pages 170-175

Get the Beat of the System
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. . . . study its beat. . . . watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who've been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. . . Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others.
. . .
Listen to any discussion. . . watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in "predict, control, or impose your will" mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it's doing it.

Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day
. . . scuttle them if they are no longer supported . . .

Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information
. . .

Use Language with Care and Enrich It with Systems Concepts
. . . Honoring information means above all avoiding language pollution. . . expanding our language so we can talk about complexity.
. . .
A society that talks incessantly about "productivity" but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word "resilience" is going to become productive and not resilient. . . . A society that talks about "creating jobs" as if that's something only companies can do will not inspire the great majority of its people to create jobs, for themselves or anyone else.
. . .
. . . first . . . [keep language] as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible. . . . [Keep] information streams clear.
. . . second . . . enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.

I've wished, a few times, for connective tissue between quotes and ideas better than simply linking thought A directly to thought B -- and realized that all that's needed is a place to put that connective tissue. I gave it a nice name, "synapses," because I wanted something brainy.

I'll see if this forum finds its use, but the idea is that I'll only use it when a connection between two things becomes large enough that it deserves a quick sideline describing the connection in all its strength, rather than lingering out of place on one end or the other of that synapse.

Perhaps in time this forum will be the most interesting of all of them.

Christopher Alexander talks specifically about the 20th-century mechanistic viewpoint multiple times throughout The Nature of Order, but I don't particularly have any quotes to pull at the moment.

~ The Nature of Order

". . . the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control."

~ Thinking in Systems

Quote from: p170We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
. . . Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity---our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

~ Inspiring Awakeness
~ Starseed Pilgrim and The Void - Two Strange Worlds of Light and Darkness

This synapse (the very first!) is about this reiterated idea that the 20th-century schools of thought regarding productivity and what not are harmful in specific ways. First encountered in The Nature of Order, synapsed in Thinking in Systems.

Quote from: p166People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems, analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

~ The Nature of Order, "20th-century mechanistic viewpoint" (A bad specific link, because I can't quiiite find anything specific - it's crystal clear in my mind, but not here. I need some connective tissue.)

EDIT: So I created a new forum for this! I'm excited for it.

~ The harmful industrial mechanistic viewpoint.

This chapter is great, really lovely. I'm going to be drawing more connections. I need a better way to draw connections than these links and backlinks... The thing is it's connected but not

I guess I just have a lot of books tied together by a huge web. Maybe these are "Systems Thinking" books, but they're not all about systems thinking in the way that this book is, they're just... thinking about things, and everything is a system... Anyway, I'm going to go one by one through all the "systems wisdoms" that this final chapter tries to describe. They are all good.

Quote from: 13:33Get your head around what [your audience] is doing. You don't just wanna know what they're playing, you want to know what they're watching, what are they wearing, what are they listening to, what are they reading, what are they talking about, you want to understand these people. And you can treat it like a fun exercise, you can treat it like you're a scientist observing a tribe in the Amazon, but either way, understanding your audience is key.

Audience. There's something about the word audience that grosses me out. Part of it is McWilliams' repeated insistence that "we are not normal people"... Are you saying that these people you're observing are "normal people"? I can't get that taste of alienation out of my mouth :/

Quote from: 11:10

How do you make a game when it's not for you?

How do you inspire yourself and your team to make something great?

Quote from: 9:14We just don't look like normal people. We don't act like 'em, we don't think like them

What a weird thing to repeatedly insist upon. Aren't we normal people? I think it's more important to understand the ways in which we are people, normal people, than to double down on this idea of alienating idiosyncrasy.

She shows a stock image of people standing around in office clothes...

McWilliams is drawing from modern popular culture as the bastion of goodness, which I'm absolutely not on-board with, but aside from that, I agree with the broad strokes, and based on the questions Momin asked, I think I will enjoy at least the strategies given by this talk.

I think it's still worth looking down on popular stuff when it is bad, and I believe my own interpretation of badness is far removed from "stuff that [I'm] not interested in."

Quote from: 7:32You need to remember that you are different. We [game designers] don't represent normal people at all. . . . We are just not normal people. And so what we value isn't the same as what normal people value. . . . What we are interested in is not the same, and our skill level is also very different from what I call "normal people".

Hmm. What is a normal people? Next McWilliams shows a slide of the top 25 TV listings. "Anytime you start to feel like you represent the mass market, look at that." She shows examples of popular media.

Quote from: 8:25And I think this . . . fact that we're not interested in the same stuff a lot of [the] time leads us to look down on the stuff that we're not interested in. . . . it's a dangerous line of thinking for us, since as developers, and as designers, and as creative people, our goal should be to put smiles on people's faces, to entertain them, to move them emotionally in some fashion, and we need to understand them in order to move them, especially if we're not part of the mass market.

My notes on the places to intervene.

-Changing numbers, buffers (stock sizes relative to flow rates), the plumbing (how stocks and flows connect), and delays in the system are lower-order intervention points. They are often physical and expensive to change one by one, and besides, they don't really get at the heart of the problem. Pay attention to these mechanisms, of course. They matter.

-Balancing and reinforcing feedback loops are powerful and more can be done with them. They are atomic in nature, each one the result of a simple "If X is higher/lower, do Y more/less". If you can change one of these relationships (the right one, in the right direction) it can have a big impact.

-Information flows, rules, and self-organization-- the ability to change the rules and structure. Education and enforcement and agency over the system itself. The previous item suggests that changing numbers directly is expensive and low-impact; instead, change the flows, change the loops. The numbers will work themselves out. The idea with this item, is that you don't have to change the flows or loops if you can change the nature of change itself. How is change effected in this system? If it's in the right hands, if everyone knows what's going on and why it's going on and how to change it (which correspond respectively to information, rules, and self-organization), the system will change for the better of everyone.

-Goals, paradigms, and transcending paradigms. Again, this flows down the list. In order to change a system, we understand its goals, goals come from paradigms, and transcending paradigms allow us to play with paradigms...

Go up another level, another level, another level. Appeal to the biggest arena you have real access to. Make changes there, while considering every subsystem. I would not be as comfortable thinking like this without the backing of everything I learned about local adaptation and living systems from The Nature of Order.