589 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
    1. The human-symbolic merger into a single contour further consolidates once the locus of its controlshifts from the human to the social system.

      !- question : human-symbolic merger into a single contour * As in comment on the previous paragraph, the way to interpret this sentence appears to be that we give up or deceive ourselves, minimize our own integrity and the social system wins. * Why does it consolidate? The social systems needs overrides our own and we simply buy into it hook, line and sinker, as they say. * When it consolidates, why does the control shift from individual human to the social system? ....perhaps because we are fully investing in it.

    2. responsible-hardworking-breadwinner and of the gifted-self-actualising-researcher are themselvessocial systems, fully realized and maintained within individual minds.

      !- example : social identity * Individual liinguistic/conceptual constructions of themselves are themselves social systems * X: the caring, devoted immigrant wife identity * Y: the responsible, hardworking breadwinner identity * Z: the gifted, self-actualizing researcher identity

    3. The line of solution that we see is based on the possibility of decoupling between the continuityof one’s personware and one’s organic and psychological survival. If a state of affairs is somehowcreated where human individuals universally realize that their organic and psychological continuity issafeguarded unconditionally and does not depend anymore on the continuity of their symbolicallymaintained social persona—their personware, then new horizons will open for human individuals aswell as for social systems to cognitively coevolve.

      !- claim : decoupling personware from biological/psychological survival will result in new possibilities.

    4. Only if an event of communication triggers a change and thischange is observed as being causally connected to that same event, the communication event can betreated as a decision. In this sense, a decision is a special category of actions that is, the exercising ofintentionality—doing something in order to change the state of affairs. This is how intentional mentaloperations of humans become functional in the context of a social system.

      !- explanation : when human intention is communicated and triggers a governance decision in a social system * inner to outer flow * articulating inner experience * manifests as outer (communication/language/linguistic) behavior

    5. At first sight, it might seem that no one but humans (even though in actuality only a few of them)hold positions of influence and power over social systems. We wish, however, to challenge this view.We argue that while human-driven governance is conceivable and in principle possible—and it is thegoal of our research to draw the path towards such future—for now, it is not human beings but ratherthe social system which governs itself [6, 7].

      !- question : human-driven governance * needs clarification !-gloss : human-driven governance

    6. Niklas Luhmann’s [ 6,7 ] terminology, we refer to these dominant symbolic networks associal systems. When approached not as aggregations of people but rather as patterns of communicationssustained among people, social systems can be observed to have enormous powers over humanbeings.
      • definition of social systems
      • social systems focus on the pattern of communication, not on the people who participate in those patterns
    1. I didn't start out in 2007 to write a programming language that naturally supports decentralized programming using the actor-model while being cloud-native, serverless, and databaseless. Indeed, if I had, I likely wouldn't have succeeded. Instead picos evolved from a simple rule language for modifying web pages to a powerful, general-purpose programming system for building any decentralized application.

      Lots of concepts ping like hail on a car hood for me. I don't really understand them but they resonate: decentralized programming, cloud-native, serverless, databaseless. It all seems like fungi in nature or the apricot you mention in an earlier post. I especially like the idea of learning systems "evolving from a simple rule language". Yes, I want to evolve and roll my own learning system then I want to teach others how to do it.

    1. If it's continuing on 15a, then 15b would make most sense to me. Perhaps this example description helps? https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350/8270#the-system-of-numbering Try not to think "between" as it indicates links forwards and backwards, but what does this thought "continue on" or "follow"?

    1. They help us do everything from controlling traffic lights to managing power grids. This is why embedded systems architecture is so important – without it, we wouldn’t have any technology at all.

      Have you ever heard about embedded software designing?

      This involves designing multiple layers according to the device - Application layer, Middle layer, and Software layer

      Here's the practical and technical guide to understand the components that make up an embedded systems architecture.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4xx_muNcs

      Don't recommend unless you have 100 hours to follow up on everything here that goes beyond the surface.

      Be aware that this is a gateway for what I'm sure is a relatively sophisticated sales funnel.


      Motivational and a great start, but I wonder how many followed up on these techniques and methods, internalized them and used them every day? I've not read his book, but I suspect it's got the usual mnemonic methods that go back millennia. And yet, these things are still not commonplace. People just don't seem to want to put in the work.

      As a result, they become a sales tool with a get rich quick (get smart quick) hook/scheme. Great for Kwik's pocketbook, but what about actual outcomes for the hundreds who attended or the 34.6k people who've watched this video so far?

      These methods need to be instilled in youth as it's rare for adults to bother.


      Acronyms for remembering things are alright, but not incredibly effective as most people will have issues remembering the acronym itself much less what the letters stand for.


      There seems to be an over-fondness for acronyms for people selling systems like this. (See also Tiago Forte as another example.)

    1. the six 00:48:41 six big systems i've mentioned can be viewed as a cognitive architecture it's the it's the means by which the society learns decides adapts and 00:48:54 and this society's efforts this is the third underlying position the society's efforts to learn decide and adapt and be viewed as being driven by an intrinsic purpose and that's really key also 00:49:08 because it's not just that we're learning deciding and adapting willy-nilly i mean i mean maybe it seems that way in the world you know in the sense we're so dysfunctional it kind of is billy nilly but 00:49:20 but what really matters is that we learn decide and adapt in relation to whatever intrinsic purpose we actually have as as a society as individuals in a 00:49:34 society it's that it's it's it's it's as i will use the the term uh maybe several times today it's solving problems that matter that really that really 00:49:45 matter that's what we're after

      Second Proposition: The six thrusts or prmary societal systems are the cognitive architecture of the superorganism which it uses to sense the world

  2. Jun 2022
    1. can someone explain to me the relationship between Luhmann's numbering and the "categories" of Wikipedia (1000-6000)? I can't find the video where Scott explains that the first number used by Luhmann for the entry note is of the order of thousands and that it indicated a general category?

      Since I just happen to have an antinet laying around 🗃️😜🔎 I can do a quick cross referenced search for antinet, youtube, and numbering systems to come up with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrjUg4toZqw.

      Hopefully it's the one (or very similar) to what you're looking for.

      Since it was also hiding in there in a linked card, an added bonus for you:

      "Here I am on the floor showing you freaking note cards, which really means that I have made it in life." —Scott P. Scheper

    1. Das gerichtliche Aktenzeichen dient der Kennzeichnung eines Dokuments und geht auf die Aktenordnung (AktO) vom 28. November 1934 und ihre Vorgänger zurück.[4]

      The court file number is used to identify a document and goes back to the file regulations (AktO) of November 28, 1934 and its predecessors.

      The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934.

      Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents.

      We know these numbering methods in public administration date back to as early as Vienna, Austria in the 1770s.


      The missing piece now is who/where did Luhmann learn his note taking and excerpting practice from? Alberto Cevolini argues that Niklas Luhmann was unaware of the prior tradition of excerpting, though note taking on index cards or slips had been commonplace in academic circles for quite some time and would have been reasonably commonplace during his student years.

      Are there handbooks, guides, or manuals in the early 1900's that detail these sorts of note taking practices?

      Perhaps something along the lines of Antonin Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life (1921) or Paul Chavigny's Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (in French) (Delagrave, 1918)?

      Further recall that Bruno Winck has linked some of the note taking using index cards to legal studies to Roland Claude's 1961 text:

      I checked Chavigny’s book on the BNF site. He insists on the use of index cards (‘fiches’), how to index them, one idea per card but not how to connect between the cards and allow navigation between them.

      Mind that it’s written in 1919, in Strasbourg (my hometown) just one year after it returned to France. So between students who used this book and Luhmann in Freiburg it’s not far away. My mother taught me how to use cards for my studies back in 1977, I still have the book where she learn the method, as Law student in Strasbourg “Comment se documenter”, by Roland Claude, 1961. Page 25 describes a way to build secondary index to receive all cards relatives to a topic by their number. Still Luhmann system seems easier to maintain but very near.


      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'> Scott P. Scheper </span> in Scott P. Scheper on Twitter: "The origins of the Zettelkasten's numeric-alpha card addresses seem to derive from Niklas Luhmann's early work as a legal clerk. The filing scheme used is called "Aktenzeichen" - See https://t.co/4mQklgSG5u. cc @ChrisAldrich" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/28/2022 11:29:18</time>)</cite></small>


      Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/Jlnn3IfSEey_-3uboxHsOA - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA

    1. It’s not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that’s theequivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pulloutdrawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works onseveral projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sightwhen he’s tackling any one of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged indexcards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There’s no singlecorrect system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve yourideas—and never lose them.

      Regardless of what sort of physical instantiation one's notes may take, a workable storage option for them is necessary whether it is a simple box, a shelving system, a curiosity cabinet, a flat file, or even an entire room itself.

    1. Before we begin, please note that this piece assumes intermediate familiarity with Zettelkasten and its original creator, the social scientist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998).

      Even the long running (2013) zettelkasten.de website credits Niklas Luhmann as being the "original creator" of the zettelkasten.

      sigh

      We really need to track down the origin of linking one idea to another. Obviously writers, and especially novelists, would have had some sort of at least linear order in their writing due to narrative needs in using such a system. What does this tradition look like on the non-fiction side?

      Certainly some of the puzzle stems from the commonplace book tradition, but this is more likely to have relied on natural memory as well as searching and finding via index methods.

      Perhaps looking more closely at Hans Blumenberg's instantiation would be more helpful. Similarly looking at the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his predecessors like Marcel Mauss may provide at least an attack on this problem.

      My working hypothesis is that given the history of the Viennese numbering system, it may have stemmed from the late 1700s and this certainly wasn't an innovation by Luhmann.

      link to: https://hyp.is/hLy7NNtqEeuWQIP1UDkM6g/web.archive.org/web/20130916081433/https://christiantietze.de/posts/2013/06/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ for evidence of start of zettelkasten.de

    1. the inter-connectedness of the crises we face climate pollution biodiversity and 00:07:54 inequality require our change require a change in our exploitative relationship to our planet to a more holistic and caring one but that can only happen with a change in our behavior

      As per IPCC AR6 WGIII, Chapter 5 outlining for the first time, the enormous mitigation potential of social aspects of mitigation - such as behavioral change - can add up to 40 percent of mitigation. And also harkening back to Donella Meadows' leverage points that point out shifts in worldviews, paradigms and value systems are the most powerful leverage points in system change.

      Stop Reset Go advocates humanity builds an open source, open access praxis for Deep Humanity, understand the depths of what it means to be a living and dying human being in the context of an entwined culture. Sharing best practices and constantly crowdsourcing the universal and salient aspects of our common humanity can help rapidly transform the inner space of each human INTERbeing, which can powerfully influence outer (social) transformation.

    1. Had their colonies not allowed European countries totranscend their territorial limits, it would have been necessary to findthese sources of supply elsewhere.

      Colonial exploitation between 1500 and 1800 allowed European countries to dramatically expand beyond their own dwindling natural resources and territorial limits. Had they been trapped in a closed system, the world would have seen a very different arc of history.

  3. May 2022
    1. One example of a siloed approach to critical infrastructure is the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection’s framework and action plan, which focuses on reducing vulnerability to terror attacks but does not consider integrating climate or environmental dimensions.39       Instead of approaching critical infrastructure protection as another systems maintenance task, the hyper-response takes advantage of ecoinnovation.40 Distributed and localized energy, food, water, and manufacturing solutions mean that the capacity to disrupt the arterials that keep society functioning is reduced. As an example, many citizens and communities rely on one centralized water supply. If these citizens and communities had water tanks and smaller-scale local water supply, this means that if a terror group or other malevolent actor decided to contaminate major national water supplies—or if the hyperthreat itself damaged major central systems—far fewer people would be at risk, and the overall disruption would be less significant. This offers a “security from the ground up” approach, and it applies to other dimensions such as health, food, and energy security.

      The transition of energy and other critical provisioning systems requires inclusive debate so that a harmonized trajectory can be selected that mitigates against stranded assets. The risk of non-inclusive debate is the possibility of many fragmented approaches competing against each other and wasting precious time and resources. Furthermore, system maintenance of antiquated hyperthreat supporting systems as pointed out in Boulton's other research. System maintenance is a good explanatory concept that can help make sense of much of the incumbent financial, energy and government actors to preserve the hyperthreat out of survival motives.

      A template for a compass for guiding energy trajectories is provided in Van Zyl-Bulitta et al. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333254683_A_compass_to_guide_through_the_myriad_of_sustainable_energy_transition_options_across_the_global_North_South_divide which can also be a model for other provisioning systems.

    1. autoph uh german how is it in english i think it's i i yeah i've looked it up i think it's autopiosis or auto autopilosis yes in germany it's

      Niklas Luhmann used his zettelkasten to develop an organic theory to understand an organic subject in an autopoetic way.

    1. it is true that the systems theory does not emanate with given, natural or morally, absolutely predetermined external variables, instances or criteria, but assumes that all scales of the assessment of action are formulated in the society itself and at once written as an abstraction to its heaven, even although it is changing with the development of society.

      This sounds a lot like the formulation of anthropology that I've been contemplating.

    1. This model was tasked with predicting whether a future comment on a thread will be abusive. This is a difficult task without any features provided on the target comment. Despite the challenges of this task, the model had a relatively high AUC over 0.83, and was able to achieve double digit precision and recall at certain thresholds.

      Predicting Abusive Conversation Without Target Comment

      This is fascinating. The model is predicting if the next, new comment will be abusive by examining the existing conversation, and doing this without knowing what the next comment will be.

  4. Apr 2022
    1. And therefore, to accept the dictates of algorithms in deciding what, for example, the next song we should listen to on Spotify is, accepting that it will be an algorithm that dictates this because we no longer recognize our non-algorithmic nature and we take ourselves to be the same sort of beings that don’t make spontaneous irreducible decisions about what song to listen to next, but simply outsource the duty for this sort of thing, once governed by inspiration now to a machine that is not capable of inspiration.

      Outsourcing decisions to algorithms

    1. The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from the pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.'[3] Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■).[4]

      It's worth look looking into the structure of Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project as the numbering system that he used on his zettels is very similar to that of both Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten as well as the street numbers of 1770 Vienna.

      link to - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA - https://hypothes.is/a/lvGHJlNHEeyZnV-8psRNrA

    1. In his illuminated bookJerusalem, Los—Blake’s alter ego—voiced a sentiment that might have servedas the Romantics’ motto. “I must create a system,” Blake’s character declared, orelse “be enslav’d by another man’s.”

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. https://www.idorecall.com/

      This was mentioned to me by Nate Maertens in our lunch discussion of edtech tools, spaced repetition, and Barbara Oakley from 2022-02-11.

      Nice layout and bullet pointed reasons for using it on a slick website, but it looks awfully expensive in comparison to Anki and Mnemosyne (free). Looks like they've got pre-existing content, but a quick scan doesn't center the value of creating your own cards.

  5. Mar 2022
    1. As James Clear said in Atomic Habits: ​

      You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems —James Clear, Atomic Habits

    1. The Five Elements of Design Thinking

      Can be used in the lecture as an introduction to ideation

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. That’s all fine and well and good as long as you don’t have a crisis

      Systems that are too efficient will become brittle. Brittle systems collapse catastrophically when conditions vary too far from expectations. The only way to accommodate unforeseeable circumstances is to give up some efficiency for greater flexibility. This produces robust systems that endure where brittle systems collapse.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eP8Bq9x5yw

      A nice overview of spaced repetition systems.

      Soren Bjornstad previously worked for Anki and is now at Remnote.


      I wonder if anyone has created a spaced repetition system set up that leverages Hypothes.is? It would be cool to write questions and answers as one takes notes in Hypothes.is and then be able to quickly/easily export those annotations into a spaced repetition system.

      Example:

      Q: What is the best annotation tool on the inernet?


      A: Hypothes.is

    1. As Professor Rangi Mātāmua, a Māoriastronomy scholar, explains:Look at what our ancestors did to navigate here—you don’t do that onmyths and legends, you do that on science. I think there is empiricalscience embedded within traditional Māori knowledge ... but what they didto make it meaningful and have purpose is they encompassed it withincultural narratives and spirituality and belief systems, so it wasn’t just seenas this clinical part of society that was devoid of any other connection toour world, it was included into everything. To me, that cultural elementgives our science a completely new and deep and rich layer of meaning
    2. These ways of knowinghave inherent value and are leading Western scientists to betterunderstand celestial phenomena and the history and heritage thisconstitutes for all people.

      The phrase "ways of knowing" is fascinating and seems to have a particular meaning across multiple contexts.

      I'd like to collect examples of its use and come up with a more concrete definition for Western audiences.

      How close is it to the idea of ways (or methods) of learning and understanding? How is it bound up in the idea of pedagogy? How does it relate to orality and memory contrasted with literacy? Though it may not subsume the idea of scientific method, the use, evolution, and refinement of these methods over time may generally equate it with the scientific method.

      Could such an oral package be considered a learning management system? How might we compare and contrast these for drawing potential equivalencies of these systems to put them on more equal footing from a variety of cultural perspectives? One is not necessarily better than another, but we should be able to better appreciate what each brings to the table of world knowledge.

    1. Harvard’s Gary Urton, with his Khipu Database (KDB), seems to have pinpointed the name of a village, Puruchuco, represented by a sequence of three numbers, like a kind of zip code. We can’t rule out the possibility that this is a richly phonetic system, but we’re still a long way from proving it.

      Quipu may potentially be a phonetic system, but the state of the art of research indicates we're far from a proof. Several digital catalogues have been created including Gary Urton's Khipu Database (KDB).

    2. Semasiography is a system of conventional symbols— iconic, abstract—that carry information, though not in any specific language. The bond between sign and sound is variable, loose, unbound by precise rules. It’s a nonphonetic system (in the most technical, glottographic sense). Think about mathematical formulas, or music notes, or the buttons on your washing machine: these are all semasiographic systems. We understand them thanks to the conventions that regulate the way we interpret their meaning, but we can read them in any language. They are metalinguistic systems, in sum, not phonetic systems.

      Semasiography are iconic and abstract symbols and languages not based on spoken words, but which carry information.

      Mathematical formulas, musical notation, computer icons, emoji, buttons on washing machines, and quipu are considered semasiographic systems which communicate information without speech as an intermediary.

      semasiography from - Greek: σημασία (semasia) "signification, meaning" - Greek: γραφία (graphia) "writing") is "writing with signs"

    1. The growing prevalence of AI systems, as well as their growing impact on every aspect of our daily life create a great need to that AI systems are "responsible" and incorporate important social values such as fairness, accountability and privacy.

      An AI is the sum of its programming along with its training data. Its "perspecitive" of social values such as fairness, accountability, and privacy are a function of the data used to create it.

  6. Feb 2022
    1. the systems theory is the 00:00:38 study of systems i.e cohesive groups of interrelated interdependent parts that can be natural or human made every system is bounded by space and time influenced by its environment defined by 00:00:51 its structure and purpose and expressed through its functioning

      What is Systems Theory - how i relate it to note taking

  7. Jan 2022
    1. To learn—A rather obvious one, but I wanted to challenge myself again.

      I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

      Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

      We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

      [[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

    1. 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. 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.
  8. Dec 2021
    1. Bibliographical notes which we extract from the literature, should be captured inside the card index. Books, articles, etc., which we have actually read, should be put on a separate slip with bibliographical information in a separate box.

      Ross Ashby's note taking system, also within the field of systems theory, shows the use of an index card set up for bibliographical notes, however in Ashby's case, the primary notes were placed into notebooks and not onto note cards.

      Was there an ancestral link within the systems theory community that was spreading these ideas of note taking or were they (more likely) just so ubiquitous in the academic culture that such a link wouldn't have mattered?

      (Earlier ancestors like Beatrice Webb may have been a more influential link.)

    2. One of the most basic presuppositions of communication is that the partners can mutually surprise each other.

      A reasonably succinct summary of Claude Shannon's 1948 paper The Mathematical Theory of Communication. By 1981 it had firmly ensconced itself into the vernacular, and would have done so for Luhmann as much of systems theory grew out of the prior generation's communication theory.

    1. Marx thereby refused the sharp separation of the economy and the state, and argued that the state embodied the interests of the capitalist class. This tradition of political economy survived in Marxist thought, although it was not greatly extended until the 1960s and 1970s, when it anchored a strong interdisciplinary approach that combined economic, sociological, and political perspectives in the analysis of capitalism—especially in the developing world. Dependency theory and world-systems theory are the most prominent among these.

      Marxist political economy dependency theory world-systems theory

    1. The unwritten rule of Cybernetics seems to be - Maintain the homeostasis until you break it for the better. #Cybernetics #Ashby

      This is a good rule of thumb for political science as well. Some of our issue in America right now is that we're seeing systemic racism and many want to change it, but we're not sure yet what to replace it with.

      The renaissance created scholasticism which created a new system, but too tightly wound religion into the humanist movement. Similarly Englightement Europe and America subsumed the indigenous critique, which opened up ideas about equality and freedom which hadn't existed, but they still kept the structures of hierarchy which have caused immeasurable issues. These movements are worth studying to see how the new systems were created, but with an eye toward more careful development so as not to make things even worse generations later.

    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

  9. Nov 2021
    1. people reading the same book at the same time, exploring the same ideas…Norms around signalling you're interested in something, and the extent of your interest, would go far

      How do we find the connections we don't know we're looking for?

    1. This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics.

      The inability to think holistically is the problem.

    1. Now that we're digitizing the Zettelkasten we often find dated notes that say things like "note 60,7B3 is missing". This note replaces the original note at this position. We often find that the original note is maybe only 20, 30 notes away, put back in the wrong position. But Luhmann did not start looking, because where should he look? How far would he have to go to maybe find it again? So, instead he adds the "note is missing"-note. Should he bump into the original note by chance, then he could put it back in its original position. Or else, not.

      Niklas Luhmann had a simple way of dealing with lost cards by creating empty replacements which could be swapped out if found later. It's not too dissimilar to doing inventory in a book store where mischievous customers pick up books, move them, or even hide them sections away. Going through occasionally or even regularly or systematically would eventually find lost/misfiled cards unless they were removed entirely from the system (similar to stolen books).

    1. Trends of Emerging System Properties
    2. Applying Systems Engineering to Policy

      The model to the right lacks references to a democatised control of this expert-driven decision making process, which does not reflect the increased complexity in decentralized demographics in a 'system of systems' (see p. 12).

  10. Oct 2021
    1. Analog zur Struktur des Zettelkastens baut Luhmanns Systemtheorie nicht auf Axiome und bietet keine Hierarchien von Begriffen oder Thesen. Zentrale Begriffe sind, ebenso wie die einzelnen Zettel, stark untereinander vernetzt und gewinnen erst im Kontext Bedeutung.

      machine translation:

      Analogous to the structure of the card box, Luhmann's system theory is not based on axioms and does not offer any hierarchies of terms or theses. Central terms, like the individual pieces of paper, are strongly interlinked and only gain meaning in the context.

      There's something interesting here about avoiding hierarchies and instead interlinking things and giving them meaning based on context.

      Could a reformulation of ideas like the scala naturae into these sorts of settings be a way to remove some of the social cruft from our culture from an anthropological point of view? This could help us remove structural racism and other issues we have with genetics and our political power structures.

      Could such a redesign force the idea of "power with" and prevent "power over"?

    1. Teach pluralism before practice. For me, the foundation of systems work is that there is no one right way to respond to complexity.

      .systems thinking

    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. Education and job hiring should be integrated.

      Systemic Problems

      The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?

    1. COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

      Adaptive Content

      COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

      With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems.

  11. Sep 2021
  12. Aug 2021
    1. William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a British pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory. He is best known for proposing the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, intelligence amplification, the good regulator theorem, building the automatically stabilizing Homeostat, and his books Design for a Brain (1952) and An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).

  13. Jul 2021
    1. "The earlier systems of writing were extremely difficult to learn," says Schwartz, the Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. "There were thousands of symbols used in very complicated ways, which meant that only a very small group of people could ever learn how to write or read. With the invention of the alphabet, it meant that a much larger number of people could, in theory, learn how to read and write. And so it ultimately led to the democratization of writing. And of course it is the system that all Western European writing systems used because Greeks, who borrowed the Semitic alphabetic system, then used it to write their own language."

      Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.

      The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.

    1. Against Canvas

      I love that he uses this print of Pablo Picasso's Don Quixote to visually underline this post in which he must feel as if he's "tilting at windmills".

    2. All humanities courses are second-class citizens in the ed-tech world.

      And worse, typically humans are third-class citizens in the ed-tech world.

  14. Jun 2021
    1. Our journey toward being completely open is continuous. Yet, in the relatively brief time that we’ve been doing this, we’ve observed three important lessons that we want to share with you:Access stimulates progressWorking openly promotes communication and accountabilitySlowing down first allows us to speed up later
    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.

    1. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

      This is the problem however. We can't program humans out of the equation entirely, for what is the general enterprise meant for in the first place?

    1. Our world is shaped by humans who make decisions, and technology companies are no different…. So the assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry

      We are part of sociotechnical systems.

  15. May 2021
    1. protocol buffers as the Interface Definition Language (IDL) for describing both the service interface and the structure of the payload messages.
    1. A fourth theme to emerge from the analysis of the data, is the highly relevant ‘cultural’ aspect to this memorization technique which students greatly appreciated. As one student notes: “I like the idea of connecting Indigenous culture with science learning…”. The theme of culture overlays learning and demonstrates the importance of conceptualising Australian Aboriginal ways of knowing or learning with or from rather than about Australian Aboriginal people and their knowledge systems. As Yunkaporta [2, p. 15] states, it is important not to examine Australian Aboriginal knowledge systems, but to explore the external systems “from an Indigenous knowledge perspective”.

      This is so heartwarming to me.

  16. Apr 2021
    1. A Type is the highest-level differentiation a component can have.

      This is the word i have been looking for to use with consistency about something above a state.

    1. It's at the right position: the first frame or artboard of all is located at x:0 y:0

      This is something I always miss, and it seems to s obvious way to anchor the chaos

    1. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was building a design system.

      This is why reluctance to use a design system is weird. It basically HAS to exist even if unused to properly do prototyping.

  17. Mar 2021
    1. Assessing Open Source Journal Management Software

      this is a good start of a mega analysis of all journal management platforms, isn't it?!

    1. System architects: equivalents to architecture and planning for a world of knowledge and data Both government and business need new skills to do this work well. At present the capabilities described in this paper are divided up. Parts sit within data teams; others in knowledge management, product development, research, policy analysis or strategy teams, or in the various professions dotted around government, from economists to statisticians. In governments, for example, the main emphasis of digital teams in recent years has been very much on service design and delivery, not intelligence. This may be one reason why some aspects of government intelligence appear to have declined in recent years – notably the organisation of memory.57 What we need is a skill set analogous to architects. Good architects learn to think in multiple ways – combining engineering, aesthetics, attention to place and politics. Their work necessitates linking awareness of building materials, planning contexts, psychology and design. Architecture sits alongside urban planning which was also created as an integrative discipline, combining awareness of physical design with finance, strategy and law. So we have two very well-developed integrative skills for the material world. But there is very little comparable for the intangibles of data, knowledge and intelligence. What’s needed now is a profession with skills straddling engineering, data and social science – who are adept at understanding, designing and improving intelligent systems that are transparent and self-aware58. Some should also specialise in processes that engage stakeholders in the task of systems mapping and design, and make the most of collective intelligence. As with architecture and urban planning supply and demand need to evolve in tandem, with governments and other funders seeking to recruit ‘systems architects’ or ‘intelligence architects’ while universities put in place new courses to develop them.
    1. The study, published in Nature Food, presents EDGAR-FOOD – the first database to break down emissions from each stage of the food chain for every year from 1990 to 2015. The database also unpacks emissions by sector, greenhouse gas and country. 
  18. Feb 2021
  19. parsejournal.com parsejournal.com
    1. ost-humanist perspective that foregrounds the apparatuses within which possibilities for action and judgement take shape, and confront visitors with the complex ways in which they are part of these systems and networks. How to be a responsible node in an Actor-Network?
    1. AI agents can acquire novel behaviors as they interact with the world around them and with other agents. The behaviors learned from such interactions are virtually impossible to predict, and even when solutions can be described mathematically, they can be “so lengthy and complex as to be indecipherable,” according to the paper.

      The sheer number of interacting variables that you'd need to track makes it impossible to make any accurate predictions.

  20. Jan 2021
    1. The theme I find most interesting here is ontology as a system of relations between felt senses, and metaphysics as the relation between this network of felt-senses and the world.

      synchronicity and harmonization between inner body systems #[[integrated systems]]

    2. At any rate, if CSHW can be used to build a good quantitative model of human-human interactions, it might also be possible to replicate these dynamics in human-computer interactions. This could take a weak form, such as building computer systems with a similar-enough interactional syntax to humans that some people could reach entrainment with it; affective computing done right.

      [[Aligning Recommender Systems]]

    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.

  21. Dec 2020
    1. Types of Structure Outliners take advantage of what may be the most primitive of relationships, probably the first one you learned as an infant: in. Things can be in or contained by other things; alternatively, things can be superior to other things in a pecking order. Whatever the cognitive mechanics, trees/hierarchies are a preferred way of structuring things. But it is not the only way. Computer users also encounter: links, relationships, attributes, spatial/tabular arrangements, and metaphoric content. Links are what we know from the Web, but they can be so much more. The simplest ones are a sort of ad hoc spaghetti connecting pieces of text to text containers (like Web pages), but we will see many interesting kinds that have names, programs attached, and even work two-way. Relationships are what databases do, most easily imagined as “is-a” statements which are simple types of rules: Ted is a supervisor, supervisors are employees, all employees have employee numbers. Attributes are adjectives or tags that help characterize or locate things. Finder labels and playlists are good examples of these. Spatial/tabular arrangements are obvious: the very existence of the personal computer sprang from the power of the spreadsheet. Metaphors are a complex and powerful technique of inheriting structure from something familiar. The Mac desktop is a good example. Photoshop is another, where all the common tools had a darkroom tool or technique as their predecessor.

      Structuring Information

      Ted Goranson holds that there are only a couple of ways to structure information.

      In — Possibly the most primitive of relationships. Things can be in other things and things can be superior to other things.

      Links —Links are what we know from the web, but these types of links or only one implementation. There are others, like bi-directional linking.

      Relationships — This is what we typically use databases for and is most easily conceived as "is-a" statements.

      Attributes — Adjectives or tags that help characterize or locate things.

      Metaphors — A technique for inheriting structure from something familiar.

    1. wealth persist across racial groups.

      EXAMINE THE SYSTEMS WHICH HELP TO ENFORCE THIS RACIAL INCOME DIVIDE! Most relate. Fixing these systems could help to bridge the income gap between racial groups. Even laws so ingrained in us.

    1. Sometimes, systems just scale the problemA UI design system is more than the code of a component library. It’s more than the colors, styles, and margins of your elements. It’s an ever-growing and ever-evolving creature that entails your brand and your user’s feelings.

      If you don't understand the problem - you can [[scale the problem instead of solve the problem]], and it's important to remember that a [[design system is more than a component library]]

    1. Instead of publishing a single one-size-fits package for components, we create an ecosystem where everyone works together yet deliver independently. The design system’s team role is to facilitate and regulate, not block or enforce.

      I think this is a really important point - the design system's team is to facilitate, not gatekeep.

    2. What you see here is a page composed of shared components. However, these are independent components developed and owned by different teams and published from different projects, which are mixed and integrated together.

      the move towards single page applications, component centric frameworks, etc has shifted how we view building webpages.

      It is not so much that we are building a page, but we are building components that we assemble into a page.

      We’re not designing pages, we’re designing systems of components.—Stephen Hay via atomic design

    3. The design of your system is not ready until you have two assets:a) A style-guide that defines the styling and implementation of your UI. This is usually a rather long document with a lot of text and typography.b) A set of reusable visual elements that bring together both visual (UI) and functional (UX) consistency through components. This is usually a rather large canvas with elements drawn on Figma or Sketch etc (we use both).

      there are two [[primary assets of a design system[[

      • the style guide
      • the reusable elements - an implementation of the style guide
    4. The benefits of our system go way beyond UI/UX consistency. We greatly accelerated and scaled our development, improved our product quality, and greatly improved work between developers, designers, and everyone else.

      Design systems enable faster development and delivery, and help teams scale - and have value beyond UI/UX consistency.

  22. Nov 2020
    1. The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

      Bush emphasises the importance of retrieval in the storage of information. He talks about technical limitations, but in this paragraph he stresses that retrieval is made more difficult by the "artificiality of systems of indexing", in other words, our default file-cabinet metaphor for storing information.

      Information in such a hierarchical architecture is found by descending down into the hierarchy, and back up again. Moreover, the information we're looking for can only be in one place at a time (unless we introduce duplicates).

      Having found our item of interest, we need to ascend back up the hierarchy to make our next descent.

  23. Oct 2020
    1. Linux Memory Management at Scale

      "we had to build a complete and compliant operating system in order to perform resource control reliably"

      epic real-talk. the only people on the planet who seemed to have tamed linux for workloads. controlling memory. taming io. being on the bleeding edge, it turns out, is almost entirely about forward-progress. what can we reclaim?

      • oomd for memory protection
      • fbtax2
      • psi monitoring for io regulation
      • cgroups v2

      https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/cgroup2/docs/fbtax-results.html

    1. You have no choice. You can shop at a store that pays its workers better, sure, but the real atrocities have taken place long before your desired products have reached the shelf, and the stickers have nothing to do with it. “And here grocery has one last trick,” Lorr writes: “it allows us to hate our shrimp and eat it too. The image of the bad polluting aquaculture farmer or vulnerable exploited migrant gets imprinted in our first-world brain, while the fungibility of commodity goods—that maze of brokers and agents—gives the entire system the plausible deniability it craves.”

      Systemic change is hard. But it is the most effective tool for the job. Where are the levers and where can we stand? Who has the power and motive to make these changes?

    2. Trucking is now an industry thriving on its workers’ vulnerability

      Again, as with most other parts of the supply chain previously mentioned.

    3. boycotting a single product is pointless. “Look at what happens when abused children get pushed out of labor markets. They typically don’t suddenly find better jobs. They get pushed further underground,” he says. “What you in the West have to realize is the entire narrative is backwards. In trafficking, the media focuses on why and where poor people get into difficult situations. But maybe we should be looking at why they are poor to begin with?” The answer is, of course, the “hunger behind our hunger.”

      And now we're back to systemic problems, and how to fix them.

  24. Sep 2020
    1. Instmctional systen1S design (IS D ) is the process for creating instructional sys­tems. It is both systematic and scientific in that it is d ocume ntable , replicable in its general application, and leads to predictable outcomes

      BIG KAHUNA OF DEFINITIONS.

      ISD is the process of creating Instructional Systems which are

      An arrangement, an organized approach, a set of resources and procedures.

  25. Aug 2020
    1. Consiglio, C. R., Cotugno, N., Sardh, F., Pou, C., Amodio, D., Zicari, S., Ruggiero, A., Pascucci, G. R., Rodriguez, L., Santilli, V., Tan, Z., Eriksson, D., Wang, J., Lakshmikanth, T., Marchesi, A., Lakshmikanth, T., Campana, A., Villani, A., Rossi, P., … Brodin, P. (2020). The Immunology of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children with COVID-19. MedRxiv, 2020.07.08.20148353. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.08.20148353

    1. Successful long-lived open systems owe their success to building decades-long micro-communities around extensions/plugins, also known as a marketplace.

      This could be said of most early web standards like HTML as well...

    1. See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

      Try and figure out when you actually are the most productive. When your usage of tools actually works. The insight you gain there could help you figure out what your ideal "productivity situation" is.

      Side note, just realized this is a perfect application of cybernetics (at least as far as I understand it so far).

      1. Apply a system
      2. Observe myself within that system
      3. Gain feedback by observing how I behave in that system
      4. Use that feedback to tweak that system until I've achieved my desired goal