Chaos

I discovered chaos partly through two main venues. The first is the teachings and works of Nassim Niclas Taleb, which are mainly concerned with uncertainty and rare events that pose risks. The second is the book and to a certain extent the movie Jurassic Park, it is not only a book about dinosaurs, but a book about how the mathematics of chaos, which drives nature, and humans collide. My favorite clip in the movie is the lunch scene. It also helps that the enigmatic Ian Malcolm is played by Jeff Goldblum.

I find the chaotic process infinitely fascinating, it is the process of creating complexity from simple rules. Examples such as Mandelbrot sets, and Conway´s Game of Life show how we can create complexity out of extremely simple rules.

Links

• Chaos HyperTextbook
• Entropy in Engineering Processes
• Boundaries of predictability

Thoughts

• Having a solid understanding of chaos and unpredictability is one of the most powerful mental models for understanding the world.
• The real world is non-linear. You need to understand non-linearity to comprehend the world.
• A pattern is as complex as the length of the shortest description that can be used to produce it - Andrei Kolmogorov
• Anthro-complexity. It means human beings are not ants. Humans complicate models of use.