gond

Had a good laugh! That could be me.

Thank you for the Be-related posts. Maybe, one day, you could write a more detailed report of it in a format made for longer articles. I would read it.

The social side is, among others, massively covered by Niklas Luhmann, the Zettelkasten guy. [1] is pure 2nd Order Cybernetics. The entry to it is a bit tough, it uses its own language. The precision presented, however, is brutal and you can’t get larger in scope, as it encompasses society as a whole, corporations, law, communication, all of it.

[1] Theory of Society, Volume 1+2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann

I am trying to help you

Quite the opposite. You are now trying to reframe your accusations as help.

1. I surely didn’t ask for accusations nor for help with this. If I need any, I will let you know.

2. Your assessment of my situation is incorrect and as such I'm removing myself from this conversation now. But I want you to have the last word, so, go ahead.

Let me summarize your chain of arguments up to this point:

“I don't think you really get either Design Thinking or Systems Thinking”

1. In the strict sense of science, Design Thinking is not a methodology, whether you like it or not. Look it up.

2. If you have no more arguments to offer besides falling back to accusations again and again, then I'm afraid I can't take you seriously.

There are so many subsets of the theory and I have no idea what would interest you and what you already know. Have you seen this paper?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220231906_The_Origi...

It leans a bit more on the cybernetic side but gives an overview and has what is possibly equally important as the text itself: some 7 pages of references. I started with openly accessible academic papers instead of books. If you find something interest there, you will surely have the direct reference to proceed further into that direction right at hand. Papers are shorter, you can switch the direction more easily. The price to pay is to miss the bigger picture a couple of times (which a book may convey) until some loose ends come together and create an aha moment.

(given what you said I would stay clear of all reinterpretations/popular science books. I would read something straight from the source, the people in the field, in whatever form it may show up.)

So what do you mean by "Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid"?

It’s its approach to Systems. Take the 5 stages. Why 5, not 10 or 3? Why stages at all? Who’s to say? Why not enable people to create stages themselves and run from there? Or whatever fits their business.

Why not teach methodology instead of method?

I'm not sure why you think it's relevant here.

I can only repeat myself: The value is in the process of inquiry itself. Systems Theory is not a set of methods. It is an epistemological based theory and requires a shift in how a person perceives reality, the often cited worldview. How do you know what you know? By assuming 5 stages? Is that objectively induced? What happens to that if looking through the lens of radical constructivism? The theory requires to incorporate multiple worldviews and with that, negates the assumption of an objective truth.

Then we actually agree on parts? Well, excuse me if I interpreted you wrong.

we have no idea if the purchaser or the seller gets more utility out of each dollar.

Assumption: the seller opened the auction with his actual hard lower limit, he should be happy with what he gets as soon as that limit gets hit.

The original poster said that he essentially altered the bid in favour of the seller. However, the exchange of subjective equal values is based on the balance between the two parties and now gets distorted in favour of the seller and in detriment of the buyer. This should result in win/lose if I am not mistaken.

So, maybe I get you wrong, I am not sure right now.

If you think using Design Thinking goes against Systems Thinking

No, not against. One is a subset of the other. but you are free to prove me wrong.

likely doesn't offer any advantage over the standard tool?

The process in itself has value. Are you sure about the meaning of epistemological?

Around ten years ago, I was a designer for some 20 years. A strange path led me to a different place which is intermixed or adjacent to the field of organisational theory.

At that time, I decomposed problems too, maybe a bit differently than a developer, I can’t really know. I still decompose, except that the difference to the past is that analysis only makes up one part of the larger whole. I knew many designers which never did either.

I agree with you that there are some areas which do not need theory. That depends on where you define the system boundaries. In the example of a carpenter: Yes, 30 years, the person indeed knows that stuff. One of first question of Systems Thinking, however, would be: What’s the reference system, is his company viable in the future? I very much believe that if you apply this to complex projects, to ‘communication and control’ of an enterprise, that one should know the backstory.

The reductionist approach got us to the problems, applying reductionism to a theory trying to solve reductionism is courageous. In my opinion, the method which is used to teach must incorporate the principle which it is trying to convey. An alternative worldview needs to have a starting point somewhere, and I like to think it starts with the education, which is not to say that I do not understand the urge to speed up absorption of the theory.

I practiced Design Thinking at IDEO for 10 years

That may possibly explain your motivation but even ten years do not make it right, nor the speed of teaching.

You are saying it yourself: internalising the very abstract system for decomposing and adapting it has a value of its own you cannot replicate by pre-solving it. The spinning-off of Design Thinking only accomplished further segmentation of a space which was already too fractured and was a disservice to the field.

I don’t think we will approach a consensus here, and that’s fine.

That is exactly the point.

Taking a theory (Systems Thinking), a mental model which has the primary goal of holistically identifying, describing, and understanding wholes and reducing it down to a set of methods/framework out of ease of use (the pragmatism) is exactly the wrong approach in my opinion.

Systems Thinking and all of its applications scenarios are based on epistemology. To turn it into a recipe is a wrongdoing. The whole notion is that one size does not fit all.

The operationalization of Systems Theory for a given case at hand is the responsibility and the transfer function of the operator whose approach this is. The process itself yields understanding and should not be abbreviated.

Please don’t use Design Thinking.

Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories.

Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics).

I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI

This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour.

(Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking)

My 2c. I'll show myself out.

You are falling for the zero-sum fallacy and mixing categories on top of it.

Globally, wealth gets created, which leads to a positive-sum game, not a zero sum game.

On the other hand, if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money available in that said system except 100 currency units, the remaining 100 humans are in possession of exactly 1 currency unit. The suffering for the 100 humans is significantly higher for the 100 than for the one, even though it fulfils your premise of a balanced global suffering index.

Before the trade, the value for the seller and the buyer was zero. Whatever the trade involved, the moment the minimum of the seller gets hit, it becomes a positive-sum game.

If this would not be the case long-term rise of stocks would be impossible. That would mean a stock rise is a redistribution and you take it away from someone else . So, if the stock market were truly zero-sum, every currency unit earned would require someone else to have lost one.

Question: what kind of fun you are referring to here?

Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?

— Riker (TNG, Generations)

Can you give an example? I am looking for a way out.

I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I couldn’t keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate a full lock down on everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two.

I cannot recommend NTLite enough.

If it has to be Windows, just remove all the shit of Win11 yourself, set it to unattended installation with a local account, remove the hardware requirements barrier while you are at it, remove the games, controller add-ons, virus scanner and whatever else you would like to (the windows store?) and create your own LTSC.

This isn’t a solution to the problem and missing the point of the whole argument. But if it has to be Windows, I would recommend to try it.

1] ntlite.com

I self hosted for 20 years, worked flawlessly, gave up because of security concerns. I would like to go back to it.

Question: How do you manage the security on such a box? Is there any simplification I missed?

I couldn’t keep up with it. So many patches, unrelated to mail, broke something in the stack, bringing the server into a critical state. Often, I had to lock down everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two. These were two days without mail.

Yes. Danny Hillis’ Thinking Machines Corporation, an AI company which created its own massive parallel processing supercomputer hardware.

“We are building a machine that will be proud of us” was their corporate motto. And that was in 1983.

One of those Machines is on view at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Back then, they could be ordered in “Darth Vader Black”, no kidding here. You can also see a couple of them (the CM-5) as the stereotypical supercomputer in the original Jurassic Park.

More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...

I am still irritated by the name of the company.

What is the reasoning behind these schemes? The hope that bits of the properties of legendary companies will rub off onto the new venture?

As if naming the next best venture PARC will inevitably create a breakthrough in networking just by the arrangement of four letters.

Yeah that’s a nice addition. However, remember that reassembling is synthesis, not emergence. Emergence is what you /may/ get by reassembling, but must not. We are talking about systems, thus, in the end, you are correct. It’s just that the terms seem to be a bit muddled.

That is an issue prevalent in the western world for the last 200 years, beginning possibly with the Industrial Revolution, probably earlier. That problem is reductionism, consequently applied down to the last level: discover the smallest element of every field of science, develop an understanding of all the parts from the smallest part upwards and develop, from the understanding of the parts, an understanding of the whole.

Unfortunately, this approach does not yield understanding, it yields know-how.

If I am not mistaken, we are already past that. The pixel, or token, gets probability-predicted in real time. The complete, shaded pixel, as you will, gets computed ‘at once’ instead of layers of simulation. That’s the LLM’s core mechanism.

If the mechanism allows for predicting how the next pixel will look like, which includes the lighting equation, then there is no need anymore for a light simulation.

Would also like to know how Genie works. Maybe some parts get indeed already simulated in a hybrid approach.

Okay, here we go: No, I am not saying anything you said.

This was not about a gentleman's agreement at all - that was a rhetorical figure to demonstrate that it is not the game which is at fault, it’s both. The behaviour of the game and the behaviour of the actors in that game, and almost in any other game is not an input -> output scenario, but instead, the output of the loop will be the input of the exact same loop. That is the definition of a feedback loop. It’s all recursion.

By shifting the responsibility to the ominous “game”, which is just another term for a system, you exclude the elements of a system from being part of the system itself.

There is a whole branch of science occupied with this. System Dynamics, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and whatnot. The argument that actors in a system are decoupled from the system or the environment as in a closed system approach is factually wrong. Apart from laboratories, there is practically no closed system on this planet.

The phrase “hate the game not the player” is cybernetic nonsense with the sole purpose of giving up responsibility. It does not matter that it gets repeated more often than not. It won’t be correct, no matter how many times the figure is used.

That is a completely false premise.

The game would not exist if there were a consensus among players to not play.

Technically, this is not linear as you argue, instead, this is a feedback loop. The game influences the actors, the actors influence the game.

To prevent an unwanted outcome, you must interrupt the loop at an arbitrary point of your choice.

Never heard of that one. Could you provide sources for the argument?

You are talking as if someone is actually looking at the problem. is that so? Because if there was such a feedback loop that you seem to think exists in order to correct this issue, then where is it?

Yes, the problem is known and actually worked on. There are several approaches, some being initiated on country level (probably because EU is too slow) some within the institution, as this one:

https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects...

No, I don’t think that institutionalised feedback loops exist there, but I do not know. I can only infer from observation that they are probably not in place, as this would, I would think, show up as “move fast and break things”.

So we should not hold people accountable when they make mistakes and waste everyone's time then?

I have not made any direct remark to accountability, but I’ll play along: what happens by handling mistakes that way is accountability through fear. What is, in my opinion, needed is calculated risk taking and responsibility on a base of trust and not punishment. Otherwise, eventually, you will be left with no one taking over the job or people taking over the job who will conserve the status quo. This is the opposite of pushing things through at high speed. There needs to be an environment in place which can absorb this variety before you can do that(see also: Peter Senge’s “Learning Organisation”).

On a final note, I agree that the whole lobbying got out of hand. I also agree on the back-door issue and I would probably agree on a dozen other things. I am not in the seat of generally approving what the European Administration is doing. One of my initial points, however, was that the EU is not “the evil, dumb-as-brick-creator” of the cookie-popup-mess. Instead, this is probably one of the biggest cases of malicious compliance in history. And still, the EU gets the full, 100% blame, almost unanimously (and no comment as to what the initial goal was). That is quite a shift in accountability you just were interested in not to loose.

That possibly cannot be the common notion to frame this.

I agree with some parts it but also see two significant issues:

1. It is even statistically implausible that everyone working at the EU is tech-illiterate and stupid and everybody at HN is a body of enlightenment on two legs. This is a tech-heavy forum, but I would guess most here are bloody amateurs regarding theory and science of law and you need at least two disciplines at work here, probably more.

This is drifting too quickly into a territory of critique by platitudes for the sake of criticism.

2. The EU made an error of commission, not omission, and I think that that is a good thing. They need to make errors in order to learn from them and get better. Critique by using platitudes is not going to help the case. It is actually working against it. The next person initiating a EU procedure to correct the current error with the popups will have the burden of doing everything perfectly right, all at once, thought through front to back, or face the wrath of the all-knowing internet. So, how should that work out? Exactly like this: we will be stuck for half an eternity and no one will correct anything because if you don’t do anything you can’t do any wrong! We as a society mostly record the things that someone did wrong but almost never record something somebody should have done but didn’t. That’s an error of omission, and is usually magnitudes more significant than an error of commission. What is needed is an alternative way of handling and judging errors. Otherwise, the path of learning by error will be blocked by populism.

——- In my mind, the main issue is not that the EU made a mistake. The main issue is that it is not getting corrected in time and we will probably have to suffer another ten years or so until the error gets removed. The EU as a system needs to be accelerated by a margin so that it gets to an iterative approach if an error was made. I would argue with a cybernetic feedback loop approach here, but as we are on HN, this would translate to: move fast and break things.

and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance,

And that is exactly the point. Thank you. What is encoded as compliance in your example is actually the user experience. They off-loaded responsibility completely to the users. Compliance is identical to UX at this point, and they all know it. To modify your sentence: “and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than user experience.”

The other thing is a lack of differentiation. The high penalities you are talking about are for all but of the top traffic website. I agree, it would be insane to play the gamble of removing the banners in that league. But tell me: why has ever single-site- website of a restaurant, fishing club and retro gamer blog a cookie banner? For what reason? They won’t making a turnover you dream about in your example even if they would win the lottery, twice.