In Search of Certainty

What Hacker News says

1. chipadeedoodahSep 2026
   I like what you did with the action catalog as a way to express bounded outcomes!

   I think the biggest similar concept in our approaches is that operational safety really requires strict determinism in a lot of places. It's not like a coding agent where you can have it write itself shell scripts to get the job done any which way, and it'll probably be fine. So you wind up wrapping the probabilistic agent as a glue point between deterministic steps to get safe, reliable results.

   It's great to be able to put automation into those places that would have required a human brain's worth of context before, because you'd never have been able to write a big enough if-case. But you need that deterministic input and outcome on each side to make sure that results are predictable enough that the system doesn't eat it.

   <Insert lenghty ranting about "Go read In Search of Certainty again, Mark Burgess is right" here>

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2. contingenciesMar 2019
   I like the take Mark Burgess gives in In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure where he states that separation of concerns is "a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane." Perhaps having scope-blinders and persistence is simply perceived by outsiders as irrational, whereas internally it is an intellectual tool for focus and achievement. Of course, there are drawbacks to mad focus...
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3. bordercasesApr 2021
   The formalization of what it means for modules to exist and compose with each other is valuable, but learning category theory as a mathematician would is not sufficient for grokking this. Category theory's insights are often obscured by terminology that fails to reify the abstractions at a level where its wide scope becomes clear.

   The candidate I would push forward as the proper reification would be Mark Burgess' Promise Theory. Mark's starting point isn't, "what's the most general algebra I can form for encoding mathematical objects", but "what happens if I generalize points in spacetime to be a special case of any kind of graph". When you do this, you make each point in space responsible for either promising information to another point, or accepting the outcome of a promise, as bidirectionality cannot be directly inferred.

   So if every point in spacetime cannot be assumed to be connected both ways, then you have to explicitly define the communication channels that exist between points. This idea unifies both physical and digital "spaces", as everything is now modeled as a communications network from atoms up. Thus, Promise Theory makes the connection between compositionality and information and the rest of reality more clear than categories alone.

   Mark acknowledges that Category Theory and Promise Theory are both similar and related. For instance, they both deal with notions of interiority. And Mark encodes his axioms with categories. He's written several books on the topic, like "In Search of Certainty" and "Smart Spacetime", and has published papers on arxiv. I recommend "Smart Spacetime" to see how powerful this kind of semantics can get.

   https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5563

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4. atsaloliMay 2018
   I hear you.

   The book I mentioned (Thinking in Promises) is the introductory-level public book.

   https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Theory-Principles-Application... is the heavy-duty scientific stuff.

   "In Search of Certainty" (https://www.amazon.com/Search-Certainty-Science-Information-...) is somewhere in-between.

   I would say promise theory is its own kind of logic and notation. Thanks for the correction @dozzie.

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5. contingenciesSep 2016
   Use the right kind of probe to see the right level of detail. - Mark Burgess

   Make our comprehension of the world more manageable by limiting the amount of information we have to interact with at any time. Our experience of the world can be made comprehensible, or incomprehensible, by design. - Mark Burgess

   The effect of limited information is that we perceive and build the world as a collection of containers, patches or environments, separated from one another by limited information flow. These structures define characteristic scales. - Mark Burgess

   The more details we can see, the less we have a sense of control. - Mark Burgess

   Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. - Mark Burgess

   These quotes are all from In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure (2013), via my fortune database https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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6. contingenciesSep 2014
   The article is essentially discussing frustration at the hiding - by abstraction - of technical debt incurred in adopting poor software architecture and/or development process.

   Some potentially relevant quotes[1]:

   Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics: Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can.

   Ducharm's Axiom: If you view your problem closely enough you will recognize yourself as part of the problem.

   The organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent. (paraphrasing of Conway's Law)

   Separation of concerns ... a necessary consequence of loss of resolution due to scale ... a strategy for staying sane. (Mark Burgess, In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure, 2013)

   [1] Taken from my fortune clone https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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