Simply Complexity
You must be getting used to this by now. Author reads a review. Author purchases with some tenuous justification. Author despairs at own stupidity. Yup, it’s another one of those!
So, complexity theory. It’s a science apparently. It also has the potential to be the next big science. I didn’t know sciences were in competition but there you go. If reading is meant to be an enriching experience then I’m quids in already. I’m not sure I should trust any author making scientific claims who dismisses the ability of another science to explain complex phenomena/systems as “dodgy”!
Am I the only one who feels let down by the sheer lack of rigour in the use of a word like that?
Anyway, I’m feeling more exhausted by the experience than enriched and yet I’m not sure that’s entirely right. I suspect the author is his own worst s enemy here.
This is a book that purports to simplify both what complexity theory or science is, and, to explain its applicability in an accessible way. Well, yes, if you can stomach getting into formulas; the joys of variables and diagrams too small to truly make sense on occasion. Not many people can and this is very much a book that, given the above remit, appears at a number of points to be showing a rather over enthusiastic desire to lose what I suspect is an already small potential readership.
It’s s book of two halves by necessity. You need to have a working definition of a complex system and of complexity itself before you can look at what the applicability is. If that first half starts off engagingly and then sags increasingly as, ironically, matters become more complex, then one might expect the second half to be full of brilliant and surprising stuff about the applicability. Stuff that brings it all to life. Well, yes, eventually that is what is delivered but it is delivered at a cost.
The cost is that by the time you reach the very stuff you were hoping for you may have actually lost the will to read on and cease to have any interest in complexity or its applicability.
Just as the first half of the book sags under the weight of detail and, more importantly, the inability of the author to simplify and engage, the second half seems to suffer with the same problem from the off and only seems to get going again near the end.
It’s as though someone actually did fall asleep in the middle and was replaced by a scientist of some sort who hadn’t blinked daylight for quite a while only to be beaten up when the real author reawakens!
Only near the end then with some excellent stuff on how we form relationships; the progression of seemingly contrasting armed conflicts (Iraq and Columbia) and, yes, those age old bedfellows, the common cold and quantum physics, does it all suddenly come to life.
Unfortunately, in between, lost opportunities abound. The world of spontaneous traffic jams and crashing financial markets offer ample opportunities to impress what complexity theory can offer. The book simply doesn’t make them palatable enough for the clearly interesting and potentially important messages to break free and lodge themselves in your brain.
I have no idea what happened in truth but you do wonder if you’re actually only the third person to read the book after the author and the one reviewer whose words you foolishly acted upon.
Fortunately I found a one star Amazon UK review that suggested I may have been number four! Then again, maybe that was the editor! All I know is that this book is relatively short and yet took me longer than any other book I’ve picked up ths year. Indeed at one point I started to resent the fact that it was preventing me picking up any other book.
So, an important subject in many ways (still not sure it’s like an actual science though chaps!) and one with far reaching implications when citizens and public bodies alike are at the early stages of true evidence based decision making. Unfortunately it feels very much like a missed opportunity.
There is a great, engaging, enlightening and entertaining book to be written about complexity. This is not it.
