Stress Failures versus Decay Failures

There is a rich history to the idea that the state of your personal environment reflects the state of your mind. So a cluttered office reflects a cluttered mind, for instance. This is why I made the connection explicit and foundational in Tempo by assuming that designed environments are primarily projections of mental models, created via codification and embedding into fields-flow complexes (the big brother of systems and processes).

Clutter is the most obvious manifestation of the mind-environment mapping, but I want to comment on a less-appreciated one: brokenness. 

There are environments where things are in a constant state of disrepair and brokeness. What do such broken environments reveal about the mental models that created them?

Brokenness implies a physical failure in the past.

There are two major sources of failure: operational stress and decay.

Operational stress failure happens when a heavily used system is subjected to a rare loading condition that breaks it.

Decay failure on the other hand, happens when a rarely used system is degenerating internally through disuse, until a common loading condition is enough to break it.

An environment that is in a constant state of brokenness because operational failures are coming in faster than repairs can be made is a state of war. One that is in a constant state of brokenness because things are decaying and collapsing is in a state of atrophy.

Neither is sustainable. A state of war must eventually lead on to victory or defeat. This kind of brokenness requires stepping back to rethink mental models and modification of field-flow complexes. If the rare loading condition is truly rare (example, Katrina), you might need to rethink your insurance model. If a once-rare loading condition is suddenly common, you need to redesign the whole thing operationally.

Atrophy happens either because nothing is happening in your life (so you need to get some action going) or because you built useless/non-functional environments. A state of atrophy is also not sustainable. It can turn into gangrene. You must either excise the decaying portions to protect the healthy portions, or start subjecting them to stress so that they start to regenerate.

Healthy environments aren’t unbroken ones. They are environments where different things get broken as time progresses, repair is mostly able to keep up and the brokenness does not spiral out of control.  The variety in what breaks down suggests that your mental models as well as the environment are evolving in a healthy way. If the same thing keeps breaking down, there is something stupid in your thinking.

Repair must also be able to keep up. If it overtakes to the point that your environment is routinely in a state of perfection, you are not doing enough. If on the other hand, brokenness accumulates to the point where you are constantly fighting fires, you need to upgrade capabilities all around.

Five Years of Blogging

July 4th, 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of ribbonfarm. Now that I’ve completed a retrospective of five years worth of writing through the last month, I figured it was time to step back and put the whole thing together. Here’s the picture I came up with.

Before I give you a tour of SES Ribbonfarm (that’s “Slightly Evil Ship”), some housekeeping matters. I now have a glossary, which many of you asked for, and a For New Readers page. Links to both are on the menu bar. The latter contains links to the four roundups I did in June, as well as downloadable epubs and links to reading lists of the posts on readlists.com (you can use their app or send the lists to your Kindle or iPad).

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for more than a couple of years or two, and have useful thoughts for new readers, please post them as a comment on that page. This should also be a good page to point people to if you want to introduce them to ribbonfarm.

Now for the ship.

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Not Important, Not Urgent

In Stephen Covey’s famous important/urgent 2×2 diagram, why is the not important/not urgent quadrant even there (other than for geometric completeness)? If you’ve always got things going on, the other three quadrants always trump the NI/NU quadrant after all, so do things in it every get done? Do they need to?

I claim that the critical NI/NU stuff is stuff that usually only gets done when it moves to one of the other quadrants. When it isn’t being done, it exists in a state of brokenness. This is okay. Wanting to eliminate all brokenness from your life is practically the definition of OCD.

Most of us live in a state of constant semi-brokenness due to things in the NI/NU quadrant that we never seem to get around to.

Here’s how this quadrant works.

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Fertile Variables and Rich Moves

Engineers and others attracted to comprehensive systems views often fail in a predictable way: they translate all their objectives into multi-factor optimization models and trade-off curves which then yield spectacularly mediocre results. I commented on this pathology as part of a recent answer to a question about choosing among multiple job offers on Quora  and I figured I should generalize that answer.

Why is this a failure mode? Optimization is based on models, and  this failure mode has to do with what you have left out of your model (either consciously or due to ignorance or a priori unknowability). If there are a couple of dozen relevant variables and you build a model that uses a half-dozen, then among those chosen variables, some will have more coupling to variables you’ve left out than others. Such variables serve as proxies for variables that aren’t represented in your model. I’ll overload a term used by statisticians in a somewhat related sense and call these variables fertile variables. Time is a typical example. Space is another.  Money is a third, and particularly important because ideological opinions about it often blind people to its fertile nature. Physical fitness is a fourth.

Fertile variables feed powerful patterns of action based on what I will call rich moves. 

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The Mysteries of Money

There was a brief period early in the life of ribbonfarm when I thought the blog was about business. But I was never quite comfortable with that idea, though I do write a lot about business matters.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I finally realized where I was going wrong: businesses, markets, products, even society, culture and civilization itself: these are all clumsy constructs that revolve around money. Money is the most basic stuff in this universe of consensual fictions that we call civilized life.

I am terrible at making money, but I have never understood people who don’t take money seriously, and have even managed to develop a disdain for it. I suspect it is sour grapes, pure and simple. Which is a pity, since money is absolutely fascinating stuff even if you don’t have enough of it to appreciate close-up or swim around in, like Scrooge McDuck. It is the fabric of social reality — stuff that is real because we collectively believe in it — the way space-time is the fabric of physical reality.

So with that bit of purple prose, I give you: the fourth and last sequence through the ribbonfarm archives, 2007-2012.

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Analysis-Paralysis and The Sensemaking Trap

Analysis-paralysis is when you get into a loop of continuous analysis that prevents you from breaking on through to the “other side” where action can begin. I am beginning to get a handle on the problem, but it is not going to make much sense to you unless you’ve read the book. So this is in the advanced/extra-credit department. Perhaps after some more thought I’ll be able to capture this idea in a simpler way.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen?

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Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away

Sometimes I think that if I were much more famous, female and in Hollywood instead of the penny theater circuit that is the blogosphere, I’d be Greta Garbo. Constantly insisting that I want to be left alone while at the same time being drawn to a kind of work that is intrinsically public and social. Simultaneously inviting attention and withdrawing from it.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Which I suppose is why ruminations on the key tensions of being a self-proclaimed introvert, in a role that seems better suited to extroverts, occupies so much bandwidth on this blog. That’s the theme of this third installment in my ongoing series of introductory sequences to ribbonfarm (here are the first two). This is the longest of the sequences, at 21 posts, and also has the most commentary. So here you go. I hope this will be useful to both new and old readers.

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Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models

In my early training in mathematical and computational modeling, an idea was drilled into my head by many teachers: make your models as simple as possible. But somehow, I’ve always resisted this urging. I’ve instinctively gravitated to greater complexity; even intractable complexity. Sometime later in my career, I encountered the slightly more refined principle: start with the simplest model of the problem that you don’t know how to solve. 

Still, I did not like the advice. Even with Einstein’s credibility behind it (“a theory should be as simple as possible, but not too simple”), something seemed wrong about the advice to me.

A few years ago, I found the key clue to the simplicity principle. A work colleague offered the principle: how you model something depends on what you want to do with the model. 

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Towards an Appreciative View of Technology

Recently I encountered the perfect punchline for my ongoing exploration of technology: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. The timing was perfect, since I’ve been looking for an organizing idea to describe how I understand technology.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Looking back over the technology-related posts in my archives over the last five years, this technology-is-nature theme pops out clearly, as both a descriptive and normative theme. I don’t mean that in the sense of naive visions of bucolic bliss (though that is certainly an attractive technology design aesthetic) but in the sense of technology as a manifestation of the same deeper lawfulness that creates forests-and-bears nature. Technology at its best allows for the fullest expression of that lawfulness, without narrow human concerns getting in the way.

I will explain the title in a minute but first, here is my technology sequence of 14 posts written over the last five years. The organizing narrative for the sequence comes from this technology-is-nature idea that informs my thinking, whether I am pondering landfills or rusty ships.

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Time Lensing

We all experience lenses and fun-house mirrors from an early age. Some people were glasses, while others have very acute vision, better than 20/20. Some are colorblind while presumably others are more sensitive to color differences. We know that there are birds and animals that see space very differently from us.

So we are used to the idea that our perception of space depends on how we see. We are used to the idea that if how we see space by default isn’t good enough, we can buy and use telescopes and microscopes to change how we see.

Time is actually a very similar dimension and exhibits exactly the same phenomena, but our intuitions around time are far worse.

For example, if you are angry or sick, time can seem to pass much more slowly than if you are having fun or are healthy. Alcohol generally slows down the perception of time passing (a drunken hour seems longer than a sober one).  Coffee speeds it up.

Various meditative practices or extraordinary situations (like being involved in a major fire, being on a battlefield, etc.) can make time appear to almost stand still, or make hours seem like minutes.

There has been some systematic study of these things (which I’ve referenced in Tempo, such as the early work of Ornstein), but in general, the phenomenology of time perception is largely unstudied. It is just hard to study in laboratory conditions. But it is not hard to study in your own life.

It is useful to think of yourself as going through life with varying kinds of time lenses stuck between your consciousness and the universe. Sometimes you are experiencing time through a microscope or telescope. Sometimes in a convex mirror. You can deliberately put on different types of time glasses for different purposes (coffee, alcohol, music). You can learn mindfulness meditation — the equivalent of getting Lasik surgery for your time-eyes.

The value of gaining some conscious control over your time-perception is that you can experience reality at different levels of resolution, both external reality and your own thoughts. Sometimes it is useful to see all the pores in your time-skin, just as it is useful to see your hair roots in a convex mirror while shaving.

If you are a computer science or information theory geek, you can think of consciousness as having a sort of raw bit-rate, and your time-lens as being able to experience that stream at a certain sampling rate and resolution.

But I am not particularly enamored of the idea of developing strong time-vision for its own sake. So long as I am wearing time-lenses appropriate to the task at hand, I am fine. I don’t need an electron microscope when a hand-held magnifying glass will do.