Topic
systems
- My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
Jeff Huang writes about his 14 year old productivity system of simply using an ever-growing single text file to house everything. To-dos, meeting notes, ideas. Everything. Good reminder that you can have a high produc…
- Places to Intervene in Systems
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. T…
- Gratitude And Resilience
Gratitude is how we maintain the fragile, critical systems of relationships that come to our rescue when things go bad. Strong institutions get that way through the effortful work of the grateful to nurture them on.
- Gratitude and Resilience
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 Wisdom Of Restraint
Riffing on one of my favorite quotes, from Calvin Coolidge:
- The Other Side of Complexity
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 othe…
- Simplifying with Gall's Law
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…
- The Whole Earth Index
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 subj…
- Pond Brains and GPT-4
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 ho…
- Mycopunk Principles
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…
- The Simplest Thing
When working through problems, the most impressive creators to me aren't those that divine an entire solution in their brain for an hour, then slam out a perfect result (spoiler: this doesn't exist outside of the occa…
- The Midwit Trap
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 ex…
- Scenes, Pattern Languages,and Nested Systems
Last week I picked up Scene and Structure on a recommendation I saw from Nat Eliason. I've seen him mention experimenting with writing fiction, which this book is about — the process of narrative structure, staging sc…
- Systems and Constraints
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…
- Measuring Productivity
Florent Crivello had a short thread on Twitter contrasting the effectiveness on systems between Goldratt's The Goal and Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself. One of the replies linked to this piece from Scott Y…
- Synthetic A Priori
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 mor…
- The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
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…