292 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. https://kumu.io/

      Make sense of your messy world. Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use.

      tagline:

      The art of mapping is to create a context in which others can think.


      Tool mentioned on [[2022-06-02]] by Jerry Michalski during [[Friends of the Link]] meeting.

    1. other cultures do not think this and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

      for - quote - Sarah Stein Lubrano - quote - self as cultural construction in WEIRD culture - sense of self

      quote - (immediately below)

      • It's just a weird fascination of our weird culture that
        • we think the self is there and
        • it's the best and most likely explanation for human behavior
      • Other people in other cultures do not think this
      • and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

      discussion - sense of self is complex. See the work of - Michael Levin and - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=michael+levin - Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major+evolutionary+transition+in+individuality

  2. Jan 2024
    1. The physicistsStephen Wolfram and Brosl Hasslacher introduced me, in the early1980s, to chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learnedabout complex systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the bi-ologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical engineerand device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the in-credible possibilities of molecular electronics.

      some of Bill Joy's intellectual history here mirrors much of my own...

  3. Dec 2023
    1. And now I will introduce a phrase,New Encyclopedism. I want to suggestthat something which for a time I shallcall World Encyclopedia is the meanswhereby we can solve the problem ofthat jigsaw puzzle and bring all the scat-tered and ineffective mental wealth ofour world into something like a commonunderstanding and into effective reac-tion upon our political, social, and eco-nomic life.

      Is it the dramatically increased complexity of a polity so organized that prevents it from being organized in the first place? If some who believe in conspiracies or who can't come to terms with the complexity of evolution and prefer to rely on God as a motivating factor similarly can't come to terms with such a complex society, could it be formed? Many today have issues with the complexity of international trade much less more complex forms of organization.

      Might there be a way to leverage "God" sociologically to improve upon this as the motivating force instead? Could that or something similar be a solution?

    1. history is always the result of a lot of causes coming together you know 00:29:22 you have this metaphor of the chain of events and this is a terrible metaphor for there is no chain of events a chain of events imagines that every event is a link connected to one previous event and 00:29:36 to one subsequent event so there is a war there is one cause for the war and there will be one consequence it's never like that in history every event is more like a tree there is an entire system of 00:29:50 roots that came together to create it and it has a lot of fruits with lots of different influences
      • for: insight - history - complexity, bad metaphor - chain of events

      • insight: complexity and history

        • chain of events is a bad metaphor for things that occur in history
        • the complexity of history is that many causes come together too being about an event
        • likewise, when that event occurs, it is the cause of many different consequences
        • linear vs systems thinking
      • adjacency between

        • history
        • emptiness
        • Indra's net
      • adjacency statement
        • history reflects emptiness
        • Indra's net extended into historical events
    1. normal crisis in the system for most people is degrowth like 00:22:22 most people's living standards don't rise that's so it's it's divorced from the experience that that most people have in in in the UK you know where we're where we're speaking from wages at 00:22:36 the same level they were in 2005 rents aren't bills aren't your groceries aren't but your pay is so um you know most people have been experiencing 00:22:49 degrowth that's the comms reason why it's bad
      • for: degrowth - criticism - bad communication, suggestion - growth and degrowth simultaneously

      • suggestion

        • evolution / transition / transformation are better terms as it indicates something is dying at the same time diverging is being born
        • it is highly misleading to think one dimensionally as there are many things that have to degrow and many things that have to grow simultaneously
          • degrowth of carbon emissions, which implies pragmatically in the short time scale noe available a significant degrowth of fossil fuels
        • growth of a new energy system to replace much of it
        • degrowth of unnecessary and harmful consumption accompanied
          • growth of holistic network of root level wellbeing activities and the low carbon infrastructure to support it
  4. Nov 2023
    1. Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety stated that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.
      • for: microbiome, gut health, MET in Individuality - microbiome, complexity - human microbiome, fermentation - health
    1. there's a microbe in the mouth called fusobacterium nucleotide it over proliferates it's okay to have normally but it over proliferates when 01:28:39 you have bleeding gums gingivitis or periodontitis where it then enters the bloodstream this is called translocation and colonize the colon and the evidence is very good it is a principal cause of 01:28:52 colon cancer colon cancer starts in the mouth incredibly and doesn't get there by swallowing gets her through the bloodstream translocation
      • for:holistic medicine - example - oral microbiome and colon cancer, oral microbiome - colon cancer, bleeding gums - colon cancer, gingivitus - colon cancer, periodontitis - colon cancer, bloodstream translocation, complexity - example - human body - colon cancer - oral microbiome

      • comment

        • colon cancer starts in the mouth!
      • references

        • Oral-Intestinal Microbiota in Colorectal Cancer: Inflammation and Immunosuppression (2022)

          • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8824753/
          • Abstract
            • It is widely recognized that microbial disorders are involved in the pathogenesis of many malignant tumors.
            • The oral and intestinal tract are two of the overriding microbial habitats in the human body. Although they are anatomically and physiologically continuous, belonging to the openings at both ends of the digestive tract, the oral and intestinal microbiome do not cross talk with each other due to a variety of reasons, including
              • intestinal microbial colonization resistance and
              • chemical barriers in the upper digestive tract.
            • However, this balance can be upset in certain circumstances, such as
              • disruption of colonization resistance of gut microbes,
              • intestinal inflammation, and
              • disruption of the digestive tract chemical barrier.
            • Evidence is now accruing to suggest that the oral microbiome can colonize the gut, leading to dysregulation of the gut microbes.
            • Furthermore, the oral-gut microbes create an
              • intestinal inflammatory and
              • immunosuppressive microenvironment
            • conducive to
              • tumorigenesis and
              • progression of colorectal cancer (CRC).
            • Here, we review
              • the oral to intestinal microbial transmission and
              • the inflammatory and immunosuppressive microenvironment, induced by oral-gut axis microbes in the gut.
            • A superior comprehension of the contribution of the oral-intestinal microbes to CRC provides new insights into the prevention and treatment of CRC in the future.
        • Insights into oral microbiome and colorectal cancer – on the way of searching new perspectives (2023)

          • https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2023.1159822/full
          • Abstract
            • Microbiome is a keystone polymicrobial community that coexist with human body in a beneficial relationship.
            • These microorganisms enable the human body to maintain homeostasis and take part in mechanisms of defense against infection and in the absorption of nutrients.
            • Even though microbiome is involved in physiologic processes that are beneficial to host health, it may also cause serious detrimental issues.
            • Additionally, it has been proven that bacteria can migrate to other human body compartments and colonize them even although significant structural differences with the area of origin exist.
            • Such migrations have been clearly observed when the causes of genesis and progression of colorectal cancer (CRC) have been investigated.
            • It has been demonstrated that the oral microbiome is capable of penetrating into the large intestine and cause impairments leading to dysbiosis and stimulation of cancerogenic processes.
            • The main actors of such events seem to be oral pathogenic bacteria belonging to the red and orange complex (regarding classification of bacteria in the context of periodontal diseases), such as
              • Porphyromonas gingivalis and
              • Fusobacterium nucleatum respectively,
            • which are characterized by significant amount of cancerogenic virulence factors.
            • Further examination of oral microbiome and its impact on CRC may be crucial on early detection of this disease and would allow its use as a precise non-invasive biomarker.
    1. Reflecting on this, I'm reminded of a pattern that has been evident since my days co-running Third Wave with Johannes: the adoption of Uncertainty Coping Strategies. Broadly speaking, these are various behaviors, products, and practices people employ to manage the strains of everyday reality. Our work has consistently identified a spectrum ranging from technological interventions like neuroimplants to the rise in mindfulness services.The staggering contrasts in how different socioeconomic groups address these pressures are well illustrated by the recent New York Times article.

      'uncertainty coping strategies' equal living your life I suppose, in the face of the 'strains of everyday reality' since the groups in caves. What is different here wrt Igor and Johannes' work experience and patterns. Just Urbanism (then how is this diff from 18th century?) The complexity of those strains? The inability to withdraw from strains created by others through industrial work practices / social media algo inducement? The sense of looming doom wrt ecocollapse, financial crash etc, systemic threats iw and no agency to individually address some of that? Or is it merely the high end market catering to it, exploiting the stress rather than solving the stressors? What is Igo saying here?

    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20231101055209/https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-planetary-egregore-passes-you by Erik Hoel (Wikipedia: Erik Hoel is an American neuroscientist, neurophilosopher, and fiction writer. His main areas of research are the study and philosophy of consciousness, cognition, biological function of dreams, and mathematical theories of emergence. He is noted for using information theory and causal analysis to develop mathematical models to explore and understand the basis of consciousness and dreams) Seems an intriguing mix/approach.

  5. Oct 2023
    1. The so-called “punctuated equilibrium”, as coined in Eldredge and Gould’s paper of 1972, attracted a lot of research not only by evolutionary biologists but also by complexity scientists

      Seems to be 1977 http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philbio/readings/gould.eldridge.punceq.1977.pdf

      Punctuated equilibria is a term from paleontology, also reasearched as a concept in complexity science.

      See zotero://select/library/items/AMCSEP75

      Vgl [[Complexiteitsmodel 20031119150531]]

    1. I'm not so much saying Adler and Van Doren were trying to prevent readers from coming to grips with the unresolved issues of American history illustrated in this example. But I am suggesting that the idea that there's a "message" in these foundational texts and they know what it is and our job is to find out, is flawed. Too deterministic, too hierarchical, too supportive of a master narrative that needs to be challenged so truth can be appreciated in its complexity.

      Amen!

    1. They are all complex unities.

      Outlines will show similarities to fractals because of their building block simplicity which can grow to show emergent complexity.

    1. there are two broad classes of adaptations that qualify as gains in “organismal complexity” and constitute METs.
      • for: definition, definition - fusions, definition - information leap, organismal complexity, fusions, information leap, traditional METs

      • paraphrase

        • there are two classes of adaptations that qualify as gains in organismal complexity and constitute traditional METs:
          • definition start: fusion
            • a process whereby independently reproducing entities are incentivized into combining into higher, integrated levels of obligate reproductive cooperation, due to factors such as:
              • selective advantages of division of labor and mutual dependence.
              • maximization of inclusive fitness
              • ability to punish cheaters
          • definition end
          • definition start: information leap
            • novel forms of information storage or transmittal across individuals, ranging from
              • genes
              • symbolic writing
          • definition end
  6. Sep 2023
    1. Given that the array of tokens grows with the amount of code we have in a file, that doesn't sound ideal. There are more efficient algorithms to search a value in an array that we can use rather than going through every element in the array. Replacing that line with a binary search for example cuts the time in half.
    1. I think "purely functional, not a single re-assigned variable" often introduces significant extra complexity, when Ruby is a language that embraces both functional and imperative programming.
  7. Aug 2023
    1. The slip box needs a number of years in order to reach critical mass. Until then, it functions as a mere container from which we can retrieve what we put in. This changes with its growth in size and complexity.

      Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

      Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

      How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?


      † Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

    1. when you when you sort of take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the 00:14:47 chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist 00:14:59 Society you know that's owning the Supreme Court they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and to play 00:15:11 into what they want is the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections and a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills 00:15:23 and CNN and every other network
      • for: polycrisis, Trumpism, Chaos, distraction, climate crisis, climate communication, complexity, adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, adjacency climate change big oil, adjacency climate change politics big oil, quote adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, quote adjacency climate change big oil
      • key insight
        • claim
          • One big reason that big oil is funding GOP to keep the chaotic Trump story as the main headline is to foster distraction from climate change impacts
          • big news story in the US is Donald Trump and the election, climate change impacts of extreme weather is minimized
          • the distraction of politics from a chaotic GOP is perfect distraction for the masses to ignore climate change and for big oil to continue BAU
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • when you take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver
        • it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist Society that's owning the Supreme Court
        • they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is
          • to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and
          • to play into what they want
            • the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections
          • a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills of CNN and every other network
      • author
        • Noel Casler
    1. as the issues have become so complex and plentiful that no one can hope to be knowledgeable enough to make competent decisions about them. This is the point at which highly complex societies start to collapse of their own weight.
      • for: complexity, collapse, polycrisis, vulnerabilities - civilization
      • comment
        • the threat of sudden collapse is that our highly interdependent world crashes
        • and we are all specialized cogs in the wheel
        • If sudden collapse happens and complex infrastructure becomes unusable, it takes a tremendous amount of global coordination of specialists to bring the infrastructure back up again
        • global society is not easy to replicate with small groups, as the specialized skills are so fragmented that no small group would likely have the collective knowhow to reconstruct the complexity
    1. N+7 algorithm used by the Oulipo writers. This algorithm replaces every noun—every person, place, or thing—in Hacking the Academy with the person, place, or thing—mostly things—that comes seven nouns later in the dictionary. The results of N+7 would seem absolutely nonsensical, if not for the disruptive juxtapositions, startling evocations, and unexpected revelations that ruthless application of the algorithm draws out from the original work. Consider the opening substitution of Hacking the Academy, sustained throughout the entire book: every instance of the word academy is literally an accident.

      How might one use quirky algorithms in interestingly destructive or even generative ways to combinatorially create new things?

  8. Jul 2023
  9. Jun 2023
    1. Far more preferable is to minimize data structure so that it tends to be normalized and not to have inconsistent states. Then, if a member of a class is changed, it is simply changed, rather than damaged.
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20230613121025/https://www.workfutures.io/p/note-what-do-we-do-when-we-cant-predict

      Stowe says the 'unpredictability' e.g. investors see comes down that there's no way to assess risk in the global network created complexity. Points to older piece on uncertainty risk and ambiguity. https://www.sunsama.com/blog/uncertainty-risk-and-ambiguity explore.

      I would say that in complexity you don't try to predict the future, as that is based on linear causal chains of the knowable an known realms, you try to probe the future, running multiple small probes (some contradictory) and feed those that yield results.

  10. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

    1. My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.

      This is where complexity comes in, teasing out narratives and recombine them into probes, probing actions that may changes the weights of narratives and mental models held about a situation. Not diagnostics, but building the path towards diagnostics. Vgl [[Probe proberend handelen 20201111162752]] [[Vertelpunt 20201111170556]]

    2. This is likely why ChatGPT “passed” the case vignettes in the Medical Licensing Exam. Not because it’s “smart,” but because the classic cases in the exam have a deterministic answer that already exists in its database.

      Machines will do well in scripted situations (in itself a form of automation / codification). This was a factor in Hzap 08 / 09 in Rotterdam, where in programming courses the problems were simplified and highly scripted to enable the teacher to be able to grade the results, but at the cost of removing students from actual real life programming challenges they might encounter. It's a form of greedy reductionism of complexity. Whereas the proof of the pudding is performing well within complexity.

    1. The result of working with this technique for a long time is a kind of second memory, an alter ego with which you can always communicate. It has, similar to our own memory, no pre-planned comprehensive order, no hierarchy, and surely no linear structure like a book. And by that very fact, it is alive independently of its author. The entire note collection can only be described as a mess, but at least it is a mess with a non-arbitrary internal structure.

      Luhmann attributes (an independent) life to his zettelkasten. It is effectuated by internal branching, opportunities for links or connections, and a register as well as lack of pre-planned comprehensive order, lack of hierarchy, and lack of linear structure.

      Which of these is necessary for other types of "life"? Can any be removed? Compare with other systems.

    1. Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

      Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

      Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

    2. Tradesmen, too, were quick to see that the exchange might be worked to their advantage; they brought unsaleable stock from their shops, exchanged it for labour notes, and then picked out the best of the saleable articles. Consequently the labour notes began to depreciate; trouble also arose with the proprietors of the premises, and the experiment came to an untimely end early in 1834.

      The labour exchange at Gray's Inn Road which began on September 3, 1832, which was based on Robert Owen's idea in The Crisis (June 1832), eventually collapsed in 1834 as the result of Greshham's Law in which "bad money drives out good." In this case, rather than money the object was the relative value of goods which were exchanged based on Labour notes. Labour notes were used to exchange unsaleable stock in shops for labour notes which were then used to purchase more valuable goods. This caused depreciation of the labor notes ultimately causing the experiment to collapse in 1834.

  11. Mar 2023
    1. In order to ensure that water, energy and food systems are secure and sustainable there is need for resources that enable decision managers to acknowledge and accommodate system complexity, recognizing the likelihood of diffuse and non-linear impacts within and beyond system boundaries.
      • acknowledging and working with complexity
        • means implementing strategies
        • to deal with the changing landscape of knowns and unknowns
      • We are always working with limited knowledge
        • we need to explicitly recognize that
        • and develop pragmatic strategies
          • to integrate the unknown into decision-making processes
    1. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      Google translation:

      The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.


      While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

      Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

      One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

      What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

      An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

    1. 9/8b2 "Multiple storage" als Notwendigkeit derSpeicherung von komplexen (komplex auszu-wertenden) Informationen.

      9/8b2 "Multiple storage" as a necessity of<br /> storage of complex (complex<br /> evaluating) information.

      Fascinating to see the English phrase "multiple storage" pop up in Luhmann's ZKII section on Zettelkasten.

      This note is undated, though being in ZKII likely occurred more than a decade after he'd started his practice. One must wonder where he pulled the source for the English phrase rather than using a German one? Does the idea appear in Heyde? It certainly would have been an emerging question within systems theory and potentially computer science ideas which Luhmann would have had access to.

  12. Feb 2023
    1. Folgezettel

      Do folgezettel in combination with an index help to prevent over-indexing behaviors? Or the scaling problem of categorization in a personal knowledge management space?

      Where do subject headings within a zettelkasten dovetail with the index? Where do they help relieve the idea of heavy indexing or tagging? How are the neighborhoods of ideas involved in keeping a sense of closeness while still allowing density of ideas and information?

      Having digital search views into small portions of neighborhoods like gxabbo suggested can be a fantastic affordance. see: https://hypothes.is/a/W2vqGLYxEe2qredYNyNu1A

      For example, consider an anthropology student who intends to spend a lifetime in the subject and its many sub-areas. If they begin smartly tagging things with anthropology as they start, eventually the value of the category, any tags, or ideas within their index will eventually grow without bound to the point that the meaning or value as a search affordance within their zettelkasten (digital or analog) will be utterly useless. Let's say they fix part of the issue by sub-categorizing pieces into cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, etc. This problem is fine while they're in undergraduate or graduate school for a bit, but eventually as they specialize, these areas too will become overwhelming in terms of search and the search results. This problem can continue ad-infinitum for areas and sub areas. So how can one solve it?

      Is a living and concatenating index the solution? The index can have anthropology with sub-areas listed with pointers to the beginnings of threads of thought in these areas which will eventually create neighborhoods of these related ideas.

      The solution is far easier when the ideas are done top-down after-the-fact like in the Dewey Decimal System when the broad areas are preknown and pre-delineated. But in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten, things grow from the bottom up and thus present different difficulties from a scaling up perspective.

      How do we classify first, second, and third order effects which emerge out of the complexity of a zettelkasten? - Sparse indexing can be a useful long term affordance in the second or third order space. - Combinatorial creativity and ideas of serendipity emerge out of at least the third order. - Using ZK for writing is a second order affordance - Storage is a first order affordance - Memory is a first order affordance (related to storage) - Productivity is a second+ order (because solely spending the time to save and store ideas is a drag at the first order and doesn't show value until retrieval at a later date). - Poor organization can be non-affordance or deterrent which results in a scrap heap - lack of a reason why can be a non-affordance or deterrence as well - cross reference this list and continue on with other pieces and affordances

  13. Jan 2023
    1. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” E.F. Schumacher
    1. emergentism. The argument here is that once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before.
  14. Dec 2022
    1. Solving the gargantuan challenge posed by complex chronic diseases demands seismic shifts in research funding, medical training, and public attitudes.

      Not to mention the myopic insurance- and profit-driven "healthcare" industry itself.

    1. If we consider organizations (universities, corporations, governments and so on) as organisms (a view I do not agree with) we can argue some increase in intelligence and institutional memory through record keeping and information technology. But, in my opinion, organizations don’t have significant emergent reasoning capabilities that aren’t really more properly attributed to their members.

      What does Hidalgo have to say with respect to this quote? Can we push this argument?

    1. One aspect of the Orientation part of Boyd’s OODA loop is analysis and synthesis. This relates to deduction, or going from the general to the specific, and induction, or going from the specific to the general. By analyzing and synthesizing our observations and interpretations, we can generate new orientations towards what we are perceiving, so that we can act more effectively.

      To orient is to deduce and to induce. To compress general things into specific views, and to move from specifics to general views.

    1. But then life went on and nothing really happened.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zl2hwh/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

      This essay seems to be more about shiny object syndrome. The writer doesn't seem to realize any problems they've created. Way too much digging into tools and processes. Note the switching and trying out dozens of applications. (Dear god, why??!!) Also looks like a lot of collecting digitally for no clear goal. As a result of this sort of process it appears that many of the usual affordances were completely blocked, unrealized, and thus useless.

      No clear goal in mind for anything other than a nebulous being "better".

      One goal was to "retain what I read", but nothing was actively used toward this stated goal. Notes can help a little, but one would need mnemonic methods and possibly spaced repetition neither of which was mentioned.

      A list of specific building blocks within the methods and expected outcomes would have helped this person (and likely others), but to my knowledge this doesn't exist as a thing yet though bits and pieces are obviously floating around.<br /> TK: building blocks of note taking

      Evidence here for what we'll call the "perfect system fallacy", an illness which often goes hand in hand with "shiny object syndrome".

      Too many systems bound together will create so much immediate complexity that there isn't any chance for future complexity or emergence as the proximal system is doomed to failure. One should instead strive for immediate and excessive simplicity which might then build with time, use, and practice into something more rich and complex. This idea seems to be either completely missed or lost in the online literature and especially the blogosphere and social media.


      people had come up with solutions Sadly, despite thousands of variations on some patterns, people don't seem to be able to settle on either "one solution" or their "own solution" and in trying to do everything all at once they become lost, set adrift, and lose focus on any particular thing they've got as their own goal.

      In this particular instance, "retaining what they read" was totally ignored. Worse, they didn't seem to ever review over their notes of what they read.


      I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal.

      Why worry about all the types of notes?! This is the problem with these multi-various definitions and types. They end up confusing people without giving them clear cut use cases and methods by which to use them. They get lost in definitional overload and aren't connecting the names with actual use cases and affordances.


      I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.

      Why? Most sources seem to have reasonable guidance on this. Make notes on things that interest you, things which surprise you.

      They seem to have gotten lost in all the other moving pieces. Perhaps advice on this should come first, again in the middle, and a third time at the end of these processes.

      I'm curious how deeply they read sources and which sources they read to come to these conclusions? Did they read a lot of one page blog posts with summarizations or did they read book length works by Ahrens, Forte, Allosso, Scheper, et al? Or did they read all of these and watch lots of crazy videos as well. Doing it "all" will likely lead into the shiny object syndrome as well.

      This seems to outline a list of specifically what not to do and how not to approach these systems and "popular" blog posts that are an inch deep and a mile wide rather than some which have more depth.

      Worst of all, I spent so much time taking notes and figuring out a personal knowledge management system that I neglected the things I actually wanted to learn about. And even though I kind of always knew this, I kept falling into the same trap.

      Definitely a symptom of shiny object syndrome!

    1. No es magia.

      I love that he points this out explicitly.

      Some don't see the underlying processes of complexity within note taking methods and as a result ascribe magical properties to what are emergent properties or combinatorial creativity.

      See also: The Ghost in the Machine zettel from Luhmann

      Somehow there's an odd dichotomy between the boredom of such a simple method and people seeing magic within it at the same time. This is very similar to those who feel that life must be divinely created despite the evidence brought by evolutionary and complexity theory. In this arena, there is a lot more evolved complexity which makes the system harder to see compared to the simpler zettelkasten process.

    1. Perrow argued that “normal accidents” were nearly inevitable in a complex, tightly coupled system. To resist such an outcome, systems designers needed to have backups and redundancy, safety checks and maintenance.
    1. I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.

      https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

      If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

      cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)


      People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

  15. Nov 2022
    1. I think that there’s also the kind of what Brian Eno called scenius, that there are times like Xerox PARC in the 1970s or Florence during the Renaissance when there are just a number of people in contact with each other, and their ideas spark each other. And again, it’s a matter of building on what has been done before.

      Definition of scenius, a portmanteau of scene and genius, meaning roughly the output of combining the ideas of zeitgeist with combinatorial creativity to create sustained output which might be considered genius level work.

      Generally it gives more credit to the people and time than is generally seen in other instances which are often frame as lone genius.

      My definition may be more complex and nuanced than that of the version coined (?) by Brian Eno.

    1. Can we all agree that Zettelkasten note-taking is probably WAY more complexity than we need as creators?<br><br>Here's how to take the best parts & leave the rest to the academics pic.twitter.com/LFnAeBkbpG

      — ⚡️ Ev Chapman 🚢 | Creative Entrepreneur (@evielync) February 21, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
  16. Oct 2022
    1. It may be that the more concrete boundaries that having multiple instances provide can dampen down the cascades caused by the small world network effect. It is an interesting model to coexist between the silos with global scope and the personal domains beloved by the indieweb. In indieweb we have been saying ‘build things that you want for yourself’, but building things that you want for your friends or organisation is a useful step between generations.

      I'd say not just interesting, but also crucial. Where T and FB operate at generic level (despite FB pages as subgroups), the statistical, and IndieWeb on the personal (my site, my self-built tool), M works at group level or just above (bigger instances). That middle ground between singular and the statistical is where complexity resides and where it needs to be addressed and embraced. The network metaphor favors that intermediate level.

  17. Sep 2022
    1. For millions of Americans who are living pay-check to paycheck and precariously close to the poverty line, normal life eventslike the birth of a child or temporary loss of a job can send them below thepoverty line. But poverty spells tend to be short, and they are caused by the riskassociated with normal events that happen to most of us across the life course.They are just more catastrophic for some than for others.

      Can poverty be modeled after a statistical thermodynamic framework? How might we move the set point for poverty up significantly to prevent the ill effects of regular, repeated poverty?

      What does the complexity of poverty indicate? Within the web of potential indicators, what might be done to vastly mitigate the movement of people in and out of poverty? What sorts of additional resiliency can be built into the system?

    1. Ostrom discovered that in reality there were no problems with overgrazing. That is because of a common agreement among villagers that one is allowed to graze more cows on the meadow than they can care for over the winter—a rule that dates back to 1517

      I think this sentence should read "noone is allowed". If you can't care for an animal in the winter, you're not allowed to graze it. This is what never made sense to me in the tragedy of the commons story in the first place, that there would be no feedback mechanisms elsewhere, that the grazing meadow is the only place this would play out, and inside a community that has many other reasons to balance things out. There's therefore always a different place in the system or constellation to introduce negative feedback, and prevent runaway effects.

    1. To criticise Rust for being a complex language misses the point: it's designed to be expressive, which means having a lot of features, and in many situations that's what you want from a programming language.
    1. I have a long list of ideas I want to pursue in cosmology, quantum mechanics, complexity, statistical mechanics, emergence, information, democracy, origin of life, and elsewhere. Maybe we’ll start up a seminar series in Complexity and Emergence that brings different people together. Maybe it will grow into a Center of some kind.

      https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/03/06/johns-hopkins/

      Somehow I missed that Sean Carroll had moved to Johns Hopkins? Realized today when his next book showed up on my doorstep with his new affiliation.

  18. Aug 2022
    1. Apart from a higher probability to retrieve particular note sheets, that advantage lies in thecircumstance that notes having a similar keyword will, as the box grows, find themselves atthe same location because of the alphabetical structure. That means not only an automaticcollection of content, but also a comparative review of those related note sheets, which inturn leads to new thoughts basd on the relation between the note sheets with identicalkeywords
    1. Correspondingly,the far-reaching studies of language that were carried out under the influence ofCartesian rationalism suffered from a failure to appreciate either the abstractnessof those structures that are “present to the mind” when an utterance is producedor understood, or the length and complexity of the chain of operations that relatethe mental structures expressing the semantic content of the utterance to thephysical realization.

      What are the simple building blocks of thought and speech that make it so complex in aggregate?

    2. To use the terminology Wilhelm von Hum-boldt used in the 1830s, the speaker makes infinite use of finite means. Hisgrammar must, then, contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitelymany deep and surface structures, appropriately related. I

      building blocks and arising complexity

    3. Descartesalso arrived, quite early in his investigations, at the conclusion that the studyof mind faces us with a problem of quality of complexity, not merely degreeof complexity. He felt that he had demonstrated that understanding and will,the two fundamental properties of the human mind, involved capacities andprinciples that are not realizable by even the most complex of automata.
    4. And this system of linguistic competenceis qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of thetaxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R psychology,or the notions developed within the mathematical theory of communication orthe theory of simple automata.

      What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

    5. Correspondingly, there was a striking decline in studies oflinguistic method in the early 1950s as the most active theoretical minds turnedto the problem of how an essentially closed body of technique could be appliedto some new domain – say, to analysis of connected discourse, or to other cul-tural phenomena beyond language. I arrived at Harvard as a graduate studentshortly after B. F. Skinner had delivered his William James Lectures, later to bepublished in his book Verbal Behavior. Among those active in research in thephilosophy or psychology of language, there was then little doubt that althoughdetails were missing, and although matters could not really be quite that sim-ple, nevertheless a behavioristic framework of the sort Skinner had outlinedwould prove quite adequate to accommodate the full range of language use.

      Are these the groans of a movement from a clockwork world perspective to a complexity based one?

    1. ManuelRodriguez331 · 8 hr. agotaurusnoises wrote on Aug 20, 2022: Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich HeydeThe idea of grouping similar notes together with the help of index cards was mainstream knowledge in the 1920'er. Melvil Dewey has invented the decimal classification in 1876 and it was applied to libraries and personal note taking as well.quote: “because for every note there is a systematically related one in the immediate vicinity. [...] A good, scholarly book can grow out of the mere collection of notes — not an ingenious one, indeed" [1]The single cause why it wasn't applied more frequently was because of the limitation of the printing press. In the year 1900 only 100 scholarly journals were available in the world. There was no need to write more manuscripts and teach the art of Scientific Writing to a larger audience.[1] Kuntze, Friedrich: Die Technik der geistigen Arbeit, 1922

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wrytqj/comment/ilax9tc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

      What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).

      Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)

      Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?

      There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...

    1. Zeynep's law: Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.
    1. Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

      Example: ant pheromone paths

      Within ants, there can be a path left for others to follow, but what about natural paths in our environment that influence us to take them because of the idea of the "path of least resistence" or the effects of having paved cow paths.

      Similarly being lead by "the company that you keep".

      relathionship to research on hanging out with fat people tending to make one fatter.

    2. The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma "mark, sign" and ἔργον ergon "work, action", and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.[4][5]

      Theraulaz, Guy (1999). "A Brief History of Stigmergy". Artificial Life. 5 (2): 97–116. doi:10.1162/106454699568700. PMID 10633572. S2CID 27679536.

  19. Jul 2022
  20. bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeicuq2jxzrw7omddwzohl5szkqv6ayjiubjy3uopjh5c3cghxq6yoe.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. . It is clear that inorder to achieve certain scientific results complex phenomena must be simplifiedand put in a kind of a straitjacket that deprives them of many if not most of thecharacteristics that make them complex in the first place.

      !- in other words : science and complexity * reductionist scientific methods have limited application within complex systems

    1. In one of his videos he talks about "approaching the mind of god" or something similar, in a way I can't entirely tell whether he is paraphrasing an early-modern note-taker or saying that's what he thinks he is doing himself. I don't really care whether he's religious or not, unless it compromises the system he's building.

      These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.

    1. there's a lot of discussion about complex systems you know we've been discussing complex systems and i just want to make a couple of points here because uh 01:31:28 commonly some it is not uncommon that someone will say a complex system well that just means that it's liable to fall apart at any moment you know it's just too complex it's going to crash uh but and that that obviously can 01:31:41 happen you know systems can collapse quite quite true but obviously life would not be doing very well if the if if the evolution builds complexity 01:31:53 in species and you know in organisms and ecosystems if life would be have a rough go of it if it was so fragile that uh complexity became a 01:32:07 burden and and uh you know come and then you know you reach a certain level of complexity and then you fall apart that's not really i don't think i mean that can happen but that's but but complex useful complexity 01:32:19 doesn't make you fall apart it actually just does the opposite it serves what we've been talking about all along and that's problem solving so we are anticipatory organisms we are problem 01:32:31 solving organisms it's our nature most of what the human brain does is to solve problems of one kind or another social problems physical problems whatever and maneuver in the world you 01:32:43 know in a useful way and complexity is what allows that there's a number of studies that i cite here that show that as an organism even as a robot you know 01:32:56 faces uh more difficult pressures from its environment it complexifies and complexifies by complexity then it's it's it implies 01:33:08 a greater number of parts coordinating or cooperating in some way uh to you know solve this new challenge and obviously as a human we're very complex we have 01:33:22 we have complex needs we have we can think not just what's going to happen in the next millisecond but what's going to happen we can think about what's going to happen in 100 years i mean part of this project is to think about what might be 01:33:36 happening over the next hundred years or even a thousand years so as an organism complexifies it become it at least potentially becomes a better adapted to solving more complex 01:33:49 problems so you could and from that sense you could almost ex equate complexity with problem-solving capacity you know at least in a uh you know in a 01:34:01 general sense and then i talked about well that just reminds me of in the free energy calculations that we um have gone over in various papers it's like accuracy is the modeling imperative and 01:34:14 then complexity is tolerated to the extent it facilitates accurate modeling so if you get the one parameter model and you got 99 and it's adequate and it's good then you're good to go and you're gonna go for simplicity 01:34:26 but then what you're saying is actually the um appearance and the hallmark of complexity in the world it means that that organism has the need to solve problems at a given 01:34:40 level of counterfactual depth or inference skill or temporal depth temporal thickness

      While complex systems these days has connotations of being more fragile or more challenging to fix, In evolutionary biology, complexity has evolved in organisms to make them more adaptable, more fit. Human beings are complex organisms. Most of our brain is dedicated to solving one type of problem or another, we anticipate the world and problem solving involves choosing the best option based on anticipation and our models.

    1. fly·wheel/ˈflīˌ(h)wēl/ Learn to pronounce nounnoun: flywheel; plural noun: flywheels; noun: fly-wheel; plural noun: fly-wheelsa heavy revolving wheel in a machine that is used to increase the machine's momentum and thereby provide greater stability or a reserve of available power during interruptions in the delivery of power to the machine.

      A potential word to describe some of my theory for evolution, DNA, and complexity

      Used often in business to describe increasing momentum

  21. Jun 2022
    1. Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

      This feels like an underlying and underpinning principle of how the IndieWeb which focuses on working real world examples which are able to build up more complex systems instead of theoretical architecture astronomy which goes no where.

      Reference: John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail p. 71

    1. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. EF Schumacher
    1. WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIZED WORLD “The most important business — and parenting — book of the year.” — Forbes “The most important business — and parenting — book of the year.” — Forbes “The most important business — and parenting — book of the year.” — Forbes “The most important business — and parenting — book of the year.” — Forbes “The most important business — and parenting — book of the year.” — Forbes ‹›

      Many university presidents site the value of basic research to fuel the more specialized research spaces.

      Example: we didn't have any application for x-rays when their basic science was researched, but now they're integral to a number of areas of engineering, physics, and health care.

      What causes this effect? Is it the increased number of potential building blocks that provide increased flexibility and complexity to accelerate the later specializations?

      Link this to: https://hyp.is/-oEI3OF5EeybM_POWlI9WQ/www.maggiedelano.com/garden/helpful-books

  22. May 2022
    1. I wore the designer and product manager hats on the project and prototyped the breadboarding and scope mapping techniques described in this book to manage the complexity.

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    Annotators

  23. Apr 2022
  24. Mar 2022
    1. Gall’s Law, which states that a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Contrast this with a complex system designed from scratch, which never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

      Gall's Law: Working complex systems invariably evolve from simple systems which actually worked.

      It is rare to find working complex systems designed from scratch. They rarely work and are incredibly difficult to patch to make them work.

  25. Feb 2022
    1. X : You seem concerned. Me : The competition talks maps but shows graphs. That's a problem. X : Why? Me : In maps, space has meaning which is why they are good for mapping spaces whether geographic, economic, social or political. X : Isn't that true with graphs? Me : No.

      https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1490344071126294528

      maps != graphs

      what are the building blocks at operation with respect to these?

      what pieces of context are built up and how do they add information to become more complex?

    1. Witness the hundreds of millions of CPE (customer-premises equipment) boxes with literally too much memory for buffering packets. As Jim Gettys and Dave Taht have been demonstrating in recent years, more is not better when it comes to packet memory.1 Wireless networks in homes and coffee shops and businesses all degrade shockingly when the traffic load increases. Rather than the "fair-share" scheduling we expect, where N network flows will each get roughly 1/Nth of the available bandwidth, network flows end up in quicksand where they each get 1/(N2) of the available bandwidth. This isn't because CPE designers are incompetent; rather, it's because the Internet is a big place with a lot of subtle interactions that depend on every device and software designer having the same—largely undocumented—assumptions.

      Good example of complexity and ecosystem behaviour in a human system - the Internet ...

    1. Because of the constantly growing number of volumes, and to minimize coordination issues, Gottfried van Swieten emphasizes a set of instructions for registering all the books of the court library. Written instructions are by no means common prior to the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, cataloging takes place under the supervision of a librarian who instructs scriptors orally, pointing out problems and corrections as every-one goes along.

      Unlike prior (oral) efforts, Gottfried van Swieten created a writtten set of instructions for cataloging texts at the Austrian National Library. This helped to minimize coordination issues as well as time to teach and perfect the system.


      Written rules, laws, and algorithms help to create self-organization. This is done by saving time and energy that would have gone into the work of directed building of a system instead. The saved work can then be directed towards something else potentially more productive or regenerative.

    1. You may remember from school the difference between an exergonicand an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need toadd energy to keep the process going. In the second case, thereaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releasesenergy.

      The build up of complexity which results in the creation of life with increasing complexity must certainly be endergonic if the process is to last for any extensive length of time. Once the process becomes exergonic or reaches homeostasis, then the building of complexity and even life itself will cease to exist.

      Must this always be true? Proof? Counter examples?

    2. By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to addthe same note to different contexts.

      By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.


      Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

    3. Sull, Donald and Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. 2015. Simple Rules: Howto Thrive in a Complex World. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin
  26. Jan 2022
    1. Technological solutions to social problems seem quicker, cheaper, and simpler to implement than larger social changes.

      Tech solutionism can often seem useful because it appears to be cheaper, simpler, and easier to implement than making more difficult choices and larger, necessary social changes.

      One needs to always ask what is the real underlying problem? What other methods are there for potential solutions? What are the knock-on effects of these potential solutions. Is the particular solution really just a quick fix or bandaid? Once implemented how will one measure the effects and adjust after-the-fact?

    1. Cross-referencing the correct answers from previous Wordles with a body of the most commonly used English terms, Moro confirmed that Wardle chooses frequently used words in English, something the game’s inventor also pointed out in his interview with The New York Times, which mentioned that he avoided rare words.

      Wordle specifically chooses more common words which cuts back drastically on the complexity of the game.

    1. The relationship between the top-level subject area and the lower-leve

      subjects cannot be described in terms of a strictly hierarchical order, it is rather a form of loose coupling insofar as one can find lower-level subjects which do not fit systematically to the top-level issue but show only marginally connections.

      There is something suspiciously similar about the instantiation of a zettelkasten and the idea of small pieces loosely joined.

      Perhaps also related to the idea of a small number of primitives which can interact in a small number of ways, but which gives rise to incredible complexity.

    1. Autopoiesis has been proposed as a potential mechanism of abiogenesis, by which primitive cells evolved into more complex molecules that could support the development of life.
    2. The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production') refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.[1] The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.[2] Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of cognition, systems theory, architecture and sociology.

      I can't help but think about a quine here...

    1. The sociological hy-pothesis that evolution implies not simply an increase in complexity but an increase in reducible complexity--or, to put it in other terms, that evolution is production of complexity through reduction of complexity--is thus verified.81

      81 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Reduktion von Komplexität’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philoso-phie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 8 (Basel/Stuttgart, 1992), 377–78, at 377. On the claim that evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity, there is an extensive literature. See J.W.S. Pringle, ‘On the Parallel Between Learning and Evolu-tion’, Behaviour 3 (1951), 174–215; Francis Heylighen et al., eds., The Evolution of Complexity (Boston/London, 1999), with large bibliography.

      Delve into the statement that "evolution leads to an increase in reducible complexity".

    Tags

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    1. Only certain kinds of self-organizing complex systems enable collectively beneficial results.

      Which? How?

      Is there a way to (easily) evolve these into political or economic contexts?

    2. Both involve “invisible hand” magic — intricate, unplanned, “self-organizing” systems.
  27. Dec 2021
    1. The role of accidents in the theory of science is not disputed, If you employ evolutionary models, accidents assume a most important role. Without them, nothing happens, no progress is made. Without variation in the given material of ideas, there are no possibilities of examining and selecting novelties. The real problem thus becomes therefore one of producing accidents with sufficiently enhanced probabilities for selection.
    2. Every note is only an element which receives its quality only from the network of links and back-links within the system.

      Every element receives its value based on the network of links and connections it has with other elements. This is just as true for ideas on index cards in a zettelkasten as it is for people within a society.

      idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society

      What other elements in complex systems is this analogy true for? Is it a truism for all elements in complex systems? What other examples can we come up with?

    3. Possibility of linking (Verweisungsmöglichkeiten). Since all papers have fixed numbers, you can add as many references to them as you may want. Central concepts can have many links which show on which other contexts we can find materials relevant for them.

      Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

      Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

      As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

      Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?


      What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?


      How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

    4. The possibility of arbitrary internal branching.

      Modern digital zettelkasten don't force the same sort of digital internal branching process that is described by Niklas Luhmann. Internal branching in these contexts is wholly reliant on the user to create it.

      Many digital systems will create a concrete identifier to fix the idea within the system, but this runs the risk of ending up with a useless scrap heap.

      Some modern systems provide the ability for one to add taxonomies like subject headings in a commonplace book tradition, which adds some level of linking. But if we take the fact that well interlinked cards are the most valuable in such a system then creating several links upfront may be a bit more work, but it provides more value in the long run.

      Upfront links also don't require quite as much work at the card's initial creation as the creator already has the broader context of the idea. Creating links at a future date requires the reloading into their working memory of the card's idea and broader context.

      Of course there may also be side benefits (including to memory) brought by the spaced repetition of the card's ideas as well as potential new contexts gained in the interim which may help add previously unconsidered links.

      It can certainly be possible that at some level of linking, there is a law of diminishing returns the decreases the value of a card and its idea.

      One of the benefits of physical card systems like Luhmann's is that the user is forced to add the card somewhere, thus making the first link of the idea into the system. Luhmann's system in particular creates a parent/sibling relation to other cards or starts a brand new branch.

    5. The fixed filing place needs no system. It is sufficient that we give every slip a number which is easily seen (in or case on the left of the first line) and that we never change this number and thus the fixed place of the slip. This decision about structure is that reduction of the complexity of possible arrangements, which makes possible the creation of high complexity in the card file and thus makes possible its ability to communicate in the first place.

      There's an interesting analogy between Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten numbering system and the early street address system in Vienna. Just as people (often) have a fixed address, they're able to leave it temporarily and mix with other people before going back home every night. The same is true with his index cards. Without the ability to remove cards and remix them in various orders, the system has far less complexity and simultaneously far less value.

      Link to reference of street addressing systems of Vienna quoted by Markus Krajewski in (chapter 3 of) Paper Machines.


      Both the stability and the occasional complexity of the system give it tremendous value.

      How is this linked to the idea that some of the most interesting things within systems happen at the edges of the system which have the most complexity? Cards that sit idly have less value for their stability while cards at the edges that move around the most and interact with other cards and ideas provide the most value.

      Graph this out on a multi-axis drawing. Is the relationship linear, non-linear, exponential? What is the relationship of this movement to the links between cards? Is it essentially the same (particularly in digital settings) as movement?

      Are links (and the active creation thereof) between cards the equivalent of communication?

    1. https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin

      decision support framework

      This looks interesting, but is so laden with jargon that it's not very welcoming and doesn't have a very clear value proposition.

      Any relation to Wardley mapping space?

    1. Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily,involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any humanaction might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect,a psychosexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a gameof make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument,that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everythingto a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would beotherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science hasbeen rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the finalanalysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud orClaude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point.One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. Theproblem comes when, long after the discovery has been made,people continue to simplify.

      revisit this... it's an important point, particularly when looking at complex ideas with potentially emergent properties

    1. The anarchist inspiration is clear than ever here: social complexity without “monopoly of legitimate violence” has been possible before, and can be possible again.

      In which contexts has this worked? And if so, how were those societies structured? How might we evolve back to that particular state space or adjacent spaces?

    1. The card index appeared to be simply what it was: a wooden box for paper slips. On one of these file cards, Luhmann once summarized his own reflections on just such an experience: ‘People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed’ (Figure 1).8
      1. Cf. Schmidt, ‘Luhmanns Zettelkasten’, 7. The heading of this file card is formulated in form of a question: ‘Geist im Kasten?’ (‘Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?’). Obviously, the answer is no. Many thanks to Johannes Schmidt for providing the image of this file card.

      In a zettel in his system entitled "Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet", Niklas Luhmann wrote the note: "People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed." This is a telling story about the simplicity of the idea of a slip box (zettelkasten, card catalog, or commonplace book).

      yellowed index card with the identifier 9/8,3 with almost illegible handwriting in German Niklas Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8,3

      It's also a testament to the fact that the value of it is in the upfront work that is required in making valuable notes and linking them. Many end up trying out the simple looking system and then wonder why it isn't working for them. The answer is that they're not working for it.

    1. If a system encapsulates single projects or topics, chances are that it can’t cope with complexity. This is okay if you want to just work on one project. But if you want to use a system as an aid to writing and as a thinking tool you should opt for a system that is powerful enough for a lifetime of thoughts. So, watch out for folders and projects. They are the means for dealing with encapsulating and limiting complexity. In addition, they hinder the most productive way of knowledge production: the interdisciplinary part.

      For complexity to flourish between various projects and ideas, folders are probably not the final solution. Within a zettelkasten, other emergent structures may emerge to deal with information that doesn't fit neatly into any particular folder or other structure.

    1. One of my greatest concerns about this field today is that almost all of the problem discovery happens by a kind of self-interested navel-gazing process, where product builders take the quote “build things you would want to use” a little too literally, and build products for the small niche group of people interested in note-taking tools and processes. This leads to products that seem useful to a small group of other people who are also working in this space and familiar with its vernacular and concepts, but are unusable or unapproachable by most people outside of that small community. I think this is a dangerous failure mode.

      The level of complexity to using some of these tools is also a huge hurdle for the everyday user as well. Some require deep knowledge of the tool along with coding ability as well.

      Perhaps this complexity barrier will come down over time, but some projects don't seem to be working toward making things easier and simpler for the end user.

  28. Nov 2021
    1. Another person suspended from his job put it this way: “Someone who knows me, but maybe doesn’t know my soul or character, may be saying to themselves that prudence would dictate they keep their distance, lest they become collateral damage.”

      Putting people beyond the pale creates a social contagion of sorts. It would be interesting to look at these cases from the perspective of public health and view these as disease. What information falls out of doing this? How does this model change?

      From Applebaum's perspective that these cases may help sow the seeds of authoritarianism, could they be viewed as something like an initial case of untreated syphilis and authoritarianism becomes a version of festered stage three syphilis.

      What other things may stem from these effects as second and third order problems from a complexity theory perspective?

  29. Oct 2021
  30. Sep 2021
    1. ween societies at greatly differing economic levels). It is also that there has never been any single type of "the transition". The stress of the transition falls upon the whole culture: resistance to change and assent to change arise from the whole culture. And this culture includes the systems of power, property-relations, religious institu- tions, etc., inattention to which merely flattens phenomena and trivializes analysis. Above all, the transition is not to "industrialism" tout court but to industrial capitalism or (in the twentieth century) to alternative systems whose features are still indistinct. Wh

      Speaking about transitions within societies and cultures can be problematic as they are complex and intertwined between individuals, families, and larger structures and institutions. The transition to industrialization is often seen as a foregone conclusion when, in fact, it was a gradual struggle over time. Glossing over these types of transition can trivialize analysis of the complex effects at play.

    1. Every area of our lives is interconnected, so should be the way we journal.

      I generally take this approach, but it can be useful to compartmentalize things.

  31. Aug 2021
    1. Complex challenges, on the other hand, require innovative responses. These are the confounding head-scratchers with no right answers, only best attempts. There’s no straight line to a solution, and you can only know that you’ve found an effective strategy in retrospect. You never really solve your complex challenges–most of the time, you have to push forward and see how it goes.
    2. Humans can master highly sophisticated technical and technological challenges because we’re very skilled at making linear connections from one technical feat to the next. But when it comes to multi-dimensional challenges, it’s a whole different ballgame. We can’t solve them with linear thinking or rely on technical prowess. Sometimes, they move and change at a rate faster than we can act. They don’t patiently await solutions. They are complex problems–which is a whole different ball game than merely complicated issues.
    1. More than that, if Hayek is right about a particular level of complexity being unable to understand its own or a higher level of complexity, it would be impossible to understand the nature of sociotemporality in the first place.
    1. It's hard to convey what a difference it makes to the development experience to cut out this massive tumor of complexity.

      making the web an alive medium again and not a preprocessed nightmare nightmare is critical

      alas: typescript.

    1. Another theoretician of the index card system, the German sociologist Niklas Luhman, whose so-called "Zettelkasten" (slip-box) has achieved independent fame in Germany, used to talk about this first analytic step as "reduction for the sake of [building] complexity." [9]

      Luhmann used the idea of "one card, one fact" as the first step of "reduction for the sake of [building] complexity."

      Historically reducing things to their smallest essential form or building blocks makes it much easier to build up new complex things from them.

      Examples of this include:

      • Reducing numbers to binary 1 and 0
      • tk

      footnote:

      See Luhmann, Niklas (2000) Short Cuts. Edited by Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, Martin Weinmann. Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins), p. 33.

    2. A wiki allows one to build increasingly more complex relationships between what might appear to be at first unrelated bits and pieces of information. The motto that characterizes this approch is: "It's not the data, it's the relationship" and it certainly rings true for me in the context of note-taking.
  32. Jul 2021
    1. “Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus' use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille. The natural world was no longer ordered on a fixed, linear scale, but came to be seen as a map-like natural system of multiple affinities.

      Ha!

      Roughly the idea I'd just written!

      The idea of reordering nature this way would have been fantastic, particularly in light of the general prior order of the cosmos based on the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being.

      Compare this with Ernst Haeckel's Tree of Man. What year was this in relation? Was the idea of broader biological networks and network-like structure thought of prior to this?

    1. These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity

      These criteria – surprise serendipity, information and inner complexity – are the criteria any communication has to meet.

      An interesting thesis about communication. Note that Luhmann worked in general systems theory. I'm curious if he was working in cybernetics as well?

    2. Complexity: your partner needs to be sufficiently autonomous. Autonomy is promoted by growing inner complexity of the system. Its inner complexity depends on both the number of notes and their relationships with each other.

      The complexity of a system promotes autonomy.

      How do we define autonomy here? Is this statement really true? Useful? How might this related to the origin of life?

  33. Jun 2021
    1. This leads us to Markovits’s second critique of the aspirational view: The cycle that produces meritocratic inequality severely harms not only the middle class but the very elite who seem to benefit most from it.

      What if we look at meritocracy from a game theoretic viewpoint?

      Certainly there's an issue that there isn't a cap on meritocratic outputs, so if one wants more wealth, then one needs to "simply" work harder. As a result, in a "keeping up with the Jones'" society that (incorrectly) measures happiness in wealth, everyone is driven to work harder and faster for their piece of the pie.

      (How might we create a sort of "set point" to limit the unbounded meritocratic cap? Might this create a happier set point/saddle point on the larger universal graph?)

      This effect in combination with the general drive to have "power over" people instead of "power with", etc. in combination with racist policies can create some really horrific effects.

      What other compounding effects might there be? This is definitely a larger complexity-based issue.

  34. May 2021
    1. Why did a figure such as Leibniz fail to use his own tools? Perhaps messiness was the source of his creativity. This is a fact of intellectual originality with which Google must still grapple—libraries, after all, allow for the type of manageable disorder which is often the spark of creativity.

      Manageable disorder, messiness, and even chaos can be the source of boundless creativity.

      There's an idea in complexity theory that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos.

    1. Standard economic theory uses mathematics as its main means of understanding, and this brings clarity of reasoning and logical power. But there is a drawback: algebraic mathematics restricts economic modeling to what can be expressed only in quantitative nouns, and this forces theory to leave out matters to do with process, formation, adjustment, creation and nonequilibrium. For these we need a different means of understanding, one that allows verbs as well as nouns. Algorithmic expression is such a means. It allows verbs (processes) as well as nouns (objects and quantities). It allows fuller description in economics, and can include heterogeneity of agents, actions as well as objects, and realistic models of behavior in ill-defined situations. The world that algorithms reveal is action-based as well as object-based, organic, possibly ever-changing, and not fully knowable. But it is strangely and wonderfully alive.

      Read abstract.

      The analogy of adding a "verb" to mathematics is intriguing here.

  35. Mar 2021
    1. Here are my thoughts: making vim startup time shorter is GOOD added complexity - BAD my main concern is with the complexity that gets added to get startup time improvements. User has to tag scripts, and then manually BundleBind to get scripts loaded. This seems like too much hassle(manual involvement) to me. Fixing 1 time thing (startup) we're adding many more (like BundleBinding required scripts once they're used) For instance in my case i don't start Vim often because i'm using --remote-tab-silent option. So i'll get no benefit along with complexity (
  36. Feb 2021
  37. www.metacritic.com www.metacritic.com
    1. Difficult enough to prove a worthy challenge, with an over-complexity that might have benefitted from a little self-restraint.

      overly complex = unnecessarily complicated

  38. Jan 2021
    1. the commonplace book has been particularly beloved by poets, whose business is the revelation of wholeness through the fragmentary

      Gestalt: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. See also, emergence in chaos theory and complexity.

  39. Dec 2020
    1. Much like civil engineering and chemical engineering in decades past, this new discipline aims to corral the power of a few key ideas, bringing new resources and capabilities to people, and doing so safely. Whereas civil engineering and chemical engineering were built on physics and chemistry, this new engineering discipline will be built on ideas that the preceding century gave substance to — ideas such as “information,” “algorithm,” “data,” “uncertainty,” “computing,” “inference,” and “optimization.” Moreover, since much of the focus of the new discipline will be on data from and about humans, its development will require perspectives from the social sciences and humanities.

      Michael Jordan draws the analogy with the emergence of civil and chemical engineering, building with the building blocks of the century prior: physics and chemistry. In this case the building blocks are ideas such as: information, algorithm, data, uncertainty, computing, inference and optimization.

    1. The compiler architecture moves complexity from the runtime and source code to buildtime and tools. Behind Svelte’s simple APIs sits a beefy compiler. Frontend web development has become very tool heavy in the webapp era, so in practice this adds little cost beyond what developers like myself already pay, but increased build complexity is important to acknowledge.

      tool-heavy dependence on build tools / heavy/complex build-time

    2. Compilers may appear to magically eliminate complexity, but that’s an illusion — they shift it.
    1. Less developer maintenance burden: The existing (Kuma) platform is complex and hard to maintain. Adding new features is very difficult. The update will vastly simplify the platform code — we estimate that we can remove a significant chunk of the existing codebase, meaning easier maintenance and contributions.
    1. For example, norms that overwhelmingly prioritize the publication and dissemination of philosophical research as articles in pay-to-read academic journals, although serving an evaluative purpose within the discipline, also reinforce a strong separation between professional philosophers and the public.

      True for advanced study of any kind. [[complexity]]

  40. Nov 2020
    1. Finally, you gain the ability to reuse previously built packets for new projects. Maybe some research you did for an online marketing campaign becomes useful for a new campaign. Or some sketches that didn’t quite make it into an old design give you inspiration for a new one. Or some book notes you wrote down casually turn out to be very useful for an unforeseen challenge a year later.

      The Intermediate Packet approach allows you to reuse previously built packets for new projects

      By incorporating existing packets in new projects, you gain the ability to deliver new projects much faster.

    1. Refactoring at scale is challenging and a significant investment, so communicating the progress is important both from a business perspective but also as a motivational effect to developers. In this case we used a combination of complexity trend visualizations and Code Health Metric as shown in the preceding example.

      [[refactoring at scale]]

    1. I also like that the folksonomic approach (as in, there are no “pre-established groups”) allows for a great deal of expression, of negotiation (I imagine that #barcamp will be a common tag between events, but that’s fine, since if there is a collision, say between two separate BarCamps on the same day, they’ll just have to socially engineer a solution and probably pick a new tag, like #barcampblock) and of decay (that is, over time, as tags are used less frequently, other people can reuse them — no domain squatting!).

      The folksonomic approach (user-generated tagging) is beneficial because it allows complexity to emerge bottom-up.

  41. Oct 2020
    1. Of course you can start implementing your own thing, but you will waste a lot of precious time reinventing the wheel. Why not take advantage of a validation library that takes care of all this complexity for you?
    2. Form validation can get complex (synchronous validations, asynchronous validations, record validations, field validations, internationalization, schemas definitions...). To cope with these challenges we will leverage this into Fonk and Fonk Final Form adaptor for a React Final Form seamless integration.
    1. One of the primary tasks of engineers is to minimize complexity. JSX changes such a fundamental part (syntax and semantics of the language) that the complexity bubbles up to everything it touches. Pretty much every pipeline tool I've had to work with has become far more complex than necessary because of JSX. It affects AST parsers, it affects linters, it affects code coverage, it affects build systems. That tons and tons of additional code that I now need to wade through and mentally parse and ignore whenever I need to debug or want to contribute to a library that adds JSX support.
    1. Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.
    2. For instance, in the study of mobile phone networks, the frequency and length of interactions has often been used as measures of link weight (Onnela et al. 2007), (Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert 1008), (Miritello et al. 2011).

      And they probably shouldn't because typically different levels of people are making these decisions. Studio brass and producers typically have more to say about the lead roles and don't care as much about the smaller ones which are overseen by casting directors or sometimes the producers. The only person who has oversight of all of them is the director, and even then they may quit caring at some point.

    3. Problems of disorganized complexity are problems that can be described using averages and distributions, and that do not depend on the identity of the elements involved in a system, or their precise patterns of interactions. A classic example of a problem of disorganized complexity is the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann, James-Clerk Maxwell, and Willard Gibbs, which focuses on the properties of gases.
    1. "Protestant" life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path of poverty and security.[8]

      Is this simply a restatement of the idea that most of "the interesting things" happen at the border or edge of chaos? The Catholic ethic is firmly inside the stable arena while that of the Protestant ethic is pushing the boundaries.

    2. In general, while I've been reading Stuart Kauffmann's At Home in the Universe, I can't help but thinking about the cascading extinctions he describes and wonder if political extinctions of ideas like Communism or other forms of government or even economies might follow the same types of outcomes described there?

    3. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

      What if, in fact, we've only just found a local maximum? What if in the changing landscape there are other places we could potentially get to competitively that supply greater maxima? And possibly worse, what if we need to lose value to get from here to unlock even more value there?

    1. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1606.03433 : Calculating the Middle Ages? The Project “Complexities and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and the Near East”
    2. “On average across all five polities, a change of ruler in one year increased the probability for another change in the following year threefold,” says Preiser-Kapeller. So the closer you are to an upheaval, the more likely there is to be another one soon. Or in other words, upheavals tend to cluster together.
    3. While the complexity that arises from network theory in many areas of science has been studied for decades, there has been almost no such research in the field of history.
    1. That leaves economist Martin Shubik, surely the second most powerful mind among economists to have tackled the complexity problem (John von Neumann was first). Shubik pursued an overarching theory of money all his life, one in which money and financial institutions emerge naturally, instead of being given. In The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy (MIT, 2016), he considered that he and physicist Etic Smith had achieved it. Shubik died last year, at 92.  His ideas about strict definitions of “minimal complexity” will take years to resurface in others’ hands.
    2. Two of the most successful expositors of economic complexity were research partners, as least for a time:  Ricardo Hausmann, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and physicist César Hidalgo, of MIT’s Media Lab. They, too, worked with a gifted mathematician, Albert-László Barabási, of Northeastern University, to produce a highly technical paper; then,  with colleagues, assembled an Atlas of Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity (MIT, 2011), a data-visualization tool that continues to function online. Meanwhile, Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Basic, 2015) remains an especially lucid account of humankind’s escape (so far) from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but there is precious little economics in it. For the economics of international trade, see Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman.
    3. Among the barons who came across my screen were John Holland, Scott Page, Robert Axelrod, Leigh Tesfatsion, Seth Lloyd, Alan Kirman, Blake LeBaron, J. Barkley Rosser Jr., and Eric Beinhocker, as well as three men who became good friends: Joel Moses, Yannis Ionnides, and David Colander.  All extraordinary thinkers. 
    1. His data also suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being invented around them as children.

      Combine this with Cesar Hidalgo's work and draw the connections!

    1. Similar to my recent musings (link coming soon) on the dualism of matter vs information, I find that the real beauty may lie precisely in the complexity of their combination.

      There's a kernel of an idea hiding in here that I want to come back and revisit at a future date.

    1. There's a grassy vacant lot near her apartment where Franklin often takes a break from her job as a landscaping crew supervisor at Bon Secours Community Works, a nearby community organization owned by Bon Secours Health System. It's one of the few places in the neighborhood with a lot of shade — mainly from a large tree Franklin calls the mother shade. She helped come up with the idea to build a free splash park in the lot for residents to cool down in the heat. Now Bon Secours is taking on the project. "This was me taking my stand," Franklin says. "I didn't sit around and wait for everybody to say, 'Well, who's going to redo the park?' "

      Reminiscent of the story in Judith Rodin's The Resilience Dividend about the Kambi Moto neighborhood in the Huruma slum of Nairobi. The area and some of the responsibility became a part of ownership of the space from the government. Meanwhile NPR's story here is doing some of the counting which parallels the Kambi Moto story.

  42. Sep 2020
    1. But we face our own hostile environment: underpowered devices, poor network connections, and the complexity inherent in front-end engineering.
  43. Aug 2020
    1. Anything that is added to a system to improve it (or make it more reliable!) increases complexity, thus uncertainty and risk. We have a bad habit of trying to add “more” to fix a problem, increase the layers of safety, band-aid over a system vulnerability, etc. We don’t often evaluate this, but this added complexity can (and does) make things worse. Wherever possible — and I know it isn’t always possible — remove something isntead of adding it. This is not usually politically favorable, something that Sr. Software Engineers who reduce the codebase size have often heard, but has far fewer side effects.
  44. Jul 2020
    1. A simplified pricing and packaging (PnP) strategy serves customers in the optimal way per the industry best practice. More SKUs lead to a more complex PnP model as a company scales, which eventually causes huge confusion to customers.
  45. Jun 2020