Came up with a satisfying definition of a complex system that I should have thought of years ago.
A system is a complex system when fixing 1 bug on average causes 1 new bug to emerge somewhere else in the system.
I call it the whack-a-mole complexity threshold.
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For those with technical interests, there are at least 2 more technical versions of this that I know of. The first is the Bode waterbed effect: improving performance in one part of the range of a control system worsens it in another part ocw.mit.edu/courses/electr
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Computer science and design people seem to have a less technical waterbed theory formulation
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Wrote about this stuff in a 2012 post that I probably need to revisit and
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This is Hurst's Law of Conservation of Complexity: Essential complexity in a system can neither be created nor destroyed, but merely moved from place to place. The corollary to this law is that the complexity may be easier to deal with in some places rather than others.

