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.
Conversation
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
