Matt > Recent Status Updates

I’m on the part where we fix society or something

When humans are faced with unprecedented situations, they dramatically underestimate the scope and possibility of outcome. She uses an example of her house burning from lightning strikes. As she tries to close doors to prevent smoke damage on the way out, the house explodes. Her efforts to close doors to rooms that would ultimately end up not existing is the myopic perspective she compares to the state of SC

Yet to read:

A Different Class
How autocrats get away with posing as authentocrats

Empire of the Census
America’s long history of manipulating its headcount for political gain

Critique of Pure Niceness
The trouble with the civility fetish

The Century of Spin
In the formative days of public relations, elites imagined a “guided democracy”

Design- Fractals appear across nature and man made systems as entities that display similar patterns across all levels of scope. This was determined and used in simulations across domains, landscapes, art, music, architecture, stock market. Discovered when Lewis Fry Richardson examined the differences between higher and lower level maps, made famous by Mandelbrot in paper: How long is the coast of Britain?

Scaling-
A system science of biology
1)Allometric scaling laws, mass related to 3/4ths power scaling of internal systems
2)Churchill polled greatest Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel second, followed by Darwin and Shakespeare, for figuring out scaling needed for steam ships
3)Network principles of scaling: Space filling, Invariance of terminal units, Optimization
“The 21st century will be the century of complexity”

Chapter 5 develops the difference between unit level understanding and systems level understanding. It covers the 3 main considerations required for the analysis of political structures: The ordering principles, the character of the units, and the distribution of capabilities among the units.
"Apples and oranges" statements are only legitimate when there is no shared category among the two objects, which is rare

Chapter 1 covered the baseline distinctions between theory and law. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 covered how international-political systems can not be explained reductively. In chapter 3 we found how often "systemic" approaches confuse systems-level causes with unit-level causes (Critiques of Hoffman's descriptions of reality, Rosecrance's conflation of a model with a framework). Some similarities between approaches remain