Complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned.

--- Artist James Bridle, quoted in NewScientist issue 3189, August 2018, in a review by Pat Kane of his book New Dark Age.

In context:

Bridle expresses moral distaste at the excesses and cruelties of digital culture, with its devastating access to our rawest selves, and its historical links to war and imperialism.

But he also possesses a near-Buddhist acceptance of how inescapably we are caught up in it. Perhaps this is why he writes so approvingly of initiatives like “centaur” chess, in which humans team up with AIs so that together they can beat the most advanced programmes.

The “darkness” in Bridle’s title is generated by the unthinkable density of our information worlds, and the growing inscrutability of the machine intelligences that tend them. We can’t afford to be overwhelmed by all this, he says. Global warming’s knowledge explosion, for example, compels all good citizens to be amateur statisticians. But we should understand the scale and intractability of the problem: “Complexity is not a condition to be tamed,” Bridle cautions, “but a lesson to be learned.”

True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

--- Jonathan Ive, explaining the design philosophy behind iOS 7 in the product video shown at WWDC 2013 (according to Wikiquote) (h/t Agata Toromanoff for the quote in her article Conscious Environments about Elena Mora, Aesthetica Magazine, June/July 2018)

From Wikiquote:

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.

You can’t run, and you can’t hide from complexity; there’s no point in even trying

--- Russ White, in "Considerations in network complexity," The Internet Protocol Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, Apr. 2018 (pdf)

Quote in context

You can’t run, and you can’t hide from complexity; there’s no point in even trying. You’re going to encounter it; ignoring it doesn’t make the problem go away, it just allows the problem to fester under some “rug” in some corner of your network. The complexity problems you create today will return as bigger, more complex problems in just a few years.  

… 

When dealing with engineering problems, then, a little humility around what can, and cannot, be solved is in order. Don’t ignore complexity, but don’t think you can solve it, either. Instead, remember to treat every situation as a set of tradeoffs—and if you don’t see the tradeoffs, you’re not looking hard enough.

"A policy of avoiding small recessions has resulted in the biggest downturn since the 1930s"

--- The Economist's Buttonwood columnist, "Running out of options" 30 July 2011

Just as in complex systems everywhere - this reminds me of the unintended consequences of fire suppression in the national parks - trying to prevent problems from occurring at all makes the eventual conflagration all the greater.

Quote in context - the opening and closing paragraphs of the column:

ECONOMIC policy in the developed world over the past 25 years has followed one overriding principle: the avoidance of recession at all costs. For much of this period monetary policy was the weapon of choice. When markets wobbled, central banks slashed interest rates. A by-product of this policy was a series of debt-financed asset bubbles. When the last of those bubbles burst in 2007 and 2008, the authorities had to add fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing (QE) to the policy mix. The subsequent huge rise in budget deficits was largely the result of a collapse in tax revenues that had been artificially inflated by the debt-financed boom. Britain and America ended up with deficits of more than 10% of GDP, shortfalls that were unprecedented in peacetime.

. . . 

In a sense, the bill has come due for the past 25 years. A policy of avoiding small recessions has resulted in the biggest downturn since the 1930s. Public finances turned out to be weaker than politicians thought. As a result, they have used up all their ammunition tackling the current crisis. Governments in the rich world will have very few options left if the economy weakens again.

A great follow-up via Frank Pasquale:  Hyman Minsky said, "stability breeds instability."

"fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates"

--- David Bowman, in the essay "Scorched earth: Wildfires will change the way we live," New Scientist, 10 October 2009

In context:

A key to understanding those consequences [of global climate change] is the notion of the "fire regime", where different vegetation has characteristic fires in terms of recurrence, intensity, seasonality and biological effects. Indeed, fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates. In other words, Earth has a "pyrogeography".

“Banks had lots of tools to create leverage, but not many to manage risk”

--- VC Roger Portnoy quoted in "Silo but deadly", The Economist, December 5th 2009, on the role of IT systems in the financial crisis.

“Banks had lots of tools to create leverage, but not many to manage risk,” says Roger Portnoy of Daylight Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm that invests in risk-management start-ups.

The article goes further to report that some think IT played a more fundamental role in the crisis:

"Because things are so interconnected, largely thanks to technology, a problem in one part of the system can quickly lead to problems elsewhere. The global financial markets have evolved over the years into an inherently unstable network, says Till Guldimann, a strategist at SunGard, a software and IT services firm. The rapid unwinding of positions by ultra-fast quantitative-trading programs at the start of the credit crunch in August 2007 is one example of this cascading effect."

... though it may go deeper still:

"Many banks have become too complex to be managed properly, says Glenn Woodcock, a director at Andromeda Capital Management and a former head of credit-risk infrastructure at RBS. IT alone cannot fix that problem for them."