The Reading Monk

Why is the stock market so hard to predict? Why do the jobs that require the greatest skills often pay the least? Why do companies with the least to sell often earn the most? Why are your cell phone and camera so absurdly complicated? Why are only 10 percent of the world’s medical resources used to treat 90 percent of its ills?

It’s hard to pick up and put down a book that asks such hard but simple questions and that’s how I ended up going home from my own bookstore with this book. It is light reading (only 277 pages) though a bit dry now and then in certain chapters. But still – don’t you just feel like you have to know the answers to those questions?

So what’s this thing called “Simplexity”?

“Simplexity“, I now understand, is the study of why simple things become complex and how complex things can be made simple. It’s not an easy topic to write about – starting as it must, with the mess and ending with a simplified explanation. But credit must go to Kluger – he does a splendid job of peeling away the layers of complexity and laying bare the ‘how’ of things; making them simpler and easier to understand.

His analyses are based on a mix of different studies – sociology, psychology and economics, combining them all in easy to read fashion. Like explaining rocket science to a kid. A bit like Freakonomics, by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt – if you get my drift.

Take for example, the chapter entitled, “Why is it so hard to leave a burning building or an endangered city?” in which Kluger examines the life and death drama that unfolded on 9/11 when the masses of workers evacuated the burning towers of the World Trade Centre. While most of us would put it to pure luck who got out and survived, and who didn’t – Kluger puts it to a little bit of all this – fear, bravado, ignorance, ergonomics, fluid dynamics, engineering, psychology, design, architecture, planning, and physics.

Sounds complex? Ok – let’s simplify it.

Simplexity scientists liken people moving en masse to air molecules filling a room – randomly moving in all directions and filling all available space more or less evenly. In a stairwell setting, keep the flow of  people running down going and sooner or later, you’ll end up with a situation where the movement comes to a halt as people jam into all available space and becoming overloaded. This is the other end of the complexity arc. The middle of the arc is where true complexity starts to emerge – where the air molecules begin to take shape, or in the case of people – begin to move to the exits.

The same applies to water especially how it navigates around obstacles and waterways. Think of a boulder in the middle of a raging river and picture how the powerful current slows down and churns and swirls around it, transformed from one form of energy into another. Using this observation, designers have found that a single post positioned along the path to a fire exit does actually facilitate the process of escaping because it staggers their arrival slightly and avoiding the overloading effect that occurs at the end of the complexity arc.

That’s one example … which I simplified. You get the gist of what the book is about, no?

There are plenty more – all amusing but once in a while dry when the discussions get too technical or scientific. Maybe it’s your cup of tea, maybe not. You can always skip the tedious parts and focus on the answers to the ‘hook’ questions.

I give this book a 3 out of 5. Interesting book – a wonderful source of dinner-time conversation. And if you like the science behind the explanation, then you’ll love this book even more.

Jeffrey Kluger is a senior writer at TIME Magazine, and author of several books on science topics including Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio; Simplexity; Journey Beyond Selene; and Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. The latter work was the basis for Ron Howard‘s 1995 film Apollo 13. (Wikipedia.org)