"Using real world examples, such as traffic flow, politics and baby linguistics, the author makes the theories of 'simplexity' accessible to the layperson...Kluger makes complex science seem simple."
--Kirkus

"Kluger makes the modern world comprehensible...his astonishing discoveries require no exaggeration..[his] findings are likely to incite controversy, confirming his contention that explaining simplicity and complexity is never as straightforward as it seems."
--Publishers Weekly

"Simplexity...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."
-Booklist

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.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Too much of a good thing....but not a bad starting point for neophytes
Comment: One is an ever-expanding universe of quasi-psychological, quasi-business books that doesn't seem to add very much. In the past year, I've read "The Tipping Point," "Blink," "Freakonomics," "The Social Atom," "The Black Swan," and "The Wisdom of Crowds." Now this. It feels a little bit like cashing in, actually. At one point, I felt as if I had entered some sort of vortex, as I read points and examples I had already encountered elsewhere, and was finally hit over the head with a direct quote from a fairly new book I had read several weeks earlier.

If I were new to reading this type of book, this would be a perfectly fine introduction. But I feel glutted. I've reached my limit. People are odd and don't behave rationally all the time. I get it. Sometimes they behave completely predictably. Got it. If you can spot the difference, you can exploit a market. Great. Things are not always what they seem on the surface. Check.

If you've already read one or two of these books, don't waste your time, really. If you haven't, go right ahead and pick this up, you'll begin to notice patterns of behavior you haven't paid much attention to before. You could really choose any of the books mentioned and get the same things out of it.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: nothing is as complexly simple as it seems . . .
Comment: This book is similar to THE TIPPING POINT in that it explores the paradoxes of human problems and the sometimes disastrous results of their well-intentioned solutions. The questions that are each chapter's title are not answered by anything other than a discursive discussion of each subject. Which is entertaining on a surface level; but if you're looking for some concrete answers, this book does not provide them.

The author proposes a new "science" patterned after complexity science; the hype for this theory of everything has zero compellability as it is talked up in these pages. Essentially, what is perceived as simple events and what is perceived as complex events are just too subjective a process to ever qualify as a science. As discussed in SIMPLEXITY, processes as diverse as traffic gridlock, software development, and energy consumption patterns in mammals are juxtaposed and intertwined in complexly simple ways. But to make the leap that this is science is just flatout foolish. I definitely agree with the reviewer from the Bronx that the so-called complexity curve does little to clarify the relationship between the simple and the complex; there is just too much that is objectively vague while also being perceptively subjective.

Since there is no thematic bridge linking these loosely linked chapters, they tend to stand alone as separate essays. It seems to me that this in itself nullifies the notion of simplexity as a unifying phenomenon. There is just no persuasive criteria as to when something simple becomes something complex and vice versa.

So, you may want to take a pass on this read; the dissatisfaction factor just ain't worth it.

Parataxis

The Cloud Reckoner

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Journey to Nowhere
Comment:
I waited impatiently for my copy of Simplexity. Having thoroughly enjoyed "The Black Swan," and "Predictably Irrational," I was hoping for more of the same - an interesting discussion of some recently studied facet of human behavior. When the book arrived, I settled down expectantly, ready for a good read.

I was disappointed.

Simplexity offers several interesting anecdotes about complexity, but that's about it. While well written, the book suffers from lack of a clear goal. Reading a few anecdotes can be enjoyable, but there's no clear, compelling thesis to keep you reading through the entire book. It's easy to put down, hard to pick back up.

Can you really make complex things simple, as the book title suggests? Maybe. Sometimes. Infrequently. However, you won't find the key to reducing complexity to simplicity in this book.

Overall, "Simplexity" offers spurts of interesting material but not enough that I jump up and down recommending this book to my friends.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Comment: Nutshell review - Not a bad book and well presented. Some material has been covered before elsewhere, some is new or different. Could have had more depth in some places but worth a read anyway.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Appealing but not very satisfying
Comment: There are many agreements that I would have with other reviewers who found the book appealing enough to open its cover, but not deeply satisfying - indeed, slipping into the disappointing range the further along I read. I thought that it would reveal something to chew on, to elucidate complexity and simplicity and the relationship of the two, but other than its first chapter with its discussion of a complexity arc, it had no more to add than diluted observations of what happens in complex and non-complex settings. Interesting perhaps, especially in the context of each chapter's probing questions, but basically not much more than storytelling of contrarian conditions (ie, why did the unbeatable team get beat by the pushover). Nice antidotes, but I felt a sportswriter would reveal more and in doing so, be more entertaining to read.

It did succeed, however, in one major area: it got me to buy the book. The cover and table of contents, as Amazon allows, were intriguing enough to order it. It just didn't have the right stuff of Apollo 13 (the author's other noteworthy book).

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