Hipercomplejidad - by Sergio Parra (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1973, economist Burton Malkiel suggested that a "monkey throwing darts" to select stocks might perform as well as investment experts. It wasn't a flippant quip; it was a warning about the limits of prediction in complex systems. We live surrounded by data, models, algorithms, and explanations. We have never known so much. And yet, it has rarely seemed so difficult to truly understand anything. A world where causes become entangled, solutions generate new problems, and artificial intelligence does not eliminate uncertainty, but rather reorganizes it. The science of complexity has been demonstrating for decades that large systems--social, ecological, economic, cognitive--do not behave like machines that can be taken apart and repaired piece by piece. Their components interact, feed back into one another, and generate consequences that no one planned or could have foreseen. Understanding them requires more than a discipline or an ideology; it requires changing one's lens--and knowing when to do so. Thomas Schelling demonstrated in the 1970s that it was enough for each person to prefer having one-third of their neighbors similar to themselves for the end result to be a neighborhood with almost total racial segregation--without hatred or conspiracies; all it took were thousands of perfectly reasonable individual decisions. Hypercomplexity proposes eight complementary approaches for thinking about the contemporary world: the epistemic, the algorithmic, the systemic, the hypersocial, the approach to complex crises, the problem-solving approach, the approach to human optimization, and the numinous. Tools for distinguishing the important from the incidental, detecting false certainties, and acting when we do not know enough. "A journey to the far reaches of knowledge, where maps warn of dragons, but also an attempt to go a little further, toward new frontiers, until we manage to peer into the abyss itself." Fed up with cobras, the authorities in colonial India had the brilliant idea of offering a reward for every dead snake turned in by the local population. At first it worked. Then, the Indians began breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government suspended the program, the breeders released the reptiles... There were more cobras, many more, than before it began.

About the Author

Sergio Parra es escritor, editor y asesor científico. Ha escrito más de veinte libros de divulgación científica sobre genética, psicología, inteligencia artificial, física, biología e historia de la ciencia, varios de ellos traducidos a otros idiomas. Colabora en medios como National Geographic, Xataka, Yorokobu, Jot Down, Muy Interesante y El Confidencial, y ha ejercido como asesor científico en programas de televisión, podcasts y proyectos editoriales. También ha conceptualizado y desarrollado más de un centenar de libros para investigadores, divulgadores y creadores de contenido, además de trabajar como editor y asesor científico en colecciones de divulgación para rba. Mantiene la newsletter «Sapienciología», una comunidad dedicada al pensamiento crítico, la ciencia y las ideas, con más de 5000 suscriptores. En los últimos años ha convertido China en uno de sus principales laboratorios de observación. Viaja con frecuencia al país para explorar de primera mano sus ecosistemas tecnológicos, sus infraestructuras inteligentes y las mutaciones urbanas de ciudades como Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdú o Hangzhou. Allí observa una de las grandes tensiones de nuestro tiempo: cómo conviven la innovación acelerada, la planificación política, la educación competitiva, la ingeniería social y las contradicciones de una sociedad que parece ensayar futuros distintos a los occidentales. Hipercomplejidad nace de esa mirada, la de quien intenta entender un mundo que ya no puede explicarse desde una sola disciplina, una sola ideología ni una sola escala.