
Toward a Theory of Design as Computation - prostoalex
http://doriantaylor.com/toward-a-theory-of-design-as-computation
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aridiculous
This is quite dense to unpack but it does remind me of a main theme from those
Adam Curtis documentaries: That overarching master plans, especially social
ones, are overconfident by nature and generally lead to large unexpected
consequences — many of which are catastrophically bad ( _ahem_ Nazism).

My napkin explanation is that governments and organizations (and so on) 'bite
off more than they can chew' by implementing theories into policies before
really understanding them. They see "this will optimize X (prosperity, civil
rights, public health)" without fully understanding the larger system.

However, that's just about the implementation details. In the end, it all
comes down to what a society wants and its values. The hard part isn't the
intellectualism and engineering of how to 'fix' a society, it's deciding what
a 'fixed' society looks like, short term and long term. I think we as
technical people need to be reminded often that the social world isn't a
machine with an easily identifiable telos.

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scarmig
Nazi-ism is a bit of a bad example, because it's a master plan that, once
adopted, went mostly as planned. It was evil, very obviously, but if anything
it speaks against the idea that High Modernism is always doomed to fail in
implementing its abstract designs.

To your main point: I would go a step further, and say that governments and
organizations "bite off more than they can chew" because it's fundamentally
impossible for individual leadership to fully comprehend a larger system to
enforce a policy on. Abstractions always obliterate local knowledge; worse
off, it's usually impossible to even know the unknowns that are being blown
away. Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.

Hayek had it on the mark, but if anything he (and, to a larger extent, his
loudest followers) didn't apply his observations thoroughly enough, and
instead think you can blindly apply governmental regimentation through
universalistic property rights that are somehow immune to the weaknesses of
global rules. Smart, technical-minded people are especially prone to this
fallacy: see the everlasting temptation to shove waterfall processes into
Agile rhetoric.

I'm taking some time to digest this article, but I like it a lot, and I think
it might fit in with some thoughts I've been trying to solidify for awhile.
Going back to Rumsfeld, he had a trio of the known knowns, the known unknowns,
and the unknown unknowns. I want to argue there's a forth category, however:
the unknown knowns. In other words, institutions and networks of individuals
may be isomorphic to real data and the algorithms that work on it, even though
no individual needs to know about the data or algorithms actually being
implemented, any more than a register would need to know what bits lies inside
it. We thus embed knowledge into society: we've created an emergent social
computation through unplanned collective activity. The parallels to Elinor
Ostrom and James Scott should be easy to build to from there.

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cgio
The unknown knowns -> qualia. I am doing some work on the application of these
concepts in organisational design and control.

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scarmig
Anything you've written or read on this topic you'd recommend?

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state
"Rather than design master plans, we designers of systems should instead
design federations of little systems linked together by extensible protocols
and generic interfaces. This way we can create complex systems without having
to explicitly define them. These protocols and interfaces themselves are
systems which, in order to work, must constrain what can be said."

I'd be very interested to see a companion piece that investigates specific
working examples of this approach. Most importantly, I'd like to see examples
of systems of this kind that can actually be attributed to a single person or
small group.

~~~
twelvechairs
This is basically 'systems theory', which was all the rage in the 60s and 70s,
and Christopher Alexander's work was linked to. There's a reason it didn't
take off as much as expected - not because the overarching premise is wrong
(that its possible to describe all things, even design, in a systematic way),
but just that its incredibly difficult to the point of impossible for people
to do so.

~~~
dorian
Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a lot more systems-theoretic. The algorithm
is more or less recursive min-cut partitioning which is now well-researched.

There is, however, a real logistical problem is getting the input
requirements, massaging them to identical conceptual scope, and then
connecting them together so you can perform said decomposition. That is a
massive, massive bottleneck.

That's why it's so telling that Alexander abandoned the technique in his
thesis in favour of using the building site itself, in effect, as a
computational medium.

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skilesare
If you like this stuff, check out Thriving Systems Theory and Metaphor-Driven
Modeling.

It takes the 15 properties and integrates them across system choice centers.
Some interesting things fall out of it:

1\. Levels of Scale -> Stepwise Refinement 2\. Strong Centers -> Cohesion 3\.
Boundaries -> Encapsulation 4\. Alternating Repetition -> Extensibility 5\.
Positive Space -> Modularization 6\. Good Shape -> Correctness 7\. Local
Symmetries -> Transparency 8\. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity -> Composition of
Function 9\. Contrast -> Identity 10\. Gradients -> Scale 11\. Roughness ->
User Friendliness 12\. Echos -> Patterns 13\. The Void -> Programmability 14\.
Simplicity and Inner Calm -> Reliability 15\. Not Separateness -> Elegance

[http://www.amazon.com/Thriving-Systems-Theory-Metaphor-
Drive...](http://www.amazon.com/Thriving-Systems-Theory-Metaphor-Driven-
Modeling/dp/1849963010)

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dorian
Are those mappings in the book you linked? Or something you just came up with?

~~~
skilesare
They are from the book.

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cousin_it
I think this article was written by one of those general-thinking people whom
I can never understand.

~~~
oxalo
I think it's hard to understand because he's generalizing a set of experiences
or insights he's had, but he's only writing about the generalization. You
don't know all of the insights and experiences and so the generalization seems
too... general. To that end, did you take a deeper look at any of the things
he linked?

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skilesare
Alexander's stuff has changed the world already and I hope it will change the
world much more in the future. Hope it is sooner than later.

If you're a fan of Taleb's Antifragile, this stuff is the Antifragile.

