20 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Seeing Organizations as Biological Systems
There’s a continuing struggle between complexity and robustness in both evolution and human design. A kind of survival imperative, whether in biology, engineering, or business requires that simple, fragile systems become more robust. But the mechanisms to increase robustness will in turn make the system considerably more complex. Furthermore, that additional complexity brings with it its own unanticipated failure modes, which are corrected over time with additional robust mechanisms, which ... 1 
notes
notes- Other takeaways: Resilience, rather than efficiency. Holism, rather than reductionism. Plurality, rather than universality. Pragmatism, rather than intellectualism Experimentation, rather than deduction Indirect, rather than direct approaches
19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Protocells
In 2007 two researchers, chemist Martin Hanczyc and artificial life scientist Takashi Ikegami, who were collaborating across disciplines agreed to test a hypothesis about the earliest forms of life (Hanczyc et al. 2007). They hypothesized that life’s precursors would need to move around their environment to take advantage of a resource-rich situation on early Earth. Hanczyc made a model system to test this hypothesis using an oil droplet that he bestowed with an internal chemical reaction, ...Folksonomies: biology origin of life
Folksonomies: biology origin of life
1 notes
notesFrom Rachel Armstrong's "Alternative Biologies"
21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Consumers of Alternative News are More Likely to Fall for...
Most of the online activism Facebook pages contain claims that mainstream media is manipulated by higher entities (and thus the information is be not neutral or reliable). Such an antagonism makes any kind of persuasion process, even if based on more solid information, very dicult. As a response to partisan debates, the emergent groups of trolls began to provide parodistic imitations of a wide range of online partisan topics. Despite the evident parodistic (and sometimes paradoxical) contents...
1 Memes that are satirical or paradoxical.
07 FEB 2014 by ideonexus
Life Reduced to Bad Physics
Those reductionists who try to reduce life to physics usually try to reduce it to primitive physics—not to good physics. Good physics is broad enough to contain life, to encompass life in its description since good physics allows a vast field of possible descriptions. There is no reason why living beings should be compared to primitive machines which don't make use of feedback. 1 notes
notesGood physics is complex enough to account for life.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
You Can't Predict What You Are Going to Do
In the physical world, the only way to learn tomorrow’s weather in detail is to wait twenty-four hours and see, even if nothing is random at all. The universe is computing tomorrow’s weather as rapidly and as efficiently as possible; any smaller model is inaccurate, and the smallest error is amplified into large effects.
At a personal level, even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still can’t predict what you’re going to do. This is because your prediction me...Folksonomies: predictability modeling
Folksonomies: predictability modeling
1 Rudy Rucker on why our brains are like the weather, so complex that only the actual system can run the computation.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Think Bottom-Up
One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energ...Michael Shermer on how understanding the world in terms of emergence can help us better understand it.
