ABSTRACT
The development of methods designed to deal with problems involving more than 3 or 4 variables and less than an infinite number is new. The first Columbia-Greystone project was an attack upon a research situation involving such an intermediate number of variables and the technique employed in its prosecution was that of simultaneous observation by means of collaborative study. While the work was in progress, an interesting article by Warren Weaver (’48) appeared. This classifies scientific problems into: (1) problems of simplicity, in which the number of variables rarely exceeds 4 and is preferably kept to 2; (2) problems of disorganized complexity, in which the number of variables approaches infinity; and (3) problems of organized complexity, in which “a sizable number of factors are interrelated into an organic whole.” Weaver goes on to point out that as early as the seventeenth century, science had learned to deal with problems of simplicity, largely by utilizing mensuration in the physical sciences, and, in the twentieth century, invaded the field of disorganized complexity by applying new statistical and mathematical techniques to physical problems. Of problems of organized complexity he said (’48, see p. 540), “These problems–and a wide range of similar problems in the biological, medical, psychological, economic, and political sciences–are just too complicated to yield to the old nineteenth-century techniques which were so dramatically successful on two-, three-, or four-variable problems of simplicity. These new problems, moreover, cannot be handled with the statistical techniques so effective in describing average behavior in problems of disorganized complexity.
