Scott E Page - Collected Quotes

"Effective models require a real world that has enough structure so that some of the details can be ignored. This implies the existence of solid and stable building blocks that encapsulate key parts of the real system’s behavior. Such building blocks provide enough separation from details to allow modeling to proceed." (John H Miller & Scott E Page, "Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life", 2007)

"Models need to be judged by what they eliminate as much as by what they include - like stone carving, the art is in removing what you do not need." (John H Miller & Scott E Page, "Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life", 2007)

"A heuristic is a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions." (Scott E Page, "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies", 2008)

"A perspective is a map from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word." (Scott E Page, "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies", 2008)

"[...] diverse, connected, interdependent entities whose behavior is determined by rules, which may adapt, but need not. The interactions of these entities often produce phenomena that are more than the parts. These phenomena are called emergent." (Scott E Page, "Diversity and Complexity", 2010)

"If we can understand how to leverage diversity to achieve better performance and greater robustness, we might anticipate and prevent collapses." (Scott E Page, "Diversity and Complexity", 2010)

"[…] many-model thinking produces wisdom through a diverse ensemble of logical frames. The various models accentuate different causal forces. Their insights and implications overlap and interweave. By engaging many models as frames, we develop nuanced, deep understandings." (Scott E Page," The Model Thinker", 2018)

“Models are formal structures represented in mathematics and diagrams that help us to understand the world. Mastery of models improves your ability to reason, explain, design, communicate, act, predict, and explore.” (Scott E Page, “The Model Thinker”, 2018)

"Collective intelligence is where the whole is smarter than any one individual in it. You can think of it that in a predictive context, this could be the wisdom of crowds, sort of thing where people guessing the weight of a steer, the crowd’s guess is going to be better than the average guess of the person in it." (Scott E Page [interview])

"Diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving complex problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly." (Scott E Page)