Scale Theory
But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence—a deck of attributes that have proved ill suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”
The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here ... See more
The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here ... See more
taylorpearson.me • The Illegible Margin: Profiting From the Gap Between the Map and the Territory
On complementarity: Near the end of A Beautiful Question, Wilczek devotes a few pages to complementarity—the idea that no single description of a phenomenon can be complete. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr introduced complementarity to resolve a problem bedeviling the developers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s: in some cases, it appeared to... See more
Gabriel Popkin • The Universe According to Frank Wilczek - John Templeton Foundation
Anderson joins philosopher Angela Potochnik and others in arguing that there exists no privileged scale for explanation. In fact each scale is characterized by its own laws, concepts, and generalizations, which cannot be explained by those of any other scale.