Complication for the win
I don’t want to make my programs simpler. I want to them make them complicated instead of complex.
complexity
From complicated to complex
Avdi Grimm describes how the book Vehicles illustrates how simple parts can compose a very complex system. Another example is Conway’s Game of Life: a nice organized grid, uniform time steps, and four tiny rules. These simple pieces combine to make all kinds of wild patterns, and even look alive! These systems are complex: hard …
Moving beyond simplicity
We prefer simple models to complicated ones. Circles to ellipses, a single ancestor to a soup. But is that really because the simple explanation is more likely? The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive. Philip Ball, The Tyranny of Simple Explanations Simpler theories are more useful because we can think about them …
Soft, or hard like mud
Soft skills are hard. “They take work to build and work to apply.” @ruthmalan The word “hard” describes sciences like physics and chemistry. It is confusing that “hard” can mean difficult, because these sciences aren’t more difficult than the “soft” ones like sociology and anthropology. They’re differently difficult. The “hard” sciences are hard because they’re …
Reasons, heuristics, and revealed intentions
In a complex system, we can’t predict consequences. As Cynefin expresses it: in complexity, we determine causality in retrospect, not ahead of time. So how do we make decisions? We have to guess, try things, see what happens, react to that. We use reasons and heuristics. There are some consequences we do predict, and these …
Growth Loops: circular causality is real
A few hundred years ago, we decided that circular causality was a logical fallacy. All causes are linear. If something moves, then something else pushed it. If you want to see why, you have to look smaller; all forces derive from microscopic forces. Yet as a human, I see circular causality everywhere. autocatalytic loops in …
When knowledge is the limiting factor
In Why Information Grows (my review), physicist César Hidalgo explains that the difference between the ability to produce tee shirts vs rockets is a matter of accumulating knowledge and know-how inside people, and weaving those people into networks. Because no one person can know how to build a rocket from rocks. No one person understands …
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
a telling question. This puzzler says something about our culture. It says we think in terms of causes that happen before their effects. That we don’t believe in reflexive causality. In life, everything interesting is a circle. The mitochondria breaks down sugar, the proteins use the energy, they keep up the cell wall, the cell …
Reading: Why Information Grows
Yesterday in a zine, I read an in-process book review of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Reading that was a project for the review author; they wrote the review while still in the thralls of the book. That seems like the best time, not after I’ve closed the book. So quick! before …
the future of software: complexity
The other day in Iceland, a tiny conference on the Future of Software Development opened with Michael Feathers addressing a recurring theme: complexity. Software development is drowning in accidental complexity. How do we fight it? he asks. Can we embrace it? I ask. Complexity: Fight it, or fight through it, or embrace it? Yes. Here, …