Conflicting Constraints
Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Software is a case study.
As we're exploring our vast space of possibilities, we're trying to balance lots of forces. We're trying to make ourselves happy (since we're selfish), but no man is an island. We have to make a healthy number of other people happy as well. There is no way to balance all the forces and make everyone happy at the same time. The greater the number of interrelationships with others (individuals or groups), the harder it is to balance the constraints. As Stuart Kauffman, one of the pioneers of complexity science, puts it,
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