fractal and cosmology images and videos as an emotional "anchor" -- grounding the trip in material I already loved and was comfortable with / fascinated by. I then surrounded those materials with more mathematically technical videos, images, and texts about fractals & cosmology -- the things I traditionally would have shied away from as too…
Oh wow - I haven't thought of Tierra in 25 years. There was a time in the early 90's where I was super fascinated by genetic algorithms, artificial life, and chaos theory. I think it was all kicked off by James Gleick's Chaos and following threads in the bibliography. I think Tierra was featured in Steven Levy's book Artifical Life. In another thread on HN, people are talking about where programmers of the 90's thought we were headed and your mention of Tierra reminds me that I thought artificial life was going to be a big, big deal.
James Gleick's "Chaos" remains, in my view, a great popular book on the subject, and manages to convey many of the ideas at a conceptual level without getting technical. And if you enjoy that, you might also like Strogatz's "Sync." For slightly more technical treatment, Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos is now a standard text. It isn't terribly technical and is quite well written and (in my view) easy to read for anyone with a background in vector calculus, diff eqs, & perhaps a little bit of linear algebra. (There are now other good options to, some more mathematical and some more…
You've stumbled upon Chaos Theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), which aims to study chaotic systems (charactesised by very high relation to initial variables - see weather prediction, double pendulum, etc). Some problems are too sensible to initial variables and solutions are not prescriptive like regular physics - meaning that variability at the 20th decimal in your initial variables will induce massive output differences. Lorentz discovery of this is interesting as he was working on weather modelling, it's a clear example of the issues with chaotic systems. He was running…
Absolutely! And he has gone from strength to strength with each new episode. His pacing is perfect as he really takes his time but just barely touches on the intense brutality that was certainly epidemic in the times. He thus avoids the salacious details like, for example, Dan Carlin (who does his research well, but is less my taste now after discovering FoC). Just outstanding. The real next-level excellence is that he is really tracing the history of technology along the way, going into significant detail about how the conquerors developed and utilized new tech to effect their…
Reference needed supporting your claim that it was so widely understood. My strong impression is that it wasn't until James Gleick published Chaos: Making a New Science in the 1980s that there was a popular treatment available to the lay public. And that book lays out many examples from the early 1960s at people like Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda being surprised at extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, and having their discoveries met by doubt and disbelief. Which indicates pre-1960, only a fairly niche audience was strongly aware of chaos theory among either the lay public or…