Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics | Ping Chen,

Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today

In the midst of industry discussions about productivity and automation, it’s all too easy to overlook the importance of properly reckoning with complexity.

The Compendium

A compendium of insights about complexity structured as inter-linked cards by Alex Komoroske

Visualizing complexity

Ecologies and AI

All you need is data and functions

It's really easy to tend towards complexity as engineers. I think on some level, we love complexity. There are obviously bad types of complexity, but I think there are other types of it that we seek out, because there's something satisfying about wrapping your head around it; and I think a lot of that kind of complexity ends up in our programming languages.

Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy

Amazon.com: Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy eBook : Mitchell, Sandra D.: Kindle Store

The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Web

The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Danny Ryan, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, and Bastian Aue 1. Introduction Complex coordination problems have an air of doomed intractability about them. We speak in fatalistic terms of economics being a “dismal” science, of sociological phenomena being dominated by the

Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems | R-bloggers

I am someone who regularly uses R, and my interest in programming languages means that on a semi-regular basis spend time reading blog posts about the language. Over the last year, or so, I had noticed several patterns of behavior, and after reading a recent blog post things started to make sense (the blog post […]

Complexity and Strategy | HackerNoon

I struggled with how to think about complexity through much of my career, especially during the ten years I spent leading Office development. Modeling complexity impacted how we planned major releases, our technical strategy as we moved to new platforms, how we thought about the impact of new technologies, how we competed with Google Apps, how we thought about open source and throughout “frank and open” discussions with Bill Gates on our long term technical strategy for building the Office applications.

Computing, Complexity and Degrowth : Systemic Considerations for Digital De-escalation

Research on digital degrowth predominantly critiques digital expansion or presents alternative digital practices. Yet, analyzing the link between digital technologies and complexity is crucial to overcome systemic obstacles hindering digital de-escalation. This article presents the different types of links between complexity and computing observed in the literature: the infrastructural complexity inherent in digital technologies, the socio-political complexity induced by them, and finally, the ontological complexity (individual’s ways of relating to their environment) hindered by digitization. The paper explores these links to identify ways to reduce infrastructural and socio-political complexities, and to move away from the reductionist paradigm, in order to support digital degrowth. Its development shows that complexity induces ratchet effects (i.e. irreversibilities in the development of a technique in a society), rendering degrowth efforts difficult to handle by individuals. Therefore, strategies to overcome these barriers are proposed, suggesting that bottom-up simplification approaches stand a greater chance of making alternatives emerge from different stakeholders (including users). This digital shift assumes the development of methods and technical tools that enable individuals to disengage from their attachments to digital habits and infrastructure, opening a substantial field of study.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.   Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973. With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

The Fractal Organisation Manual: How to diagnose & design organisations using the Viable System Model | SCiO - Systems and Complexity in Organisation

RRP: £12.99; Paperback: ‎ 192 pp; Publisher: ‎ SCiO; ISBN 979-8250847018

Complexity Explorables

A collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields....

Algorithms As a Vehicle to Reflective Equilibrium:‬ Behavioral Economics 2.0

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Complexity and biases

We examine experimentally how complexity affects decision-making, when individuals choose among different products with varying benefits and costs. We find that complexity in costs leads to choosing a high-benefit product, with high costs and overall lower payoffs. In contrast, when complexity is in the benefits of the product, we cannot reject the hypothesis of random mistakes. We also examine the role of heterogeneous complexity. We find that individuals still (mistakenly) choose the high-benefit but costly product, even if cheaper and simple products are available. Our results suggest that salience is a main driver of choices under different forms of complexity.