Concepts
The building blocks of everything else
I write, edit, and link notes that help me think. The 139 notes published here are Evergreen Notes capturing a slowly evolving network of concepts. Sometimes my notes result in essays.
The building blocks of everything else
Basic insights into system behaviour
Descriptions of complex systems
Recipes for goal-oriented action
Formats and spaces for collaboration
Political Freedom is non-domination. It has historically been gained from holders of significant power to dominate (the monarch, government, the state). This power was curtailed by withdrawing Consent following a critical assessment of its extent and legitimacy. At the birth of political liberalism, Capitalism hadn’t yet made economic actors holders of significant Power to dominate (at least comp
Any Theory of Rationality is normative – it describes how a rational agent should evaluate beliefs, not (only) how they in fact evaluate them. To see how this is not a problem, we can start with the question why we attribute normative power to the theory in the first place. We do that because we’ve reached a reflective equilibrium concerning its merits – we think it is the most reasonable account
An affordance is a relational property of both a System and its Environment. It is “an action possibility available in the environment [that] exists relative to the action capabilities” of the system and “as such, […] cut[s] across the objective-subjective dichotomy”. The totality of a system’s affordances are its Umwelt in the sense of von Uexküll: an environment-world which is … “constituted b
An attractor defines a stable system (S1). This includes, but is not exhausted by, the system’s relationship to its Environment, i.e. the exchange of energy and information to keep up its System Boundary. An Affordance is a relational property of both the system and its environment and thus an emergent property of the larger system (S2) that is made up of S1 and (parts of its) environment. Therefo
Since the “states that will actually be observed in [a] System are the Attractors”, we can identify any system as we observe it with its attractors. In other words: A system’s identity is captured in the signature probability distribution of its dynamics. Abraham & Shaw (1992): Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior DeLanda (2002): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Juarrero (2000): “Dy
The geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s ecosystems, as documented in geological evidence. Using the so-called Orbis Spike as the decisive geological marker, the beginning of the Anthropocene can bet set to the First Globalisation and thus the establishment of colonialism as a global system of exploitation. Since then, Colonialism and capitalism for
Racism is a justification for exploitation, which means at its core are structural disadvantages and severe Power imbalances. Therefore antiracism needs active mitigation of exploitation to be effective. [F]reedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take
An attractor landscape is an abstraction of the State Space of a System. It describes how the system’s Attractors are topologically distributed: the dependencies and constraints embodied by attractors can also be visualized as three dimensional adaptive landscapes depicting a series of changes in a system’s relative stability and instability over time. Juarrero (2000): “Dynamics in Action: I
An attractor is the set of states a System tends to be in given what it is or how it can maintain its boundaries. An attractor defines a stable system; a system’s possible attractors can be more abstractly represented in an Attractor Landscape. In mathematical terms, [a]n attractor is a set of states (points in the phase space) … towards which neighboring states in a given basin of attraction asy
A behavioural disposition is a disposition of a System to behave in a certain way. Complex behaviours are expressions of complex dispositions; complex dispositions can encompass patterns of concrete actions (actual ones as well as potential, i.e. empirically possible ones), strategies, habits and values. Behavioural dispositions are the product of Evolution and can get selected on the population
A bubble of affluence is a community of (relatively) wealthy individuals and groups, whose affluence hides the negative aspects of the world from their personal experience, thus masking or hiding their Privilege. Creating bubbles of influence is an essential Strategy of Consumerism: it makes it hard for people inside the bubble to detect this Ideology as such in the first place, rendering it invi
Traditional theories of (the success of) Capitalism tend to fall in the camps of individualist (bottom-up Explanation of social structure as the consequence of aggregated individual behaviour), structuralist (top-down explanation of individual behaviour as the consequence of social structure) or historicist thinking (“horizontal”, i.e. historical explanation of both individual behaviour and social
Understood as a System Strategy, capitalism is “the investment of profits to generate more profits”. As strategy, Capitalism is dominant because it feeds growth. Understood as a System, capitalism is an enormously Complex System structured by Power, central parts of which can be described as a Memeplex. In this this sense, capitalism is an Egregore. Lewis & Maslin (2018), The Human Planet
Causation happens between Systems demarcated by System Boundaries, horizontally as well as vertically. Since The world is a hierarchy of systems, the question then is on which level of the hierarchy to locate specific instances of causation. Top-down Reductionism claims that this is always the micro-level. According to causal emergence, however, the causation happens at the level of the hierarchy
Causation consists in Constraints. Therefore, the causal structure of a System is “its spatiotemporal organization combined with the operative constraints” , which “determine the possible behaviors of those [sytems]. That is, they determine modal features – what [they] can and cannot do. Winning & Bechtel (2018): “Rethinking Causality in Biological and Neural Mechanisms: Constraints and Con
We want to Use a parsimonious and productive ontology in which modality is dissolved into systems described in State Spaces: there are no more basic principles of change and modality beyond … local constraints; they, and not possible worlds, laws, or counterfactuals, are the ontological bedrock of dynamical organization. In other words, causation consists in Constraints. This has explanatory be
In contrast to companies, cities generate more Innovation per capita the larger they are because they “tolerate crazy people”. This is because Irrational behaviour is adaptive in stochastic environments – in the long run, there is a Selection pressure to keep “crazy” beliefs in the mix for a population to stay adaptive, i.e. rational. Brand (2011), “Superlinear Cities”
Colonisation can be seen as an expansion of the supply zones of European cities, “the original European solution to the ‘ghost acreage’ question”. The resulting “First Globalisation” created new, unidirectional flows of material and wealth: European countries used their political and military Power to extract and trade to import gold, spices and other riches, which led to an early accumulation of
A complex system is a Dynamical System that has the following attributes: It consists of a large network of diverse individual components. These components interact without central control, but following comparatively simple rules. From these interactions, complex collective behaviour emerges that can change non-linearly through reinforcing feedback loops. It is out of thermodynamic equilibrium w
Our Folk Ontology interprets things as being of different genuses or types: locations, physical objects, organisms, biomes, organisations, words, to name a few. Based on that view, we understand different types of systems (e.g. physical, biological, social and conceptual ones) as made up of different types of things. But there really are no types of things in the world – The world is a hierarchy o
Concept Mapping is a tool for collaborative Sensemaking. It is based on constructivist learning theories and uses visual and haptic representations of Concepts to facilitate the exploration of Concept Networks. It produces abstract, map-like Models of Complex Systems that show conceptual and causal relationships between components and properties of the system. Document, structure, and acquire
Concepts are part of a concept network, the position in which determines the concept’s meaning, that is its specific function and content. More technically, the network as a higher-level Complex System acts as a Constraint on its component concepts.
A concept is a “cluster of dispositions to be responsive to differences in a particular region of possible worlds”. It enables distinctions and thus represents a class of things in widest sense, from perceivable objects to abstractions and theoretical posits. Concepts have a set of ideally complementary functions: Concepts facilitate social cooperation; thus they structure the social space we int
Because Concepts are compressed models, and Models are Systems themselves, Concepts are also systems. Since An attractor defines a stable system, successful, i.e. stable, concepts can be understood as their Attractors. In other words: Concepts are attractors, not essences – just stable enough to be used as a component of successful models. Concepts are part of and get their meaning from their posi
A Concept is an interface to expose and connect some Models’ salient features. It extracts key distinctions from existing models, amplifies them and “fades out” the rest to reduce granularity and “boost the signal”, i.e. what is important or interesting about the models in a specific context. A concept is thus a “lossy compression” of these models: it reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less i
Conceptual Engineering can mean building things with Concepts, for example Models or Frameworks; assessment and amelioration of concepts to improve their usefulness. While the first sense captures a lot of my work and especially how Facilitation helps meaning emerge in social groups, the second has greater potential impact and is more central to my overall Theory of Change. Create more adequat
A conceptual metaphor is a metaphor with the help of which one Concept or conceptual domain is understood in terms of another. This transfer of understanding is a key strategy how Concepts facilitate generalisation. An example of a conceptual metaphor is “argument is war”, in which the concept “argument” is understood in terms of the concept “war”: Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every
Constraints are relational properties components acquire in virtue of being embedded in a higher level System alterations in the probability distribution of a system’s State Space In other words, “[w]hat constraints do is restrict trajectories from reaching some parts of the state space”. Juarrero (1998): “Causality as Constraint” Juarrero (2000): “Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as
Consumerism (or consumerist Capitalism) is an Ideology that encourages the acquisition and consumption of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. It supports the feedback loops that make sure that Innovation fuels continuous growth and has led to the so-called Great Acceleration in the second half of the 20th century.
Critical theory is situated theory with an emancipatory goal. As Sally Haslanger puts it, the goal of critical theory is not just to provide a true description of social reality. … Critical theory has a practical and political aim: it should reveal injustice in a way that informs action. And because … the world itself can become distorted, we need a critical vantage point not just on what we beli
Culture is socially transmitted information that affects individuals’ behaviour. “Cultural Evolution is the change of this information over time.” More specifically, Cultural evolution is multilevel meme variation, selection and replication. Cultural Evolution Society: “What Is Cultural Evolution?” Wikipedia: “Cultural evolution”
Cultural hegemony is the dominance of an elite’s Ideology. In other words, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the Culture of that society—the beliefs and Explanations, Perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As a result, the elite can set the direction of trave
Cultural Evolution is the change over time of information that can affect individuals’ behaviour. This change is usually understood to happen either in a Darwinian process of Meme selection and replication, or as a broader process that incorporates non-Darwinian mechanisms, e.g. “Intelligent Design”. On a memetic view, cultural evolution acts via Selection of instances of cultural variants – beh
We can define culture as information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission. Cultural Evolution Society: “What Is Cultural Evolution?”
Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) help understand the experience a Customer (or User) has with a Product or service. They map their interaction with the offering from becoming aware of and deciding to acquire it, to using and staying loyal to it. Thus a CJM is a visualisation of the steps that a person goes through in their Customer Lifecycle, focusing on how they feel at each step. Visualise of (a
Cultural Evolution makes sure that every method that helps understands people’s wants and needs can and will be used to generate new wants and needs, which is needed to keep an economic system from collapsing in which Innovation fuels continuous growth. This is the foundation of Consumerism. This means a lot of design methodology like Design Thinking and concrete methods like Personas, Customer Jo
A deflationary Explanation explains something by showing that it is in fact something else that we have already explained, at least in principle. It thus has the form “X is really just Y”, for example “Causation is really just local constraints”. Inserting an object from our everyday experiences for “X”, we can use deflationary explanations to debunk our Folk Ontology. Deflationary explanations ar
A Design Studio is a visual, fast-paced and collaborative approach to Ideation. It takes a design challenge, ideally framed in the form of “How Might We?” Questions, and lets participants iterate repeatedly between sketching, presenting and critiquing solution ideas. By differentiating between these steps, it avoids drawn-out discussions and enables creative diversity, rapid improvement and team
A dynamical system is a System that changes over time. The change can be continuous, i.e. a flow of system states, or discrete, i.e. a cascade or map. In other words, flow and map describe its System Dynamics. Flows and maps are mathematically described by evolution functions, often the solutions of differential equations, that project points in a system’s State Space to other points in this space
Originally an occult concept referring to “a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people”, it can also be understood as denoting a Meme, focusing on the meme’s point of view and agency in Cultural Evolution. As a more specific description of a meme, the Concept of the egregore might be a useful Scale-free Abstraction, while egregores themselves might
As James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner put it, the most basic kind of emergence is the existence of laws and properties at the level of the whole System that do not exist at the level of the constituent parts. The classic example for this kind of emergence is the property of being wet: While water (the “whole system”) is wet, i.e. has this property, individual water (H₂O) molecules aren’t – they
Contrary to the conventional view that they are hard-wired into our brain and different from and often at odds with our Rationality, emotions are constructed from the Interoception of bodily Feelings, interpreted in the light of experience and Culture: They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever Environment it develops in, a
Empathy Maps help gain a deeper understanding of Stakeholders in a Project or Product Ecosystem. They locate a stakeholder in a specific task or decision-making context and help think through what they are perceiving, saying and doing, and which pains they experience and gains they expect. Empathy Maps are a low-effort way to start thinking more deeply about stakeholders and identify gaps in unde
An enabling constraint is a Constraint that creates alternatives: constraints not only reduce the alternatives - they also create alternatives. Constraints, that is, can also create properties which a component exhibits in virtue of its embeddedness in a system, properties it would otherwise not have. But constraints also bias a constrained object towards reaching points and trajectories in the
The context of a System from which it is separated by a System Boundary. Complex Systems interact interact with their environment to exchange energy, entropy, and information in order to stay in a Non-equilibrium Steady State. A system and its environment share Affordances – features of the environment that are salient for the system in specific ways.
Epistemic colonialism is the use of Power to force a System of thought, often an Ideology, onto an area of thought and a population of thinkers that have every right to organise and be organised differently to deal adequately with their specific experiential context. Epistemic colonialism is violent in two different, but related ways: It forces thinkers to adopt a foreign system of thinking. It
An event is a change in the state of a System. In a State Space, an event is the transition between one point and another. A consecutive and continuous transitions between multiple point is a process – a “longer event”.
For a System to have an Implicit Model means embodying “statistical regularities of its world in its physical and functional composition”, which reduces surprise about how its world behaves and helps the system stay in stable states. In the case of biological systems, i.e. organisms or agents, the agent’s phenotype embodies evidence of the very environmental dynamics that it and its progenitors o
Nothing is the same. No thing is the same. Everything is itself and one of a kind. This is because every thing is complex (made up of numerous components) and entangled (connected to numerous other Systems). In other words: Every thing is defined by its internal and external connections. Thus what it is is a complex pattern. Everything exists because of what it really is. What it really is: a
Evolution is descent with modification, that is change in the heritable characteristics of populations of individuals over successive generations. The individuals are Systems, specifically Dynamical Systems and Complex Systems, in their Environments. Since The world is a hierarchy of systems, this encompasses subatomar particles, atoms, molecules, dissipative structures, cells, organisms, organisa
When revising Concepts in Conceptual Engineering, use Deflationary Explanations to get rid of Folk Ontology and Magical Thinking in order to make our thinking more precise, accountable and empirically adequate.
An explanation answers a “why” question. It refers to a Fact (state of a System) or Event (change in a system) to be explained (the explanandum), and offers an account of why it is the case or has happened (the explanans). The explanans is a causal, mathematical or conceptual Model of the explanandum that shows how it is part of a larger Causal Structure, an instance of a general Pattern, a conse
An explicit Model is a consciously articulated, interpretive description of a target System that can be the object of the modelling system’s attention. Explicit models are built from Concepts and thus systems of concepts. As such, they can take various forms, for example, texts, diagrams, plots of empirical data, objects, or mathematical equations. These “external representations” are tools in te
When we call something a fact, we don’t refer to an abstract object “fact”, but express and emphasise that the world (or a subsystem of it) is in a specific state. “It is a fact that p” just means p.
“Fascism“ can refer to a historical political movement and to a political Ideology. As a political movement, fascism is a Complex System, i.e. an emergent phenomenon that cannot be captured by a definition, but has to be described and understood historically (which goes beyond the scope of this note). The overarching pattern in any such understanding is that “far-right movements arise when the es
Feelings are expensive, but effective cognitive mechanisms to direct our Attention, experienced via Interoception as bodily sensations. [F]eelings are how our mental models communicate. A “gut feeling” is a mental model at work. Feelings tell us whether the prediction produced by a mental model is positive (feels good) or negative (feel bad), so that’s the most important information to be encapsu
Our Folk Ontology is our everyday picture of what the world consists of: Which (types of) entities it is made up of and what the relationships between them are. It is a product of our Adaptation to our original Cognitive Niche: Human intelligence, and the collective representational technologies (especially public languages) that constitute the basis for what is most biologically special about th
Our intuitions about what constitutes liberty or political freedom are best captured by the so-called republican conception of freedom. On this account, freedom is “the secure enjoyment of non-domination”, i.e. “the absence of any structural dependence on arbitrary Power”. Importantly, non-domination comes in degrees: … one is not either free or unfree, but rather more or less free depending on t
A generative Model aims to capture the statistical structure of some set of observed inputs by tracking […] the causal matrix responsible for that very structure. A good generative model for vision would thus seek to capture the ways in which observed lower-level visual responses are generated by an interacting web of causes – for example, the various aspects of a visually presented scene. In ot
As a collection of Models, Theories and Explanations, Geology offers “an evidence-based understanding of planet Earth’s history”. As a discipline and artefact of Cultural Evolution, it also “encases the history and cultures of those who organized … our planet’s history. It is a human construct, created to help us make sense of the world we find ourselves in.” As the former, its results need to be
A heuristic device is [a]ny procedure which involves the use of an artificial construct to assist in the exploration of …[complex] phenomena. A heuristic device is … a form of preliminary analysis. [A] heuristic device is usually employed for analytical clarity, although it can also have explanatory value as a Model. Heuristic devices play a central role in Sensemaking. Dictionary of Sociolog
Ideology is “a Cultural Technē gone wrong”: a “network of social meanings, tools, scripts, schemas, heuristics, principles, and the like” which is distorted in specific ways so that it hides aspects of the world the perception of which would question or threaten systems of Power and the social order they impose. An encompassing ideology like Consumerism acts as a Nexus of Delusion. An example for
An implicit Model is an evolved, embodied representation of a System’s Environment. This means a system is a statistical model of its niche in the sense of coming to embody statistical regularities of its world in its physical and functional composition. In the case of biological systems, i.e. organisms or agents, one should recognize that the morphology, bio-physical mechanics and neural archi
The Social System of industrial agriculture does not actually do what it says it is doing – it is, in a more than metaphorical sense, lying. Industrial agriculture is not primarily, as often claimed, the most efficient system to feed 8 billion people, but the most extractive one to use available resources. Efficiency is at best a side-effect. Its adaptive advantage is not that it gets chosen by pe
There are three distinct, but connected feedback loops between technological Innovation and Economic Growth: Productivity enables economic growth, which enables investment, which increases innovation and productivity, which enables further growth Innovation increases productivity, which reduces need for labour, which necessitates growth on pain of economic collapse Growth exhausts scarce resource
In its most common sense, innovation is the creation and introduction of new, redesigned, or substantially improved Products, processes or Systems. More generally, innovation is the successful transition between Exploration and Exploitation of the innovating System’s Environment. It can be understood as: the practice of making this transition, the process that structures this practice, the System
Zuboff (2021) describes why the legitimacy of Institutions is essential for social stability: [The] ongoing miracle of social order rests on “common sense Knowledge,” which is “the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of everyday life.” … The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are essential because they buffer us from chaos by formalizing our common sense.
Interoception is a Living System’s sense of of its internal state, parallel to how Perception is the sense of its Environment. Interoception also gives us access to our Feelings, understood as basic bodily sensations (“gut feeling”). Wikipedia (2022), “Interoception”
Behavioural Dispositions that are individually irrational in the current Environment (due to either random deviation or maladaptation) can improve the chances of a population to adapt to disruptive changes. In other words, they are necessary ingredients of a population’s rational repertoire of dispositions in complex environments and get selected in these environments. The rational behavior is a
The Kano Model helps test, categorise and prioritise potential features for new Products and Services. It classifies them into five categories by mapping them according to the Customer Satisfaction they generate on the one hand side, and the functionality they provide and the associated cost on the other. It can be used to conceptualise feature profiles, empirically research customer preferences,
Knowledge of something is “the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”. Put more technically, this means having access to a Model of a subject. Derived from this we also talk about knowing that – for example, I know that there is a dictionary, and I know that the dictionary defines knowledge in this way (a fact about which I have information); knowing how – for example, I know how to
Large Language Models (LLMs) will soon be a main source of content in our digital (virtual, augmented) world(s): Machine learning generated content is just the next step beyond TikTok: instead of pulling content from anywhere on the network, GPT and DALL-E and other similar models generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost. This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately
A living system is a Complex System that actively and autonomously upholds its System Boundary by exchanging energy and information with its Environment, thus “importing” order and staying in a Non-equilibrium Steady State. How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. W
If we want to Prioritise abstraction over metaphor, the concept of a System Boundary needs to be stripped of its metaphorical content. The concept of a Markov blanket delivers exactly that: [T]]he notion of a Markov blanket allows one to define any System or structure in a way that distinguishes it from the Environment or milieu in which it resides. The Markov blanket plays the role of a statisti
As a first approximation, a meme is System behaviour that can be copied. By copying concrete behaviour, a Behavioural Disposition gets transmitted between systems: “an idea, behaviour, style, or usage … spreads from person to person within a culture”. Thus memes can be understood as transmittable behavioural dispositions. This means memes are the units of Cultural Evolution. Importantly, and in de
A missing system is a hypothetical System described by a Model that doesn’t track real System Boundaries – a system that doesn’t exist (in the hypothesised boundaries). This is different from the “models as fictions” account in two respects: It only refers to wrongly identified delineated systems. Users of these models don’t necessarily treat them as fictions. With increasing Knowledge, many of
A model is a simplified representation of a System. Representation means that a model is “about” or denotes its target system; more specifically, it “stands in” for the system in some functional context in some useful way. In other words, representation is a product of function and selection, either by design or by evolution: Explicit Models are consciously developed representations that can be o
Money, like everything interesting, is a Complex System. This means it is an emergent phenomenon that cannot be captured by a definition, but has to be described and understood historically. More specifically, just as Power, it is not a resource controlled by any specific agent, but an agent itself – a Memeplex or a highly complex Egregore. We understand any complex system by building a Model of i
The world is a hierarchy of systems.We necessarily perceive these systems in their attractors – in other words, An attractor defines a stable system. So when we’re trying to understand systems, what we’re really looking at are attractors within attractors. To understand them, we can go two ways: Up, to understand how the larger context, its Environment or super-system in the hierarchy of systems,
Since we want to Move up and down in the system hierarchy, a useful Strategy is to build epistemic connections between very abstract and very concrete Models, that is an easy-to-climb ladder of abstraction. At the ends of this ladder, we do different things: We look for large-scale Patterns, i.e. Attractors, “high up” on the ladder, where models have a wide scope and high generality – this levera
A nexus of delusion is a Complex System or network of perceptual Affordances whose purpose (or effect) is to delude us and make Ideology invisible. At superficial levels this network appears not just self-consistent but self-evident, not an ideology at all: “this is just how the world works”. A nexus of delusion can also be understood as an ideology, i.e. a distortedCultural Technē itself. It upho
In any group activity, capture everything that’s being said on a sticky note – note first, discuss later. This helps you speed up the process, create a shared perception of what’s being said, avoid fruitless discussions, and value every contribution.
Any Model or Theory has to presuppose the existence of certain things in order to work, i.e. be consistent and empirically adequate. The things they have to presuppose in every possible world are their ontological commitments. Quine (1948): “On What There Is” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Ontological Commitment”
Patriarchy is not an inevitable consequence of human nature. Like agriculture, it originally “evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences”. At the beginning of the transition from hunter/gatherer to agricultural lifestyles, systemic gender inequality was practically nonexistent. At its end, a series of individual rational choices that were initially not ideolo
Rationality is an evolved strategy. This means current rationality is the result of Adaptation, i.e. relative evolutionary success of its component dispositions in past environments, or of random deviation from adapted dispositions. It follows that every theory of rationality must show that current dispositions are either adaptive, i.e. in fact rational, maladaptive, i.e. would have been rational
Perception is the active sampling a System does of its Environment to validate its Model. It is an instance of Active Inference. Parr, Pezzulo, Friston (2022): Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior
Personas describe an archetypical User or Customer, with a focus on their motivations, the problems they encounter, and how they deal with them. They are based on surveys, interviews and personal experience, and provide just enough information about the user’s or customer’s socio-economic background and general behaviour to enable empathetic understanding of their perspective and needs. Describ
Pirate Metrics are a Customer Lifecycle framework that helps think through the five most important stages of Product development and growth: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. It provides guidance to develop metrics for each of these stages and a structure for implementation and evaluation. Generate a set of metrics for the whole customer lifecycle Deepen understanding o
A polycrisis is a (ecological, social, political, economic) crisis that consists of multiple causally entangled, mutually reinforcing crises. A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. Effective action in a polycrisis requires treating it as a highly integrated Complex System. What may appe
At its core, political or social power is a System’s ability to influence the behaviour of other systems. This means power is a relational property of systems. One level up, out of power relationships systems of power emerge, i.e. constellations of relationships between people, resource, institutions and social positions that are object to Cultural Evolution: Systems of relationships themselves c
Usually, the Abstractions we are using are based on Conceptual Metaphors. They enable conceptual creativity, but also put Constraints on what thoughts we can think: they import assumptions and distinctions from the source domain to the target domain, regardless of their applicability, and thus “constrain available hypotheses”. Therefore changing metaphors is not enough when we want to understand C
A System samples its Environment to build, update and use Models of it. If it does this to change the model, that’s Exploration of this environment (or epistemic action), if it does so to change the environment, it’s Exploitation of the environment (or pragmatic action). The overall goal that determines the trade-off between the two is to avoid surprise in the future, i.e. minimising expected free
Problem Statements define the problem a Product is going to solve. They inform Ideation and help create alignment on the Value Proposition at the core of the product. Problem Statements connect information about a particular User or Customer and their situation, the problem they need solved, and why this solution is important to them. Concisely describe a particular user or customer in a speci
Contrary to what we’ve learned in school, it wasn’t racist ideas, born from ignorance and hate, that led to racist policies, but exactly the other way round. Race is the child of racism, not the father. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Extractive institutions [are] the main determinant of racism today. [A] racist Power creates racist policies ou
Rationalism à la Eliezer Yudkowsky has two connected fundamental flaws – an ontological and an epistemological one. Taken together, they make Rationalism an irrational program. Rationalism is built upon a naïve Model of reality. For the Rationalist, Rationality means organising your beliefs so that they are accordance with Bayes’ Theorem. In other words, it sees Bayes’ Theorem as operating on bel
It is a fact about our social and epistemic lives that Rationality is a norm that guides our thinking about beliefs and hypotheses; it is a Concept we use to direct thinking and discourse. (Habermas would call it a „regulative ideal“.) Any plausible conception of rationality has to make sense of this basic fact. This also means that it has to show that we are mostly rational beings: The norm would
Rationality is an evolved strategy, aiming for success within an evolutionary environment. But we also aim for better success rates at a second level, Rationality’s explicit Articulation and critical examination. When we consciously scrutinise and adapt our conception of rationality as it guides our judgements, i.e. as a normative conception, we also do so “in response to practical needs”. When we
A behaviour and by extension a Behavioural Disposition is instrumentally rational iff it maximises the subjective probability for a System to achieve a certain goal given an Environment and the available Knowledge about it. Someone displays instrumental rationality insofar as she adopts suitable means to her ends. Such an understanding of rationality is within the intersection of all theories o
Renormalisation is the coarse-graining of Models when switching between levels of System description. To correctly predict observable quantities at larger scales, the parameters or quantities attributed to the observables need to be “renormalised” – adapted to account for the accumulation of interactions on the micro-scale that add up to a change on the macro-scale. Renormalization specifies rela
We want to maximise scope, detail, and cognitive efficiency of Sensemaking. One way to achieve this is to replace Sensemaking Frameworks, i.e. Complex Systems of Concepts, with a small set of loosely connected Scale-free Abstractions used as Heuristic Devices: widely applicable, highly general concepts that enable the description of order on different scales, enhancing detail, and reveal similar
In Conceptual Engineering, propose improvements to Concepts that expose and critique Ideology, making Ideological Oppression visible and enabling its subversion. Conceptual engineering is thus a key practice of Critical Theory. Deflation plays a crucial role here as well: Getting rid of folk ontology and magical thinking makes effective action more feasible since it removes distractions from the
All political revolutionaries imagine a future constellation of their society and, if and when they succeed in disrupting the old system, use Power to implement the new one. This is bound to fail, and the consequences are consistently horrible (for exceptions see below). Here is why: Societies are Complex Systems, and only some of their possible states (constellations of its components) are stable
Scale-free abstractions are a specific type of Shorthand Abstractions: highly general concepts taken from our best current thinking about evolution, cognition, and the world as a hierarchy of systems. They can be used to describe systems on all scales or levels of Causal Emergence, which helps us Move up and down in the system hierarchy. An initial set of scale-free abstractions are the following:
Science can be understood and critiqued on a variety of levels. The three most interesting ones are: Science as Culture, embodying values and motives like curiosity and acceptance of failure, disassociation from social context, objectification of nature, hubris (e.g. economics, eugenics). Helps explain large-scale historical trends like the rise of Capitalism and ecological collapse. Science as D
As a corollary to the systems view of Evolution, on the level of the system of nature, selection of lower-level systems can be seen as Bayesian search – as an algorithm that metaphorically fills niches and builds bridges of complexity into the void by “looking for” Attractors of nature as a System. [D]iverse phenotypes amount to multiple hypotheses about what might ‘work’; each individual is a hy
Systems “try to survive” and are differentially well equipped for that, depending in their specific Environment. Selection is just the effect that, in every environment, “what works stays”. As a corollary to the systems view of Evolution, we can say that Selection is Bayesian Search. Darwinian evolution, i.e. variation and selection plus heredity, is one implementation of this Bayesian Search, but
Self-organisation is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered System. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, dist
A Sensemaking framework is the codification of useful sensemaking practices, i.e. a Complex System of Concepts that aims to facilitate building Explicit Models. A sensemaking framework is more useful the wider its scope of applicability, i.e. the greater its generality, the more detail and distinction it can accommodate, and the less cognitive capacity is needed to use it. While a framework is c
We make sense of the world in order to act in it. Making sense means establishing coherence: When we make sense of a situation, we realise how its parts are connected, and how it fits into the wider context. In other words, we form a Model of the situation. Sensemaking doesn’t have to be a conscious act. Most of the time, we find our way around our Environment without actively thinking about it. I
The world is a hierarchy of systems. Or rather Complex Systems (e.g. a relationship, a business). We have only limited data about the world, i.e. hints about the Causal Structure of these systems (e.g. the end of a relationship, the lifecycle of a business). We build Explicit Models to interpret and explain these data. With these we postulate a causal structure, i.e. events and their causal connec
Shorthand Abstractions are Concepts that enable us to build more complex Explicit Models by compressing the models they stand in for. In other words, they are terms [that] stands for a cluster of interrelated ideas that virtually spell out a method of critical analysis applicable to social and moral issues. … [T]hey are abstractions with peculiar analytic significance. The concepts can be given
Stakeholder Maps help identify and classify actors who have Power over and/or interest in the outcomes of a Project or Product development. They help clarify the relationships of internal and external Stakeholders to the project, assess their influence, and choose an adequate Strategy for managing them. Get an overview of relevant stakeholders Classify them according to power over and interest
When we Move up and down in the system hierarchy, we should start our system descriptions “top down”, with the largest patterns, instead of “bottom up” like in Systems Thinking. A sufficient representation [of a complex system] is one that has a set of possible states corresponding to the set of distinguishable states of the system at each level of resolution, down to the level we need to describ
A state space (or, which is roughly equivalent, phase space) is the set of all possible states of a Dynamical System; each state of the system corresponds to a unique point in the state space. Describing a system in its state space means switching from a simple space (with 3 dimensions) and complex things (made out of N elements) to a complex space (3^N dimensions) and simple things (points in tha
Strategy is de facto always an iterative learning process, even if this is often not made explicit and information gaps between iterations make it less effective and efficient. The process of strategy is not a linear process but an iterative cycle. To maximise overall learning in a changing Environment, one needs to minimise cycle time, not maximise the information processed in each step of the
On an abstract level, Strategy is a set of System activities, structured in a process. On a traditional view of strategy in organisations, there are different degrees of control over this process and the resulting activities: Strategy can best be conceptualized as a continuum with “pure deliberate” (prescriptive) strategy at one end and “pure emergent” strategy at the other. But this takes an “
Every Strategy is based on an (implicit or explicit) assessment of the situation, that is the Model a System has of its Environment. The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects. This simplified model of reality allows one to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem
Strategy is a set of choices about the use of a System’s resources to maximise its chances to fulfil its Purpose in a given Environment. If the environment is competitive, “the heart of the matter in strategy is usually advantage”. In a good strategy, one that does provide advantage, the choices make a real difference for resource use, have a clear relationship to the purpose, are based on suffic
A System boundary is topologically defined as the set of system components which have connections both to other system elements and to its Environment. This means a system boundary does not need to be “a smooth manifold (line or surface) including all the elements of the system” – it can be “fuzzy”. It also allows for the fact that “the organizational boundaries of living systems are open and flex
The change of a Dynamical System over time, described as the (continuous) flow or (discrete) map of the system’s states. This is not to be confused with the school of thought by the same name, exemplified in the work of Jay Forrester and Donnella Meadows and today often referred to as Systems Thinking.
Climate and Ecological Breakdown is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, with civilisational Collapse an increasingly realistic outcome. To avoid the worst we need not only a fast, large-scale transition to net carbon neutral Technology, but also a radical reduction of consumption in general and of animal agriculture in particular – and, in the long run, a Steady-state Economy. It has be
A system is a group of regularly interacting or interdependent items forming a coherent whole. It is defined by its Boundary, i.e. by what is and what is not part of it. Each item that is part of a system can itself be understood as a system. This means that described abstractly, The world is a hierarchy of systems. A system can be fully characterised by describing the evolution of its states. Thi
Systems or, more precisely, dissipative and autocatalytic structures that are precursors of autonomous, e.g. biological, systems emerge from the “the background soup” via contextual Constraints – “No constraints = no form or structure”. This means contextual constraints act as Enabling Constraints. The “organizational closure” autocatalysis effects is such that a Boundary between the autocatalyti
We should Use a parsimonious and productive ontology. The most radical interpretation of parsimony is to “infer just that fundamental structure and ontology that is required by the dynamical laws” we postulate to describe reality. Our view that The world is a hierarchy of systems means we have a minimal Ontological Commitment to the existence of Systems that change over time. So the most parsimoni
Technology is “a collection of phenomena [or effects] captured and put to use”, “a programming of phenomena to our purposes”; a “purposed system”. It is combinatorial (technologies are combinations of existing components) and recursive (components are themselves technologies). [A]ll means—monetary systems, contracts, symphonies, and legal codes, as well as physical methods and devices —are techno
Due to significant Selection filters between generations, insects (have evolved to) need a very large number of individuals in each generation to survive as populations and species. Large numbers of insects are detrimental to industrial lifestyles (agriculture, production, urban living). Industrial lifestyles win – and don’t see that they are destroying there own foundations because insects have b
When thinking about ontology (put simply, what the world consists of), we can start with the basic fact that there is difference in the world – that “something can be distinguished from everything else”. We call such distinguishable somethings Systems. Systems are differentiated by their boundary, i.e. by what is and what is not part of them. Each item that is part of a system can itself be unders
A Strategy tells us what to do, a Theory of Change explains why this should work. It describes a Causal Structure and highlights promising points of leverage and intervention to achieve (social) change in a certain direction. The core of my personal Theory of Change is that System change needs disruption, popular support and alternative institutions.
A theory is the description or external representation of an Explicit Model and its Concepts, in advanced sciences using mathematical equations. In other words, the model is expressed in terms of the theory. Bailer-Jones (2009): Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science
As systems need energy (and Entropy) in order to self-organise, there are no fully self-organising systems. [S]omething that can be described as self-organising on one level (a System) can also be shown to be hetero-organised at a higher level (an element), while also composed of parts that organise one another at a lower level. Heinz von Foerster argues that a system is said to be self-organis
There never were socialist states. No liberal democracy hay ever become (permanently) socialist – every attempt at democratic socialism has so far ended in a rollback forced via IMF-monitored “stabilisation programmes” (Portugal), a coup (Allende’s Chile), an assassination (Lumumba), or successful preemptive counter-propaganda (Corbyn, today’s Chile). But no post-revolutionary state under “really
When doing Conceptual Engineering, treat individual Concepts as nodes in a Concept Network, the position in which determines the concept’s function and content. Thus changing one concept necessarily means changing other concepts, making Conceptual Engineering an ongoing effort in Concept Refactoring. For pragmatic reasons, there needs to be a cut-off point for each iteration of refactoring and he
A Universal Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to each individual by virtue of their legal residence in a country. The strongest (moral) argument for it is that A Basic Income secures political freedom. Torry (ed.) (2019): The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income
We need a better way to look at (the features of) the world than Folk Ontology. Any alternative ontology should be more parsimonious, i.e. postulate fewer entities. This reduces the cognitive cost of using it and makes it more universal, i.e. cover a wider range of phenomena more adequately. If this deflationary character of the ontology is combined with a greater openness for diverse descriptions
In any group process, use sticky notes to capture any data, insights or questions and put them where everyone can see them. Use a separate note for every aspect you’re capturing. This allows you to move aspects around, improve and iterate.
While Innovation has often been identified with technological innovation, this is an unhelpful conflation in a situation where we face Climate and Ecological Breakdown and possible societal Collapse: We have confounded the idea of innovation with technology. We need something dramatic that’s outside of this framework in order for the system to make a dramatic change. Further technological innova
That Capitalism is dominant because it feeds growth is a specific case of the general principle that when resources are abundant, the most extractive culture will be dominant because without resource limitations, more growth-oriented strategies always outperform less growth-oriented ones. Innovation makes sure resources stay abundant.
Why/How Laddering is a way of reframing a problem or challenge by complementing its initial statement with more abstract and more concrete statements. Moving up the ladder expands the scope and helps see larger patterns and deeper needs, moving down helps find different concrete solutions. Find connections between challenges or problem statements Create context for the original challenge or pro
“How Might We?” (HMW) questions help reframe Problem Statements into areas of opportunity and think more creatively about solutions. The method uses small but surprising instructions to recast a problem or challenge for Users, Customers and Stakeholders, creating many different questions out of one initial statement. This can help prompt more fruitful and relevant solution ideas. Generate quest
For me, notes are a sensemaking tool. They serve as an external memory or “second brain”, capturing the results of a thought process, but also as a way to document and augment the process itself. With their help I can go with its flow more easily and enter into a dialogue with myself, as it were.
This usually takes place in Daily Notes, from which I regularly extract thoughts into drafts in my Writing Inbox. Over time, these turn into the notes published here. The output of the process varies greatly – periods of intense thinking alternate with times focused on implementation.