Future Branching & Perspectives

Watching a blue truck pull out of a parking space on Breitestrasse. The future is determined by your perspective in an instant.

My immediate thought was to keep looking at the parking space, using that as my unit of analysis. Over the next three minutes I would already see a new smaller truck park, and a garbage truck pull alongside and leave.

And yet, if I’d have adopted the perspective that the system was defined by the original trick, then I would be in a different world, a future where the surroundings keep moving as the truck makes its way through Berlin.

Perspective change is a very simple concept. And yet it is incredibly powerful. Everything is likely to change based on your perspective. The past. The present. And the future.

A handy device to thinking about systems!

PS the space was then empty for the next four minutes… And no idea where the truck went to!

Use of network science to design programs and select tools to achieve end goals

Also interpretation layer on events that can be used to explain outcomes and steps leading to outcomes.

An inspiration! Batman movie, with Robin asking five kids to alert homes nearby, two blocks each. Way of leveraging the network to achieve an end goal:

- more quickly than linear methods
- more likely to work (more credibility and urge to act in the agents)
- less resources

For network thinking to work need to have network science, a method for end goal program interpretation and design, and a toolbox of techniques.

Dissipation

Why do some stories that are big then dissipate after a few days (or less)?

Iranian hostages in Syria
Bulgarian bombing of Israelis

And yet Teddy Bears in Belarus

Most things dissipate - spread of non-interest? Absence of acceleration factors? Also context that event taking place in
- superseded by other events?

Interesting to understand another dimension of the spread phenomenon - how do things stop?

Driving at 80kmph on a Berlin freeway, the cars in front and in the rear view mirror look like they are stationary. Inside the car, everything looks stationary. And yet the rest of the world flashes by. And the whole road itself flies at 1000kmph on the big aping ball we call home.

A conversation at a Berlin lounge bar, outside, warm summer’s day. A discussion about reality, and an attempt at finding some common, trustworthy examples of a singular truth. Two people on top of a building I think, dropping things and taking measurements with the same instrument. A universal result, for sure. Well, again, it all is relative to the viewpoint of the observer, and the perspective of the protagonists, even in the thought experiment.

Perhaps, then, it is relativity that is the true constant. Everything depends on the perspective of the observer. Systems change entirely, even physical systems, based on the observed stance.

You look in the sky with a naked eye, you see the moon and stars. Telescope, more detail. Background radiation? Light shifting? You keep looking at the same bit of sky and keep seeing different things. And, in all likelihood, the person sitting next to you may see different things. The data you gather can be interpreted in many ways.

And, sometimes you as an observer get it wrong. For many decades chemists investigated phlogiston in total confidence of its presence. They were wrong. Wrong lens.

More thinking to do on the subject, and not my first dive in either. It’s important for some work I’m doing on how complex systems and networks become configured based on the end goal of any one of the participants (elements in my terms, nodes on network terms). Interesting things to think about on a balmy Wed night.

How did we start eating wood pulp / cellulose …

To work out the likelihood of things happening or not happening, we have several methods. The probabilities that emerge are derivatives of the underlying data / observations / system dynamics.
We put confidence in probabilities as being somehow ‘real’ - but they are derivative artists.

Tactics for compliance taking prescription drugs - I take propecia daily to keep my hair on. Packets have seven pills. I used to forget to take them… And I realized that it was the transition day that killed the routine. I’d finish a pack, throw it away, and I’d no longer have the pills in the normal place.

Easy solution. On the day I finish the pack, I immediately take out a new pack from my supply place. I then take the last pill, and throw the old pack away.

Compliance… Now practically 100%. Easy

It is not disembodied, it is connecting. We see people having a great time, and we see invites to events.

It is a platform to spread social behaviour, by it’s very nature. So even if individuals might want to be isolated, it has a contrary effect of connecting them, and putting pressure on those individuals to conform with whatever the new social norm is propagating through the overall network, and the individual networks they are connected to.

Moreover, those who are connected to more people will be exposed to more information and social behaviour. Especially if their friends are connected to relatively large friend networks themselves.

It is possible that the observed or reported behaviours of social isolation was an over focus on those who were isolated (the ‘looking for my keys under a street light’ research problem). Also that the network itself was less social.

However these dynamics have changed rapidly, then if the isolation argument was ever a truthful or fair observation of mass behaviour. Now it is social, and it is driving in-person meetings and conversations more than ever.