Or: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. (video, or TL;DR, or abstract) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins …
Read moreCollective problem solving in music, art, science, and software
There’s this church near my house, with a statue of Mary Magdalene. She’s the picture of deference. As a child and as a Christian, I was raised to see deference as a virtue, to find this statue beautiful. As an adult and as a systems thinker, I learned that deference is dangerous. Nora Bateson pointed …
“Why” is a terrible word because it’s overloaded. Often when we ask “why” we mean “for what purpose” — we’re looking for intention. In the bigger questions (bigger than one person’s decision), that doesn’t make sense. “Why do we let people buy those dangerous guns?”In a system the size of our country, there is no “for what …