Monday, July 13, 2009

Complexity is Hard Enough

... Don't make it harder by mis-understanding it.

Some colleagues and I have been discussing Bayesian reasoning to refine, and hopefully validate models of systems that exhibit complexity. This lead to the discussion of Taleb's "Black Swans", and ideas about how these may be generated, identified and simulated on a computer. I offer this link to Eliezer Yudkowsky's work that provides an excellent context for starting the discussion.

http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf

It seems that one of the hallmarks of complexity is self-reference between meta-scales.