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|  | Author: Jeffrey Kluger
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $5.35
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Seller: vana11
Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 945600
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1ST
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1
Dewey Decimal Number: 501
ASIN: B0023RSZR8
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New, great condition
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 30
No New Paradigm Here August 13, 2008
bronx book nerd (Bronx, NY USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I picked up this book with some excitement thinking that I would be introduced to some new paradigm on how to view the world, as captured by the new science of simplexity, or what purports to be the study of the way simple things can be made complex and complex things can be made simple. In the end, I was disappointed.
Maybe it's me but I just did not get how this is a new science. What I did find was a lot of very interesting and even fascinating information about how complicated some things really are; i.e. how a pencil is the sum of a lrage number of processes, events and even other complicated systems; or at the simple end, how what was apparently an insurmountable and complicated cholera outbreak was broken by the very simple act of disabling the water pump from which the epidemic was born. These things by themselves are fascinating. However, putting them together in one room, so to speak, does not a new science make, in my opinion.
The one new insight that I do concede to Kluger is the complexity curve which he introduces early on. This is, for me, a new way to look at the relationship between complexity and simplicity, but again, I'm not so sure that this visual display of a concept necessarily creates a new science.
 Fascinating Perspective on the Complexities in Life August 12, 2008
S. Riley (Chicopee, MA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you liked the book Freakonomics, you'll enjoy this one. Also, economics, complexity theory, chaos theory, fractals, evolution, randomness, medicine, the arts, the humanities, politics and several others are touched upon here. Well written, well researched, and each chapter topic is concise, full of fun concepts and intelligently, thoughtfully addressed.
Starts with a Bang July 28, 2008
Ken Palmer (Nashville, Tennessee)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book starts with a bang, and contains occasional flashes of brilliancy. The cover artwork, title, and premise are very appealing. Unfortunately this book doesn't live up to it's parenthetical subtitle of "how complex things can be made simple."
I picked this up at an airport for a good cross-country airplane read. Initially I was very happy with this purchase.
The first two chapters are very interesting, and propose some brilliant insights into human behavior. These insights, like all of the interesting facts in this book, are disappointingly unsupported by any bibliography or source references. Hopefully the publisher will consider adding a bibliography when the edition goes into paperback.
This book fizzles out around chapter 4. There are a few interesting tidbits of information in the sports-centric 6th chapter. But it never seems to pick up the momentum created in the first two chapters.
As a senior software developer I was keenly interested in reading chapter 9, which is technology centered. It's titled "Why are your cell phone and camera so absurdly complicated? Confused by Flexibility." This is where I expected Mr. Kluger to shine on the book's subtitle "How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple." In that respect this chapter was a complete let-down.
The chapter provides an overview of the development of TVs, cell phones, and software, with dips into washing machines and other gadgets. Ultimately it boils down to a list of complaints about the complexity in technology, and a suggestion that simplification will eventually come as a result of market forces.
My expectation was that some insights would be offered on HOW to make the technology simpler. Jakob Nielsen and others have done remarkable work in this arena, though we are still only scratching the surface of making user interfaces "more intuitive." It seems that the intuitive user interface is the mystical gold standard that no-one can seem to get right. But I digress...
Read chapters 1, 2, and 6 for the meat of this book. Then move on to another book in your summer reading list.
 Not earthshaking, but worthwhile July 20, 2008
Joseph Oppenheim (San Diego, CA USA)
"Simplexity" analyses various things and deduces how they are either simple or complex, the purpose being that we should look a little deeper into things before making consequential decisions. Sounds like pretty much common sense, and it is to a degree, but the book does highlight some scientific insights which might help the reader in approaching some situations. Here are some items which the book presents which I think are worthwhile:
1. It is the region between order and disorder which gives complexity. For instance, a piece of copper pipe can be thought of as a simple piece of frozen solid, but it gets more complex as a network of plumbing in a skyscraper, and extremely compex at the subatomic level.
2. Any system must be seen at all levels before determining if it is complex.
3. The stock market may seem complex, but major changes in it come more from some bland pieces of information, rather than from some catastrophic news events.
4. With experiments involving how people will divide up money, they show that we "appear to be wired for justice".
5. Although human behavior can't be mathematized, it is influenced thusly. For example, 1.3M people die in auto accidents globally, yet something as simple as well placed speed bumps could reduce that amount quite significantly, since there is about an 80% death rate when accidents happen above 35mph.
6. Fads spread faster rather than by first influencing the most popular people first, but by first influencing a smaller number of people but those having a close relationship with the originator.
7. Politically, it is better to market ideas about a candidate which voters already think, than by breaking bigger, more surprising things. Hence, a simple approach is more effective in such situations.
8. Complicated work skills appear at some of the least prestigous jobs. For instance, truck drivers must process visual, tactile, auditory and cognitive skills all instantaneously.
9. Animals have about 1B heartbeats per lifetime, influenced by the mass of the animal. Based on that, humans should only live to age 20 or so, but they are the exception because they use their brains to "game the system".
10. Since humans survive by converting carbs to CO2 + H2O + energy, perhaps inorganic substances share overlapping similarities with humans since CO2 and H2O also are associated with them, like with cities compared with humans.
11. Zipf's Law - certain mathematical patterns appear as how often centain words and terms show up in text. Therefore, maybe similar patterns show up elsewhere, like income, size of corporations and urban populations. They do seem to do so.
12. "Probability neglect" - people seem to fear a catastophic event (terrorist attack) rather than a more chronic one (climate change) when the chronic one can cause greater harm. Apparently, there are two systems for analyzing risk, automatic (feelings) and more thoughtful (experience).
13. "Availability heuristic" - the better able it is to summon an image of a dangerous event, the easier it is to be afraid of it.
14. In the computer world, it has been said "there are two kinds of people, software engineers and those who are afraid of them".
15. Muhammad Yunnis, who pioneered microloans, showed that surgical strikes, so to speak, are more effective in reducing poverty, but that involves complex analysis.
16. The Pareto principle applies to an 80:20 rule when looking at income distribution, but also shows up in all sorts of things.
17. For the arts, complexity falls flat, but there is still a connection. Sure, in music, but also in art, reflective of nature's quasicrystals, which have seemingly symmetric patterns though they never repeat. Jackson Pollack's paintings exhibit the mathematical concept of fractals.
So, overall, if one wants to ponder how the mind works or might work better, there are some helpful thoughts here.
An okay start on complexity theory July 18, 2008
Linzi (CA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Simplexity is a book tied together by a very large and abstract concept - that seemingly complex things can sometimes be understood in a very simple way, and some deceptively simple things are not actually so at all. This is called complexity science, and is primarily studied at the Santa Fe Institute, where Jeffrey Kluger has done a lot of his research for this book.
Simplexity is written with the easier tone of a good magazine article than an academic book, making it an easy read (although, in the same vein, the lack of endnotes or any bibliography reflect badly on the book as a serious resource). Each chapter is more-or-less self-contained to one aspect of simplicity or complexity; Kluger writes about the stock market, political structures, speech acquisition, and technology, among other subjects. His scope is extremely broad, enough so that he could afford only to put the interesting bits in, but the thread tying everything together is very very tentative.
One of the problems I had with some of his chapters was how reductive he was in his sociology. A lot of the chapter on the stock market hinges on the concept of "zero intelligence investors," that people playing the stock market will always behave as predictably and mindlessly as a school of fish. In the chapter on sports, same thing - trust stats for players, never hunches or long shots. Again, any corroborating footnotes would help a lot, and a good discussion of social anomalies in these instances, compared to the predictable mechanisms of technology, would have been really interesting.
The reader learns a lot from this book; there are plenty of neat tidbits and anecdotes that made it enjoyable to read. My favorite parts were the chapters on language and on technology. For technology, Kluger makes the point that the entire industry is really supported by complexity - not just in making detailed gadgets, but making them user-unfriendly enough that additional support/hardware/software will be needed to supplement them.
Sadly, Simplexity doesn't build to any really stunning insights, and I'm not sure ultimately what impact complexity science will have on the world - much less what impact this book will have. It's an interesting read, but the disparate subject matters and the vagueness and abstractness of the concept make it a less than fulfilling work overall.
Showing reviews 21-25 of 30
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