what consumes me, bud caddell

A complex system has no repeating relationships between cause and effect, is highly sensitive to small interventions and cannot be determined by outcome based targets, hence the need for experimentation; hence when dealing with complex systems there is the need for experimentation. From Dave Snowden.

There’s a third reason why complexity economics is under-rated. It does not give us a means of foreseeing the future. Of course, conventional economics doesn’t do so either. But the difference is that complexity theory tells us that such forecasts might well be impossible – which is not what the customer wants to hear. The best it can do is help us understand what has happened. And for me, this is good enough. As someone once said, […]

One of the hardest lessons to internalize in software engineering is the hidden costs of additional complexity. Sometimes, complexity is just inherent in the problem space. Matching passengers and drivers while adjusting prices to balance supply and demand is a complex and hard problem. So is routing questions and answers to the people most likely to answer and read them while scaling a community and maintaining quality. Or developing a rich document editor that works […]