Dr. David Krakauer speaks on the nature of simplicity and complexity | Academic Conferences 

From my studies of public policy, culture and business dynamics I have concluded that there seems to be a latent potentiality of ideas that are brought into being through the properties of complex systems, rather than any linear rules, executed in discrete steps. If there are systems and rules that are built/designed in the right „spirit“ this latent potentiality will manifest. Much along the lines of the saying „nothing is as powerful as an idea who’s time has come“. I may be wrong but things like „first mover advantage“ could be part of a cognitive bias/subjective interpretation of reality, taught to MBAs to encourage them to build start-ups. After all, we may never have heard of the true „first mover“, the ones that failed, its just the first ones that make it, that we talk about. This also harmonizes with physics as the basis of everything already exists in the universe, the details are just a matter of very advanced combinatorics. I do agree with your first part though, that simplicity and complexity are somewhat unified. Perhaps only a matter of perspective in line with quantum physics.

@@john.8805 the properties of complex systems (such as emergence, feedback, etc) are caused by execution of rules by the agents of the system. There’s also no requisite that the rules be executed have to be linear, just computational, which just encompass the computability space of a Turing machine. “All computable functions,” which is a very broad set of rules. With regards to discrete steps, I guess this a very analytic thing for me to say…because in reality discreteness is hard to appreciate since we tend to perceive the world as a continuum. Ex: Instead of seeing individual photons hit our eyes, we see what looks like a seamless environment. Ex: instead of seeing the individual water molecules bumping into each other in a liquid we see it’s bulk wavelike properties. At the level of molecules in a liquid, the local rules (of electromagnetism and whatever other forces atoms care about) governs the behavior of that scale. At a larger scale of the fluid we consider only the bulk properties of the fluid to describe its motion…things like density, temperature and flow etc. Even though reality appears continuous, each level is also discrete and there’s no point at which either property truly exists without the other. In this way the two concepts are equivalent too, in the same manner mentioned in the OP. What I’m saying is that, you could describe rules as continuous rather than discrete but why would you, as there’s no truly formal computational framework to describe continuous computation without it being at base level discrete anyway…so this is why I choose this way to talk about it…for pragmatic purposes