They’re mostly self-sufficient, actually... They all got software and seeds. That’s the basic necessities. - Kim Stanley Robinson , Green Mars Related: Whole Earth Catalog
Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones. The quote above is from Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic…
But Beer started from this realization: in a world of exceedingly complex systems, for which any representation can only be provisional, performance is what we need to care about. ( Andrew Pickering , 2010, The Cybernetic Brain ) Stafford Beer and…
The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary until very recent historical times…
Alfred North Whitehead : Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. And: Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number,…
“We use a lot of quotes at Tedium, but we’ve never done an issue of Tedium ABOUT quotations,” Ernie said when writing this piece. “Let’s fix that.”
Here’s an insightful excerpt from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 21, 2009: Users don’t care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don’t love ...