A Crude Look at the Whole
The Science of Complex Systems in Business, Life, and Society
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- CHF 16.00
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- CHF 16.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
A top expert explains why a social and economic understanding of complex systems will help society to anticipate and confront our biggest challenges
Imagine trying to understand a stained glass window by breaking it into pieces and examining it one shard at a time. While you could probably learn a lot about each piece, you would have no idea about what the entire picture looks like. This is reductionism -- the idea that to understand the world we only need to study its pieces -- and it is how most social scientists approach their work.
In A Crude Look at the Whole, social scientist and economist John H. Miller shows why we need to start looking at whole pictures. For one thing, whether we are talking about stock markets, computer networks, or biological organisms, individual parts only make sense when we remember that they are part of larger wholes. And perhaps more importantly, those wholes can take on behaviors that are strikingly different from that of their pieces.
Miller, a leading expert in the computational study of complex adaptive systems, reveals astounding global patterns linking the organization of otherwise radically different structures: It might seem crude, but a beehive's temperature control system can help predict market fluctuations and a mammal's heartbeat can help us understand the "heartbeat" of a city and adapt urban planning accordingly. From enduring racial segregation to sudden stock market disasters, once we start drawing links between complex systems, we can start solving what otherwise might be totally intractable problems.
Thanks to this revolutionary perspective, we can finally transcend the limits of reductionism and discover crucial new ideas. Scientifically founded and beautifully written, A Crude Look at the Whole is a powerful exploration of the challenges that we face as a society. As it reveals, taking the crude look might be the only way to truly see.
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Economist Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems) lucidly explains his academic specialty, which seeks to identify the general principles by which the individual elements of systems, behaving independently, interact to achieve complex adaptive solutions to various environmental challenges. Miller contrasts this approach with traditional disciplines that reductively examine only individual elements, such as studying single neurons instead of the entire brain. Using examples of systems as different as beehives and economic markets, the book demonstrates how the repeated, decentralized application of simple algorithms can produce sophisticated solutions for organisms or groups. Miller shows how concepts such as data feedback loops, population heterogeneity, and social networks are relevant to his theories and describes how game theory, computer modeling, and modern statistical methods reveal the elegance and power of complex adaptive systems. He concludes that their appearance in widely varying contexts suggests an underlying "deeper unification among systems" for example, that "a honeybee swarm may just be a more easily observed instance of a brain." Not every reader will be convinced by these broader assertions, but Miller does provide a thought-provoking introduction to the study of complexity.
