- How did you come up with the idea for
Simplexity?
The basic premise occurred to me many years
ago, at a time when I was something of an
aquarium enthusiast and had four tanks in a
small New York apartment. I was looking at a
small, guppy-sized fish swimming around a
tank one afternoon and considering how
inconsequential it is. Its mass is tiny, its life is
star and considered how dwarfed the guppy is not only in size but
in significance. A star, after all is massive, powerful, seemingly
eternal. But a star is really a simple thing—just a crude cosmic
furnace. A guppy is a symphony of systems and subsystems:
auditory, muscular, skeletal, neural, olfactory, visual, reproductive,
behavioral, social. The guppy is infinitely more complex than the
star, and all that got me thinking that one day it might be
interesting to write about this kind of thing.
So how do you distinguish something simple from
something complex?
There are a number of ways. Some people say description length
is the best way. The longer it takes to describe something, the
more complex it’s likely to be. Others say the best way is to look at
things along a sort of arc. An empty room pumped full of air
molecules may not be a particularly interesting place, but it is an
extraordinarily active one, with the molecules swirling in all
directions at once, dispersing chaotically to every possible crack
and corner. On the other hand, a lump of carbon chilled to what
scientists call absolute zero—or the point at which molecular
motion is the slowest it can possibly be—is neither interesting nor
active. The carbon is exceedingly static, or robust; the room is
exceedingly chaotic. What neither of them is, however, is complex.
Where you’d find real complexity would be somewhere between
those two states, the point at which the molecules begin to climb
from disorder, sorting themselves into something interesting and
organized—a horse, a car, a communications satellite—but
stopping before they descend down the other side of the hill,
sliding into something hard and lumpish and fixed. The more
precisely the object can balance at the pinnacle of that arc, the
more complex it is.
Is anybody really studying this in a serious way?
Absolutely. Mike Lazaridis, the developer of the BlackBerry,
founded the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, which is in part devoted
to the study of simplicity and complexity. Much more well-known is
the 24-year-old Santa Fe Institute, founded by Murray Gell-Mann,
the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1969 for developing the
theory of quarks. Gell-Mann reckoned that having already brought
discipline to the chaotic world of subatomic particles, he might be
able to do the same thing with the equally unruly swirl of specialties
and sub-specialties that make up scientific theory. In 1984, the
Santa Fe Institute was created, with Gell-Mann as its co-founder.
Today, SFI is a hive of more than 100 resident faculty members,
post-doctorate fellows, visiting scholars and other researchers,
studying the internal clockwork of dozens of fields. Gell-Mann is
still there, a philosopher father of sorts, and one who continues to
give the group its gravitational center.
Does simplexity theory have everyday applications or is it
more of an academic idea?
Not only does it have everyday applications, it more or less
governs everything we do. Complexity analysts studying the stock
market, for example, see remarkable similarity between the
behavior of investors and the behavior of schooling fish. As a rule,
fish in a school remain cohesive, with all of the individuals
maintaining a position no more or no less than about a single body
length from every individual around them. Get too close and you
collide and compete. Drift too far apart and you begin to stand out.
The most important thing is not where they’re going, but making
sure they don’t fall out of ranks along the way. Of course, fish on
the move are inevitably heading somewhere—toward food or a
spawning ground, say—and they can’t just be getting there by
guesswork. The investigations found that the schools do require at
least a few leaders—“informed individuals” as they call them. In an
average-sized school, it takes only about five percent of the
members to know the proper route and set out in that direction for
the other 95 percent to follow. This, the theorists say, precisely
mirrors the way a few traders can influence an entire market sector
and with it, the market as a whole.
You’ve said that simplicity and complexity can sometimes
be matters of life and death. How so?
Lives turn on complexity theory all the time. People evacuating
buildings, for example, move the way water molecules do in a flow.
Understand those physics and you can design better egress
routes. The great cholera epidemic of 1854 turned on a single
handle on a single pump in a working class ward of London. The
pump was contaminated and hundreds of people died before John
Snow, arguably the world’s first epidemiologist, persuaded the city
fathers to knock its handle off. Thousands of lives might have
been saved as a result of that simple act. Millions of lives around
the world were similarly saved when designers developed a tiny,
two-pronged needle that simplified the administration of the
smallpox vaccine, making it much easier to eradicate the disease.
How broadly does complexity theory apply?
One of the things that struck me most is not just the power of
principles of complexity and simplicity, but the scope. The book
touches on fields as diverse as chemistry, physics, biology,
behavior, sports, arts politics, business, commercial design,
language and more. Every time you look at these fields through
the simplexity lens, they start to come into a new kind of focus.
Is there one of these areas that surprised you the most?
A lot of them did. There’s the way the stock market can be
analogized not only to fish, but to particle physics, with buys and
sells essentially cancelling one another out the way colliding
particles annihilate each other; there’s the way political and social
movements mirror a standing ovation in a theater, with ideas or
actions spreading out in similar ripple-like ways; there’s the way
sports leagues function like economies, with a victory over a good
team carrying greater value than a victory over a bad team, simply
because it’s a quantity in lower supply, which raises its price.
There's even the odd mathematical pattern known as the Zipf rule,
which says that the most frequently occurring word in any text—
usually “the”—will appear twice as often as the second most
frequently occurring one, usually “of.” The third most common
one will similarly occur a third as; the fourth a fourth as often, and
so on.
How is simplexity theory being applied by governments?
The military is a big beneficiary of simplexity theory. Small military
organizations like terrorist groups and large organizations like
formal armies act a lot like bacteria on the one hand and large
multicell organisms like humans on the other. A human may be a
lot more powerful than a bacterium, but a bacterium is more
elusive and adapts faster. Studying the way the two species
compete can actually help the U.S. do a better job of containing
terrorist threats.
What can companies learn from simplexity theory?
The most valuable lesson is: sell less. Don’t necessarily move less
merchandise, but offer fewer types. Consider how a car company
markets even a single model in its line. The company may offer it
in 20 different colors, with five different interiors and three different
engine sizes and 15 different option packages, meaning that you
can easily end up with thousands of combinations of that single
product. Now spread that across the company’s entire fleet. The
cost and complexity of the operation expands exponentially, and
efficiency and profits drop accordingly.
And what’s the deal with my cell phone?
The biggest reason cell phones—and digital cameras and
camcorders and remote control boxes and even washing machines
and coffee makers—are so complex is because it’s easy to make
them that way. When every switch can do five different things and
the people who design those products are engineers—who have
no shortage of ideas about the different functions they can stuff
into a product—everything conceivable gets included. It’s harder
to do the rigorous research to determine what consumers really
need than simply to throw everything you can at them. So throw
the engineers do.
CREDIT: Author's photo by Bobbie Bush.
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| AN INTERVIEW WITH JEFFREY KLUGER |
