Understanding Complexity in Systems: A Beginner's Guide

What has been corrected on this page?

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 29 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   Corrected 5 unverified citations attaching unverified precise statistics to real people, companies, and events: an unverified 2002 Eli Lilly internal analysis and 2013 Drug Information Association presentation with unverified Phase II failure-rate figures; an unverified Federal University of Parana 2020 Transportation Research Record study on Curitiba's transit resilience with unverified statistics; unverified precision statistics (60 percent, 60-70 percent) attached to Didier Sornette's real dragon-king theory, whose actual crash-prediction track record is disputed rather than quantified; an unverified 2003 SARS-specific Bar-Yam study with an unverified statistic, when his real relevant work on differentiated epidemic response is from the COVID-19 era; and an imprecise/unverified detail in the well-documented 2003 Northeast Blackout report (real figure is approximately 55 million affected, and the cascade collapsed within minutes, not over '52 events across 2 hours 11 minutes').

   What the page claimed

   Article cited specific studies, presentations, and statistics for real companies, researchers, and events that, on independent verification, do not exist or materially misrepresent the documented timeline/findings.

   What was corrected

   Removed the unverified study citations and unverified statistics while preserving the real underlying facts (Lilly's real adaptive-trial-design push, Curitiba's real transit design philosophy, Sornette's real precursor-signal research, Bar-Yam's real COVID-era policy analysis, and the blackout's real scale and cascading-failure mechanism).

   Why: Real researchers, companies, and events were used as anchors for unverified studies, conference presentations, and statistics - the Barabasi-Albert 1999 Science paper and the P&G/Lafley/Huston-Sakkab 2006 HBR citation in the same article both verified as fully accurate.

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