A Quote by Thomas Sowell
Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.
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It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.
The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.
If you're a prosecutor, and you believe the defendant is guilty, you only talk about ultimate truth, but not intermediate truth. If you're the defense attorney, you care deeply about intermediate truth, but you tend to neglect ultimate truth.
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
Simplicity design axiom: The complexity of the information appliance is that of the task, not the tool. The technology is invisible.
Technology for me is discover, learn, evolve and implement. It combines 3Ss- speed, simplicity and service. Technology is fast, technology is simple and technology is a brilliant way to serve people. It is also a great teacher. The more we learn about technology and the more we learn through technology, the better it is.
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.
It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. [...] It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. [...] You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
It is this ideal of progress through cumulative effort rather than through genius—progress by organised effort, progress which does not wait for some brilliant stroke, some lucky discovery, or the advent of some superman, has been the chief gift of science to social philosophy.
Religion asks you to believe things without questioning, and technology and science always encourage you to ask hard questions and why it is important in science and technology. So I was always interested in science and technology.
One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.
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