<story><title>Are Cities Too Complicated?</title><url>http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/09/are-cities-getting-too-complicated/496556/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tsunamifury</author><text>This is the fundamental premise that object oriented thinking was created to solve.  You cannot understand a sufficiently advanced system from both an overview and granular view.  You have to either see the overview and trust the granular objects, or specialize in one granular object and then trust your adjacent objects.&lt;p&gt;Its a problem written about in detail by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations when he comments on running an empire. He notes that the most difficult part is not having information in a timely fashion at scale -- you can either have timely information about a single place, or out of date information about the entire empire.&lt;p&gt;They key part in both is trust and responsibility.  You must trust that granular objects can take responsibility for themselves.  If each one requires knowledge of the entire system to function, then the weight of that will overburden any system over time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Are Cities Too Complicated?</title><url>http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/09/are-cities-getting-too-complicated/496556/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wellpast</author><text>&amp;gt; The Entanglement is a term from the computer scientist Danny Hillis, referring to a new era of technology that we find ourselves in, where no single individual can possibly understand what we ourselves have constructed. In other words, when even the experts are unable to fully grasp a system that they might have been themselves involved in the construction of, we are in a new era of incomprehensibility.&lt;p&gt;This is not a phenomenon of just cities or other large societal systems. In my experience, this is already true for many a single company.</text></comment>