Saved links
A saved link is not an endorsement. It's just a thing I read or thought about reading.
Jordan R. Beauregard, The Strategic Intelligence Implications of Circular Causality, American Intelligence Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1, Intelligence Community Leadership: The Next Generation (2020), pp. 98-106
Chapter
7
is about feedback, circular causality, and system dynamics modeling. Circular causality due to positive or negative feedback is a major cause of complexity. When the causality between variables is not linear but...
In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton and colleagues present a new model showing the trade-offs between the cost and utility of new tools in small-scale societies.
Context: By proposing to regard objects as “tokens for eigenbehavior,” von Foerster’s seminal paper opposes the intuitive subject-object dualism of traditional philosophy, which considers objects to be instances of an external world Problem: We argue that this proposal has two implications, one for epistemology and one for the demarcation between the natural sciences and the humanities. Method: Our arguments are based on insights gained in computational models and from reviewing the contribution...
Top-down hierarchies are typically characterised by command-and-control systems of authority that often create harmful stress and internal competition for advancement within organisations. The perv...
My thesis is essentially that people lose resolution as the pool of resources under their control increases: as the pile gets bigger, they just round off at bigger orders of magnitude. When individuals are in control of vast quantities of resources, even the smartest, most well-meaning person will make what are effectively targeting errors.
Why? Because in nature, causes and effects often form circuits, not one-way streets
Critical AI literacy is crucial for our world, as AI applications rapidly spread across society. In this project, we educate students, education professionals, and the public on how uncritical AI adoption causes harm and what steps can minimize it.
On this page are some resources for Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) from my perspective.
Many coordination failures stem from misaligned problem definitions. Before debate, define what “good” looks like and who holds which pieces of information.
Historically, U.S. corporate law has not been structured or tailored to address the situation of for-profit companies that wish to pursue a social or environmental mission.[29] While corporations generally have the ability to pursue a broad range of activities, corporate decision-making is usually justified in terms of creating long-term shareholder value.
The idea that a corporation has as its purpose to maximize financial gain for its shareholders was first articulated in Dodge v. Ford Motor ...
Looking at Overleaf through the lens of the Viable System Model, as part of our regular retrospective programme for continuous improvement.
Abstract page for arXiv paper 2510.19894: The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
Each issue and key assumption is subjected to further analysis to adduce the data and warrants
Anthropology’s critical examination of its own founding conception of the human—as a being that, by its own nature, transcends nature—inevitably entailed a
Herman’s canonical work focuses on the necessity of understanding trauma within a social and political context.
Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of an overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
Mintzberg's 5 Ps for Strategy
Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too
Hardly any other management concept sounds as hackneyed as strategy, and at the same time hardly any other concept in organizational science is as vaguely defined. As a means of escaping the conceptual tangle, this article suggests a systems theory-based definition which allows us to sort out the various threads of the strategy discussion. Strategy, according to this interpretation, entails programs that search for the means to achieve previously defined goals. This makes it possible to systemat...
Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work
A free online philosophy magazine, delivered monthly
“We have witnessed transformation too often to dismiss its possibility, and we have an obligation to that possibility.”
Context: The importance of brands has increased and structured management methods have been established. However, new proposals go beyond conventional brand management, including stakeholders other than customers, treating brand identity as a variable, and taking the development of the concept of brand activism over the past twenty years into account. Problem: The new proposals for brand management are not addressed within the conventional theory of brand management and require a more comprehens...
Interactive visualization of technological history
Context: I aim to show how the act of naming, in our activity as interpretants/observers is formally and fundamentally related to both our being, and to the Gödelian structure of understanding of …
How generative AI systems capture a core function of language Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning i...
AI isn't replacing developers, it's transforming them. Just as NoCode created specialists and cloud turned sysadmins into DevOps engineers, AI elevates engineers from code writers to system architects. The most valuable skill isn't writing code, it's designing coherent systems.
Learn how we partnered with Coinbase to bring payments onchain at scale with a new smart contract protocol to meet the complex requirements of commerce.
Matthew Butterick
People sometimes try to call others’ beliefs into question by pointing out the contingent causal origins of those beliefs. The significance of such ‘Etiological Challenges’ is a topic that has started ...
We help people and organisations imagine, work with, and shape their future. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies is an independent, non-profit think tank established in 1969. By building the capabilities necessary to address potential futures we help create a society fit to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities we face.
Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.
This paper explores Stafford Beer’s lesser-known journeys and collaborations in Latin America beyond the well-known Chilean project Cybersyn. It trac
Serial task switching, or rapidly shifting attention between tasks, is a natural user behavior that lowers productivity and increases stress and the chance of errors.
By attributing experiences and emotions to software systems, we pave the way for them to be perceived as having rights, writes Eryk Salvaggio.
My goal in this paper is to bring about a cultural shift in how we make sense of our day to day interactions with one another, whether in the family, the organization, the community, or any of the other social systems of our lives. I draw a distinction between how our interactions are normally experienced and how they are viewed through a human systems framework. Using this framework, I demonstrate how, without awareness or choice, we regularly fall into scenarios that are unsatisfying, unproductive, and often destructive of our relationships and our systems.
This framework also enables us⸺with awareness and choice along with determination and strategic thinking⸺to create satisfying, creative, and productive relationships in all the systems of our lives.
A project-based learning tool built on LLMs
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002.
Notes from seven Gregory Bateson conferences exploring systems theory and ecological aesthetics.
Children’s books and learning fables are aimed at children, young adults, and educators to introduce concepts of systems thinking in a fun way through storytelling and fieldbooks with concrete strategies.
Purpose – The paper sets out to apply the concepts of cybernetics and the control of probabilistic systems to the issue of performance measurement within organizations. Design/methodology/approach – Conventional approaches to Performance Measurement have been based on a mechanistic “target‐plan‐variance” model that was introduced into mainstream management practice in the 1950s. It has been subject to criticism from within both the academic and practitioners community over the last 50 years but ...
Rewilding your attention. To find truly interesting ideas, step… | by Clive Thompson | UX Collective
Defining terms for design tokens.