Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) - Hardcover

Kluger, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401303013 ISBN 13: 9781401303013

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

Why are the instruction manuals for cell phones incomprehensible?
Why is a truck driver's job as hard as a CEO's?
How can 10 percent of every medical dollar cure 90 percent of the world's disease?
Why do bad teams win so many games?

Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea. Things that seem complicated can be astoundingly simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. A houseplant may be more intricate than a manufacturing plant. A colony of garden ants may be more complicated than a community of people. A sentence may be richer than a book, a couplet more complicated than a song.

These and other paradoxes are driving a whole new science--simplexity -- that is redefining how we look at the world and using that new view to improve our lives in fields as diverse as economics, biology, cosmology, chemistry, psychology, politics, child development, the arts, and more. Seen through the lens of this surprising new science, the world becomes a delicate place filled with predictable patterns--patterns we often fail to see as we're time and again fooled by our instincts, by our fear, by the size of things, and even by their beauty.

In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger shows how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives; how a million cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to gridlock; how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs abstract art and physics drives jazz; why swatting a TV indeed makes it work better. As simplexity moves from the research lab into popular consciousness it will challenge our models for modern living. Jeffrey Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving theory into a delightful theory of everything that will have you rethinking the rules of business, family, art -- your world.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey Kluger joined TIME Magazine in 1996, mainly writing science stories, and was named a senior writer in 1998. With astronaut Jim Lovell, he wrote Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, on which the 1995 movie Apollo 13 movie was based. He's written several other books, most recently Splendid Solution, which is about Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. Mr. Kluger and two other colleagues won the 2002 Overseas Press Club of America's Whitman Bassow Award for their "Global Warming" cover package (April 9, 2001), garnering first place for the best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues. Before joining TIME, Mr. Kluger was a staff writer for Discover Magazine and a writer and editor for the New York Times Business World Magazine, Family Circle, and Science Digest.

Reviews

Frustrated by the traffic on narrow bridges? Stunned by the number of buttons on a remote control? Saddened by the lack of basic medical care in the developing world? Kluger (Splendid Solutions) makes the modern world comprehensible, analyzing social and technological systems to reveal that things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. He compares cells to cities to stock markets, renders quarks and fractals accessible and draws parallels between Wal-Mart and AIDS clinics in Tanzania. Although Kluger is prone to hyperbole, his astonishing discoveries require no exaggeration: the book describes how even the most technologically advanced manufacturing plant is infinitely simpler than a humble houseplant with its microhydraulics and fine-tuned metabolism and dense schematic of nucleic acids—and baseball fans will be dismayed to discover that football is, in fact, the more complex of the two games: the possible number of starting configurations before the play even begins is... 31.4 billion. Kluger's findings are likely to incite controversy, confirming his contention that explaining simplicity and complexity is never as straightforward as it seems. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Yes, simplexity is a new word—a whole new theory, in fact. In essence, simplexity holds that simple things become more complex (even unnecessarily complex) over time, while complex things can become (or be made) simpler. OK, so that sounds rather blindingly obvious: who, for example, hasn’t shaken his head at the sheer verbiage of cell phone or camera instructions? But here Kluger, coauthor of the best-selling Lost Moon (1994), which became the film Apollo 13, doesn’t merely trot out examples of simple things that became complex, and complex things that were simplified; he explores how they got that way and why. Instructions, for example, are complicated because the products themselves can do so many different things—the consumer’s demand for flexibility leads to complexity. Simplexity, the theory, is intriguing and plausible. Simplexity, the book, is a study of human behavior, and the way we perceive things and events, and how our perception frequently causes us to make wrong assumptions and to perceive simplicity (or complexity) where it does not exist. The book is sure to be a deserved hit among the ever-growing Freakonomics crowd. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1401303013
• ISBN 13: 9781401303013
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336