-
Hmm. Terms can differ in meaning from field to field (and in casual language people use the two words interchangeably), but I do think he's gone off on his own, there. For one thing, scientific/engineering fields define complexity of a system as the number of distinct but related components (and the number of their relations). Complexity is about structure, where complication is about detail (often the implication being that it is at least unnecessary and possibly harmful). An orrery is complex, a ball of string that a cat played with is complicated. Abstraction, done well, removes or reduces complication at the cost of increased complexity.
I think your finance prof there has misunderstood something he read about Complexity Science, which, among other things, looks at the ways emergent behaviours appear in more complex systems. But Complexity Science says that a system is more than the sum of its parts and that you can't explain anything but the simplest of systems just by looking at the parts. It absolutely doesn't say complex systems cannot be understood, just that you can be caught with your pants down if you make simple assumptions. Chaos Science looks at systems or phenomena whose behaviour can be wildly or unexpectedly unpreditable, but complexity and chaos are not the same thing. Some of the classic examples from the early days of Chaos Science talked about things like the different ways water drops might behave after dropping onto the back of a spoon. Maybe it was a Chaos Science article he used for roaches in his spliff, but he should have done more reading, less smoking.
To go back to my earlier example, an orrery is complex but it's not going to surprise you. String is simple, but trying to predict what shape it will be in after a cat has played with it (or it just fell through the air from a significant height), that goes into the realm of chaos.
We talk about systems or problems having an irreducible complexity. Nobody talks about them having irreducible complication.
Frankly, either the prof or whoever (mis?)quoted him to you is talking out of their hat, to the best of my understanding of the subject.
You are reading a single comment by @itsbruce and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
itsbruce
Did I? Always happy to be corrected, but I was working on the basis of this sort of distinction by Rick Nason:
On this basis, the main aspects of this situation are complicated, but not inextricably complex. With apologies for a very crude example, you know that if you don't make murderous incursions into Southern Israel you won't provoke specific and calamitous reprisals, and if you don't bomb Gaza in retaliation you won't kill untold numbers of objectively innocent men, women and children. Most of the action-result pairs are predictable. And in the bigger picture, while the situation is complicated, it isn't so complex that it's impossible to see the asymmetry of it.
Again, happy to be corrected!