how we got to be as big as we…
how we got to be as big as we are today-that's as much a story about surprises, coincidences, and luck as it is a story about great design.
— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Holy Grail of Investing: The World's Greatest Investors Reveal Their Ultimate Strategies f
In the book
The Nobel laureate Herbert Simon put the deepest version of it: a human being, seen as a behaving system, is actually rather simple — most of the bewildering complexity of our conduct is just the reflection of the complicated environment we are flying through, the same trap we fall into when we credit an ant with elaborate cunning that proves to be nothing but the shape of the ground it crossed. Even our proudest achievements, examined honestly, owe as much to surprise, coincidence, and plain luck as to any grand design. And when chaos is left unattended it can compound on itself frighteningly fast: like an infection, trouble grows in proportion to how much trouble is already loose, which is how a small disturbance becomes an exponential one. — Takeoff Into Chaos