Gordon Brander explores Meadows’s list of intervention points in systems, from her excellent book Thinking in Systems:

All systems are fictions that we project onto our environment for our own instrumental purposes. Those purposes are determined by our mindset, by the way we see the world around us.

If the pursuit of our instrumental goals results in catastrophe, perhaps it is possible to change our mindset, the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises?

Her list is a useful set of...

My latest post at Res Extensa, on the importance of gratitude and resilience for building the systems and networks we rely on in times of crisis.

The latest issue of Res Extensa, on the path from “simplistic” to “simple” understanding, over the hill of complexity:

Superficial simplicity is our first impression, a naïve jump to conclusion. Simplicity on the other side of complexity is wisdom. Wisdom comes to us in rules of thumb, heuristics, knowledge gained from hard-won experience. The experience comes from grappling with the complexity so we can distill with simplicity.

Profound solutions are simple, but they’re post-complexity simple. Elegant, robust solutions are rooted in deep understanding. Whether they’re laws, books, or products, the ones with the most impact climbed over the complexity...

In the latest issue of Res Extensa, I dove into “Gall’s Law”, which says:

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.

Too often I see a team propose a solution to a problem that involves making what we’ve got more complicated. Adding more people, more processes, more tools. “Maybe if we start using Salesforce it’ll...

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was a counterculture magazine from the 1970s. Ostensibly it was about DIY and self-sufficiency, with a focus on product reviews, but flip through an issue and there’s almost no subject you won’t find. It reflected the publisher’s holistic, systems philosophy.

The Whole Earth Index is an archive of Whole Earth as downloadable PDFs, hosted by the Internet Archive.

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published...

Are complex ecosystems like ponds actually smarter than we are? Are they “thinking”? Gordon says yes:

Evolution is a pragmatist. It only cares about actual behavior. It is the getting and the doing that matter. The how can be approached in many different ways, through pheromone trails, or trophic networks, or nerve nets, or brains, or symbolic representation. Evolution doesn’t care. If you can get information and do something about it, you are thinking.

All we really need to say a system is “intelligent” is that it incorporates feedback. Loops generate reactions, learnings...

What would it look like to apply principles of mycelial (fungal) networks to other systems? A sampling:

• 🕸 NETWORKED/DISTRIBUTED/ANARCHIST: No central command. Local subsidiarity, problem solving at the edges.
• 💪 ANTI-FRAGILE: Disturb a mycelial network, and it grows more dense.
• 🌳 FRACTAL: Self-similar structures up & down.

Bookmarked to revisit later. /via the Subconscious Discord server.

Some solutions rely on convoluted chains of logic that are strictly dependent on every single statement being true. They are more likely to have hidden “divide by zero” problems that may be easily noticeable to the experienced practitioner but are invisible to the layman. Simple solutions might have errors too, but they will be much more obvious. Also, complicated chains of logic “feel” correct because a lot of the steps will be verifiably true; people sometimes forget that all of the steps have to be true for the entire argument to have any truth.

Complicated stories seem more likely...

There are so many good little pieces in this brief interview with Alicia Juarrero, who studies complex systems and complexity theory.

Three options are possible once a complex system reaches a threshold of instability: adaptation, evolution, or disintegration. There is never a guarantee that the whole will not collapse, which it will do if we are unable to adapt and evolve to achieve a new coherence or fit. I think of adaptation as modifications within a given space of possibilities. You either expand your adaptive capacity or move to a more stable location within that adaptive space.

Basecamp’s Ryan Singer has been doing this solo podcast on a lot of his favored topics, centered around product design. But he also branches into adjacent, related areas of systems, research, user experiences, and more.

I like the solo format as a different approach to your standard conversation or interview shows. I’ve listened to a couple of these, and the best way to describe the content is somewhere between a Twitter thread and a blog post series. You get the good parts about the Twitter medium — the sort of unstructured, “thinking out loud” quality — with more space...

A thought-provoking post from Florent Crivello. Engineers’ continuously seek structure and organization assuming that it’s a proxy for efficiency. Here the author points out that with new tools enabling AI systems to design the most efficient way to construct things, you don’t get anything remotely like what a human would generate.

Bottoms-up systems like organically-spreading cities, evolved species, weather patterns, and the like don’t naturally form looking like an urban planner’s dream — they’re much messier (but often the most efficient).

Planners may make their maps look better when they use zoning to separate the city...