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Comment by surprisetalk | Hacker News Reader

To me, Christopher Alexander's work comes closest to describing "systems science". I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The Timeless Way of Building, and then skipping to the Nature of Order series.

I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces.

What's cool about Alexander's work is that he makes a great case that this stuff is objective phenomena that can be studied!

I'm planning to write much more about Christopher Alexander on my own blog in the future, but meanwhile I can recommend Dorian Taylor's excellent works:

• https://the.natureof.software

• https://doriantaylor.com

I gave a talk on this subject at DDD Europe this year, so keep your eyes out for "Timeless Way of Software - Taylor Troesh" on their YouTube channel :)

• https://www.youtube.com/@ddd_eu

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Interesting! Have heard about Christopher Alexander's work, but have never really jumped in. Maybe I should do that now.

>I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces.

Wow! Yes! Agree with this view that all design and organisation is mostly just the most optimal/favorable state for the entire system to be in. What constitutes as favorability might be low free energy, high interconnect, distributedness etc.

May I suggest you to look into the work of Jeremy England in a similar light of self-assembly and optimisation in non-equilibrium states? Some really really interesting takeaways there, me sharing some of my interpretations might constitute as epistemic noise as I'm not sure if I understand each bit of it completely well at a 100%.

There was a great article about him in Quanta, and you might want to check out his talk at Karolinska Institutet.

Thanks for the recommendations, and I'll look out for your talk!

I strongly recommend picking up Carliss Baldwin’s Design Rules. It is a great addition to the thinking done in Notes on the Synthesis of Form, in a more empirical and specific technological context (the advent of the computer).

Without knowing much about what you reference, this remembers me of the second law of thermodynamics [1], which coined entropy as a general concept for understanding many phenomena.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

Yeah, entropy definitely has been included in some forms of thought that are very correlated with complex systems. Schrodinger early on had a very interesting insight on life and entropy, people like Jeremy England are taking that view forward. Work by England, Crooks, etc. very beautifully relates entropy and the probability of any state x existing more than all others.

The information theory counterpart of entropy seems extremely relevant in describing coordination failures, some forms of stochasticness that aren't necessarily derived from lots of molecules with high degrees of freedoms interacting together. Also might hold high explanatory power in describing why trickle-down/bottom-up and top-down effects are slowly negated and diluted - although I believe this is fuzzy thinking and we need a better tool than just entropy to understand this.

Thanks!

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