Book Summary — Deep Simplicity

You can find all my book summaries — here.

I read this book on a recommendation of Charlie Munger, who referenced it when he talked about mental models. I understand his underlying reasoning for reading this book but didn’t enjoy the read nevertheless.

It was way too long for its key message — the beginning of the book is fairly interesting and follows a historic timeline, but the author jumps around too much after the first couple of chapters without much of a storyline and I got lost.

1 paragraph summary:

All the perceived complexity of the universe and world underlies very simple and straightforward rules. The four main trends/rules mentioned in the book are a constant pull towards entropy, sensitivity to initial conditions, the importance of feedback and a resulting non-linearity.

The World is simpler than we think

The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.

The Rules of the World

What really mattered was simply that some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial ‘push’ you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback so that what a system does affects its own behaviour.

In essence, we have already found the underlying simplicity from which chaos and complexity emerge — simple laws, non-linearity, sensitivity to initial conditions and feedback are what make the world tick.

Left to their own devices, systems tend to sink to a state of minimum energy and maximum entropy — provided there is no input of energy from outside.

Power laws always mean that the thing being described by the law is scale invariant so that the earthquakes of any size are governed by exactly the same rules.

Bonus: Adaptability

This is what is meant by ‘survival of the fittest’. Not necessarily the most physically fit and athletic individuals, but the ones who fit in best to their environment, like the fit of a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or the fit of a key in a lock. Not the ones who are fit, the ones who do fit.