Where the magic lies
SIMPLEXITY:
Why Simple Things Become Complex
(and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple)
By Jeffrey Kluger
324 pp. Hyperion $25.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
Time Magazine senior editor Jeffrey Kluger delves into a fascinating topic: What makes the world so complex and yet so simple? The area of study he dubs “simplexity” doesn’t dwell on any one area of our daily lives, but attempts to make connections and discern patterns we might ordinarily ignore. The most complex and intractable problems can yield to the simplest of solutions. Remember the tale of the Gordian knot? Kluger doesn’t mention it, but he could have: How can anyone untie the most impossible, complex tangle? Simple: One hack with a sword takes care of it.
In 1854, cholera scourged a section of London and killed people by the hundreds. The victims were mainly in several contiguous neighborhoods, yet no one seemed to have a clue about why. Then John Snow, acting on his own, painstakingly analyzed the death patterns on a city map, pinpointing the victims’ homes, the locations of all the water wells, even tracking which wells each victim actually used. He discovered that many people drew water from one particular well because of the taste. Unfortunately, the well was near an open sewer. Sure that this well was the source of the cholera, Snow had to persuade city officials that his analysis might have merit. The solution to this complex problem? A few swings of a mallet disabled that well, and within days, the cholera deaths dropped to zero.
Kluger opens with this dramatic story, explaining how fiendishly complex a plague can be and how simply it can be stopped at certain choke points. In a highly readable style, he shows readers how simplicity and complexity-simplexity-affects everyone. We can see that principles of fluid dynamics apply to the movement of crowds. We can see the difference between group behavior and individual behavior in the burning World Trade Center, and how building design, safety procedures, personal courtesy, crowd behavior, and traffic flow in stairwells all played parts in who lived and who died in the inferno. In burning buildings, Kluger notes, it’s common for everyone to head for the same exit, which then becomes a choke point that no one can get through. Yet if one person heads for an unused exit, others are likely to see and follow.
Kluger makes a fascinating analogy between flowing water and flowing crowds: Place a stick in the middle of a stream, and you create eddies and swirls, slowing down some of the water while the rest speeds by. Place a seemingly meaningless obstruction in the middle of the flow of foot traffic, and part of that flow is interrupted, causing some people to get to the exit before others. Thus everyone does not arrive at the exit at once, and more people are likely to exit safely.
Simplexity, however, is not all about death and disaster, but about a whole range of intriguing questions. For example, given the thousands of human languages and their radically different structures, how do babies ever learn to speak? Raise a baby in New York, and she learns English; raise her in Beijing, and she learns Mandarin. Why do babies adapt so well and adults so poorly? Why do people so often worry about the wrong things? Why do the most skilled jobs so often pay the least? Why do bad teams win and good teams lose so often?
And why are gadgets so unnecessarily complicated? Cell phones and software become “absurdly complex” as their makers attempt to be all things to all users. Features that only a few customers might want complicate all users’ lives—Microsoft Word is a shining example of that.
Kluger distills his point in a most elegant fashion by juxtaposing a guppy and a star:
Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea, one that defies almost any effort to hold it down and pin it in place. Things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex.... We’re suckers for scale. Things that last for a long time impress us more than things that don’t...We grow hushed at, say, a star, and we shrug at, say, a guppy. . . . Yet the guppy is where the magic lies. A star, after all, is just a furnace . . . . A guppy, by contrast, is a symphony of systems . . . systems are assembled from cells; its cells have subsystems; the subsystems have subsystems. . . . Admire the fireball star if you must, but it’s the guppy we ought to praise.
This book in itself is a fine example of simplexity. Kluger draws from a cross section of human experience and distills a dizzying array of examples into one simple and convincing book. He shows that sometimes a book is where the magic lies.
But we book lovers always knew that.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews. Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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