Stats for nerds
2recommend
11mentions
2people
2016–2026years
82% recommend18% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
- The answer is yes. The answer about how bad is really bad. We humans have never before understood how essential our innate collaboration is nor. Nor have we ever understood how fragile it is. Here are some thought experiments for you.
Take a colony of ants and destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. What happens?
Take a colony of ants and use the pheromone trail to generate "profit" for some of the ants at the cost of others.
Ants probably have little self consciousness. But add that awareness to them - essentially tell them they are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again.
A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.
- Nice one! Ceremonies! I like that.
The unfortunate thing is that the tag word "agile" in this context has obliterated some very sound ideas of how to effectively develop software in teams. But that would require actual thinking. In lieu of that, maybe we should just get some kind of high priests to run the scrum meetings? Sorry. I have been in the software business way, way too long.
If anyone actually wants to think about software development, my starting point would be John Holland's "Hidden Order". Don't read it. Try to implement it for software development teams.
- Our understanding of organizations completely derives from military and manufacturing. It is essentially top down. Heck, our whole society and schooling is top down. Someone else knows more than you and is better at things than you are. So if you want to be good at something, you follow. Guess what?
So what is the alternative to top down? Another model is that the persons in an organization act in two roles. First they effectuate. They take effective action. The people 'in situ' know what the situation is. Secondly they act as sensors. They provide information to others. And groups can act in the same way.
We humans evolved by being very good at this model. There were no CEO's in small communities. There were no schools that taught you how to be a hunter gatherer or make cheese.
Yes I know that large corporations and armies have in the past scaled better. Perhaps that is because we have had better technology to give orders better than to collaborate.
The (mythical) Mythical Man Month tells us that New York City cannot exist. And no corporation runs NYC. So clearly it cannot exist. Right? Yet it does. Perhaps we need to understand how. My attempts have started with 'Hidden Order' by John Holland. Don't follow it. Just use it as a starting point.
- OMG one must wonder about a system that produces this article and especially these comments. If you are interested in this area you might consider:
* Hidden Order by John Holland. Especially if you are technical, then read it from the perspective of "how would I build one of these"? (See RIP).
* Signs Of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. An overwhelming book. At the very least you should come out aware of how little we understand.
* What is money? Really. We all know the mythical person month perspective, but according to that New York City can not exist.
* The RIP routing protocol.
* A New Kind of Science.
Gestalts, created from complex adaptive systems, surround us. (Inside joke). I think this is an example of the old adage "I won't see it until I believe it" which is just a simplified version of Sapir Whorf.
[edit: add Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" ]
- Great article.
I find systems design and complex adaptive systems fascinating. I really recommend the book, "Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity" by John H Holland. It is technical but aimed at the educated, non-technical reader, with enough description that you could code along to his models. I really wish he had written more books. RIP.
Another good source of systems thinking are the books by Jane Jacobs on urban planning.
I think anyone wanting to study this area rigorously would need to spend time doing detailed discrete event simulations, understand probability theory, time series analysis, phase space analysis, experimental design, graph theory and queueing theory.
Like databases or operating systems, complex systems embody many fields of study simultaneously. One of the funnest parts is that they can be modeled at so many different levels.
Complex Adaptive Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Holland
Urban Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
Ants https://theconversation.com/e-o-wilsons-lifelong-passion-for...
