Thom reviewed SIMPLEXITY by Jeffrey Kluger
Review of 'SIMPLEXITY' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This book takes a really good idea, describes it and analyzes it, then applies it to a too-wide range of topics. In some it isn't mentioned at all. In this way, a book which could be comparable to Gleick's Chaos or The Black Swan ends up going astray.
The really good idea is graphing complexity as an arc, with low complexity for highly ordered and completely chaotic systems, and high complexity in between. This idea comes from the Santa Fe Institute, and turns out to be really interesting when compared to the stock market, fluid turbulence and traffic flow. Other chapters occasionally hint at the complexity arc, but instead focus on topics covered in other books, or at least topics which have more to do with math than complexity.
Did the author (a science writer for Time and before that Discover magazine and Science Digest) recycle some of his older …
This book takes a really good idea, describes it and analyzes it, then applies it to a too-wide range of topics. In some it isn't mentioned at all. In this way, a book which could be comparable to Gleick's Chaos or The Black Swan ends up going astray.
The really good idea is graphing complexity as an arc, with low complexity for highly ordered and completely chaotic systems, and high complexity in between. This idea comes from the Santa Fe Institute, and turns out to be really interesting when compared to the stock market, fluid turbulence and traffic flow. Other chapters occasionally hint at the complexity arc, but instead focus on topics covered in other books, or at least topics which have more to do with math than complexity.
Did the author (a science writer for Time and before that Discover magazine and Science Digest) recycle some of his older topics? It would seem so to me. That wouldn't be bad, if he didn't try to shoehorn "complexity" in where it didn't really fit. I'll likely check out one of his more focused works, such as Jonas Salk or Apollo 13, because he seems a decent enough writer.
While I liked the two chapters dealing directly with complexity, the rest of the work was just "okay".