This idea is also apparent in Davidson's essay "Project Classroom Makeover". In her essay she talks about the idea of crowd-sourcing, which is a way of taking the collective answer of several people rather than relying on an expert's opinion. Crowd-sourcing in its essence is a very simple idea. Each person who answers the question posed, gives a brief answer that helps lead to the overall conclusion. The end result is often a complicated solution. So just like the complex systems seen in Johnson's essay, crowd-sourcing which appears complicated, comes from simple beginnings.
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Johnson Reading Assignment
The word complexity repeatedly appears in Johnson's essay, "The Myth of the Ant Queen". At first Johnson describes complexity in two ways. He claims it to be a "sensory overload" or something "stretching the human nervous system to its very extremes" (Johnson 198). Or he says it can be a seen as a "self-organizing system". In other words "larger patterns can emerge out of uncoordinated local actions"(Johnson 199). So for something to be complex it must be overwhelming and at its core, be very simple. This seems rather contradictory. For something to be complex it must overwhelm us yet be understandable at the same time. Usually it is one way or the other. You either understand something or it is overwhelming. At first glance, I believed that for something to be complex, it had to have several intricate moving parts that worked together in an advanced way. Yet here Johnson claims that complexity does not come from more complexity but from simple movements. Johnson first demonstrates this with an ant colony. An ant colony is very similar to a city. Each worker ant goes about doing their own separate task from the other worker ants. As each ant does their own menial task, the tasks work together to form a large and powerful colony. Complete with a system of tunnels, dumps, food storage, and cemeteries. All the repeated simple actions that take place slowly build on one another to create something very complicated. This simple build up can also be seen in code breaking. Alan Turing broke the code of the German Enigma machine by finding a pattern within it. The underlying pattern he found was very simple. Therefore continuing the idea that complexity comes from simplicity.
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I really liked your point about how you first believed that for something to be complex, it had to be intricate and have several parts. At first, I too always thought that when something was described as complex that it meant that it was confusing or involved many different parts. Now, I see how complexity is more about simple movements or patterns coming together. Although the entire system may be extremely complicated, the individual parts themselves are quite easy to understand. Complexity is not necessarily about intricacy, but rather more about the underlying simplicity in seemingly complicated systems.
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