Seeing Whole Systems | Nicky Case

Good evening, they have opened the upper balcony for those of you who are just entering, feel free to fill it up there. It's going to be a very visual show and there will be great seats there so enjoy tonight as many of you know we're getting started. These talks often include a short film that somehow exemplifies long-term thinking along with the topic of the evening's talk and in fact for tonight the short film was selected by our speaker Nikki Case, please enjoy the pace It is all that physicist David Deutsch claims that science basically advances from explanation. to explanation, explanation, civilization and meaning follow the same path, the other side of an explanation is understanding and one of the synonyms of saying I understand is I see someone exceptionally good at

seeing

, it is our speaker, Nikki Case, so maybe you remember playing this game as a childhood monopoly or what should be called the game that ends friendships and destroys families, so yes, most of us remember having suffered this excruciating experience, but what you may not know is that the Monopoly was based on an earlier and, in my opinion, better game.

It has a secret history, so in 1866 Elizabeth McKee was born, daughter of an abolitionist who traveled with Abraham Lincoln and when she was young her father introduced her to the economic philosophy of Henry George, who saw the monopolies of his time as a problem. and advocated for a unique solution that would maintain the innovation of free market

systems

, but not as inequalities, and Lizzie was captivated when she was 37 and created a board game that took the complex

systems

of George's economic philosophy and explained them in a visual, tangible and playful way. She called her game the Owner's Game, it came out 30 years before Monopoly and was played as a slimmer, less crushing version of Monopoly, but this is the strangest thing.

Lizzie intentionally designed her game to break. It worked like this if you don't play Monopoly. I know what happens, players go around the board buying properties and collecting rent on the property, but this creates a vicious cycle where someone gets a very small lead at the beginning and is already guaranteed to be the winner within 15 minutes, so everyone has to do it. wait about four hours for the sweet release of death and that was Lizzie's point that this land rent economic system was terrible, it's a broken game, but Lizzie didn't want to just show a systemic problem, she wants to show a solution systemic, so Later he made a supplement to his game and together called them the owner game and prosperity, so it worked like that after everyone played the owner game and he was incredibly angry because then they would change to prosperity and until now parity. has the same rules as the landlord game but with a change instead of paying full rent to the landlord, the lorentz share would be paid to the middle of the board some communal fund and those funds in the middle of the board would be used to buy back the monopolies that arose during the landlord game, so first they will buy back the utilities and then they will buy back the railroads and finally, if there are surplus funds in between, they will use them to create a universal basic income which is actually what the mechanism of going in monopoly is: turn the board, choose, pass and get your basic income which was actually bad and, according to Lizzy's interpretation of George's economics, with this change in this rule, he which was once a vicious circle. now it's become a virtuous circle and everyone enjoys prosperity anyway, then some guy stole his design, turned shit and sold the pocket chimes and the

whole

family forever, but anyway this talk isn't about some obscure 19th century economic philosophy that may or may not work, so why did I mention the story of Elizabeth Nikki?

Well, we live in a post-TED Talk world, so I always need to start a one-story talk in two because Lizzie's creation is my favorite example of

seeing

entire systems speak hello. I'm Nikki Case and I explain complex systems in a tangible and playful visual way. I've made games and simulations about social trust, environmental economics, mental health, political polarization, alternative voting systems, and fireflies because fireflies are awesome and since you're here listening. In the meantime I will talk, you probably have a goal, you want to kill a dragon, we all care about some big problem, global warming, terrorism, pandemics, poverty, crime, war, you know, the usual and these big problems are not the dragon, the dragon is the set of systems. that come and create these problems the dragon is complexity the dragon is chaos now you may be thinking what am I saying a bunch of board games and stick figures will help save the world What I'm saying is yes, sure, why not, because There are three reasons why it is important to not only understand or describe abstractly these complete systems, but to actually see these complete systems and the first reason is to make the abstract concrete because scientific progress is not achieved by scientists floating on an abstract earth and climbing increasingly towards the abstract.

Today's world is created when we take these abstract ideas to our level where we can see them with our monkey eyes feel them with our monkey fingers many people think that visualization is just a pleasure for the eyes, it is just a way of wrapping gift ideas and deliver it to the masses real scientists can work in purely abstractions well considered the following in the 1940s french mathematician jacques hadamard surveyed one hundred of the best physicists and mathematicians of that time and asked them how you do your thing, how they think and It turns out that only a few of them actually think about mathematical symbols or use them in their everyday imagination and work, while all of them reported having seen what their theory is and, in fact, a third of them actually felt their ideas and theories in their hands on his muscles, including Albert Einstein.

This is one of the rare crazy quotes that is actually found in Einstein quotes and it goes like this: The words of language do not seem to play any role in my thinking mechanism. In my

case

, the thoughts are visual and muscular. Wow, so no real scientist doesn't just float on some abstract earth, they bring it down to the human level and so yes, visualization can help us organize our thoughts within ourselves, but it also helps us. communicate thoughts so number two is encourage communication because if we want to tackle the big problems we have to tackle them together, different people, different fields need to communicate, everyone needs each other, however when it comes to communication, words They're terrible as someone who using words now I can show you they're pretty terrible, so actually, when I was flying a couple of days ago from Canada, the border guard asked me, "Oh, so what are you coming here for?" and I said, "I'm giving a talk" and he said.

Oh, what's up and I said visualize systems? So what does that mean? I have no idea why yes, system, the word system itself is the vaguest and frankly useless word there is. I mean, they're probably more vague and useless words, but anyway system and on the other hand. I could use more technical and precise jargon, like the self-organization theory of nonlinear dynamics, but that would be jargon that makes it more difficult to not only talk to the public and policymakers that we will need to solve these big problems, But Olson's slang makes it difficult to speak. for someone who is outside your field or even outside your own subfield, however, I think that speaking in pictures gives you the best of both worlds because pictures are specific, as opposed to a word-like system, but they are also universals, unlike the non-linear dynamic Doubler, so you need both. images and words that you need to show and tell, so once everyone is using visualization to see their own thoughts and show their own thoughts to others, what is all that?

Well, visualizations number three can help guide us on our course. The officialization is something like this. a map and you know, maps have three purposes: one they show what we know, they show what we don't know yet, but the most important thing is that they guide us through complex and unknown territory and now you'll be thinking that yes we can. It's not possible to map a

whole

system by looking at whole systems, you can't do that and you're actually right so I don't know why I'm getting this talk, you know you're right, you can't see whole systems and you shouldn't, this is what happens when you are trying to map an entire system this is an actual slide from a military presentation given a few years ago it is about the war in Afghanistan and one of the generals said when a slide appeared one of the generals said once we can understand this slide we will have won the war, as you may have inferred, we don't understand this slide, what's the point, this is a bad map because, although it is incredibly detailed, it provides no guidance to give a completely opposite example.

Compare this to this map of where we are now in San Francisco, this map is obviously wrong. The roads are not white and yellow. The words don't float in the air, but the buildings aren't featureless gray blocks and if there were a giant red guitar pick. floating above us right now, I think we would have noticed it by now, but even though it has all the details wrong, it is incredibly useful just because, but you all know that all maps are simplified, but few people understand that maps are not They are useful despite being simplified. They are useful precisely because they are simplified, that is why in this talk I want to give you the tools, which are the three simple tools for you to see and play with the systems.

I want you to be able to pick up a pen after this or tomorrow. get a piece of paper, I didn't bring the paper and draw the systems in your own field or the big problems that interest you, so that's the revelation of why this is not just a trick, that's why I give all my 200 slides that It took me forever that dragon took me two hours, thank you, but yes, these tools that you can make and see in play with yours when drawing, these tools are concrete, they help you communicate and they will help guide Humanity in our course and while we set sail.

As we head towards unknown worlds, it is best that we follow the advice of ancient maps. There are dragons here, so once upon a time and yes, I'm doing the whole star story again. Once upon a time the British colonialists in India had a specifically problematic stent. poisonous cobras now the Indian population was used to these poisonous creatures but the British colonialists were quite terrified and they want to solve this problem so they offered a reward for every dead cobra you bring back, sorry you could get some cash and for later for a while it seemed to work, people were bringing dead cobras, too bad the population wasn't actually decreasing because that's when the British realized that the population wasn't decreasing even though they turned into all these dead cobras because they turned out to be intelligent and enterprising people.

They were actually farming these cobras knowing they could make quite a bit of money doing it once the British found out that, oh shit, we didn't know these savages would actually be intelligent human beings like the rest of us, they canceled their bounty and what it meant was that there There was no longer a financial incentive to keep the Cobras, so they would let them all go. Now a revelation, this story is apocryphal, but this is not exactly the only example of the British Empire ruining India and, to a greater extent, this story is that every time we try to slay the dragon of complexity it turns out that it is not just A dragon, not just any dragon, is a Hydra, you cut off one head and two more grow.

Too many drunk people, let's prepare some alcohol, oh no, now. gangsters like Al Capone there are too many diseases, let's put antibiotics in all our livestock, oh no, now there are superbugs resistant to antibiotics. I think the reason we have so many problems with Hydra is because we tend to think of cause and effect as linear to cause B because of C and so on, and if you're more sophisticated you might say: Oh, multiple causes for one thing. and a thing has multiple effects, but they are still lines, they are still lines of causality, they are still linear, but the point is that the world is not linear.

A crazy thing can be its own cause or effects later in time it feeds back on itself that's why it is called feedback loop but now how do we see and play with these feedback loops? Well, it's pretty simple, you get a piece of paper and you're done. get yourself a pen this one is for smiling whatever i'm not going to do probably locations firstYou draw a bunch of circles for whatever you want to represent, such as a simple ecosystem, hairs on links, then you draw the relationship between these things, for example. here I have drawn an arrow with a plus sign for hares the Linksys because more hares means more Linksys because the hares feed the lynxes with their bodies and to complete the loop Lynx from nexus the hares I have a minus sign with the arrow because more Linksys means less Lynx hares like every hare and then you can extend this as much as you want to map your system, but don't go as far as this F like in Afghanistan guy, just keep it simple, by the way, if you want to draw your own systems and see them work In a simulation a few months ago I created a tool called loopy, a tool for thinking about systems, seeing and playing with complete systems and people have been really cool, users have eliminated all kinds of systems media economics mental health genetic regulation lo to be.

I started sharing this tool because I think it could be useful for you in your daily life or in your own work mapping systems and I also want to prove that I can actually do more than draw stick figures, so I'm putting up a simulation anyway , this is how loops are drawn, but how do these loops behave? There are three types of feedback loops, they are one of the reinforcement loops. When something speeds up, an environmental example, the heat causes the polar caps to melt, which means more dark ocean water, which traps more heat, which means even more ice melts, so, Oh, battery, this is sometimes called a positive feedback loop, but I think it's really misleading, you know? they're terrible because they think I'll pass it if it's really nice, but then the ice caps kick in and it's like, oh, those are bells, they're not positive at all, that's why a booster loop is like imagining, say, a ball on a hill, you just push the ball. a little bit and then it starts accelerating and accelerating down the hill and these kind of feedback loops, this creates exponential growth and a dramatic decline, but now there's also the opposite kind of loop, so the second balance loop is when something goes wrong. undoes and economics Full of these types of examples, they say that suddenly there is a shortage of something, so supply falls, but lower supply means prices rise, prices rise means there is a greater profit incentive.

A higher profit incentive means producers crave more supply and therefore unwind. and this is sometimes also called a negative feedback loop but that is again misleading because your body is full of negative feedback loops to keep you alive so it is actually not that negative and again you can visualize this as a ball in a valley if you need to give it. with a big push it will eventually return to its original place and this type of loop tends to create graphs like this that come to equilibrium or oscillate around a point or some mix in between where it oscillates and then damps and then goes to equilibrium, but now here's our strangest type of feedback loop number three, chaos and this isn't actually a loop, but it's one of the reasons looped systems are so unpredictable.

I want to give a concrete physical example. Let's consider two pendulums swinging side by side. They don't interact with each other, so at this point it's pretty predictable, but if you put a pendulum at the end of another pendulum so that there is a feedback loop between the two pendulums, you'll get chaos like one of those robotic arms. that short video above and it's not just that this is really hard to predict, as you know, it's been shown mathematically in chaos theory that the smallest amounts of error make it completely impossible to predict, so no, we're not even talking about this. the climate or the economy or foreign policy this is a pendulum it's two pendulums so what can we do with these real world systems?

The moral of this story is that prediction is for fools, but what does it mean that she does? I mean, we should Don't give up, don't think about saying the pinball game, it's a totally chaotic system, you can't predict it even a second in advance, but that doesn't mean you can't have better or worse players, in fact, To become a better player, what do you have to do? is to create a tighter feedback loop to quickly see what is happening in the machine and quickly play with what is happening, well, play with visual machine inputs, tangible output, view and play, these are the three tools that They help us map systems, reinforce loops, balance loops, chaos, but if these tools cannot predict our course, how can they guide our course well?

These tools provide very solid guidance, which is this countering loops with loops, a concrete example. Think about a simple thermostat, none of that fancy stuff, just a good, honest thermostat, like you know. a thermostat doesn't use Navier's Stokes Fluid Equations - Simile and Predictive Thermodynamics in your house, no, it's just a simple balance circuit, if it's too cold, turn up the heat, if it's too hot, turn off the heat and you're done. , imagine the ball. in the valley it just keeps you out of balance if the thermostat doesn't predict the future, doesn't even remember the past and yet this humble thermostat can keep you nice and cozy on a windy day and that's how we should approach complex systems. not by trying to predict whatever in the future because prediction is for fools, but by changing loops with loops we can create reinforcing loops to increase the things we value and create balancing loops to maintain the things we value just like Elizabeth did McGee. showed that with a simple change we can transform a vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle, maybe with a simple change in the way we see systems we can outsmart the Hydra, so now I live in Boston, on the east coast, and many of my friends there. who's been there a while has a story everyone remembers the day keep your eye on an arrow everyone remembers the day this happened August 14, 2003 several states in the northeastern United States and the midwestern part of Canada experienced what was then the second largest blackout of all time in the world 55 million people were left without power, some of them were without power for up to a week and which could cause so much chaos given that no foreign power has ever shut down the US power grid, especially on this scale, who was it?

This master criminal who successfully launched an attack on our own infrastructure, the culprit was a tree. It was a nice summer day so people turned on the air conditioning which heated the wires and because metal expands when heated that caused the wires to sag and it's sunken enough for a tree in Ohio I could reach that wire and set it on fire, which is fine, actually it's normal, this happens all the time, but I mean the trees probably don't scream when it happens, but you know it happens all the time. time and this usually only resulted in one power station being out of service, but due to a software bug they were unable to send automatic alerts to neighboring power stations, so it took an electrical charge and passed it on to its neighbors . power plants, causing them to become overloaded, so they passed their load on to their neighbors, causing them to become overloaded, which created a vicious cycle that spread across the Northeast and caused a blackout.

This isn't the only example of something bad cascading throughout an entire network. For example, the 2008 financial crisis affected a handful of banks in the United States. I made some bad bets, then something happens and then the fat burns, that's because we live in such a connected economy for better or worse, or we think about epidemics, one patient zero a little, while then millions die better because they were already connected again for better or worse, and behind all these systems there is something called attractors, they called them attractors because they attract the system towards different things, in this

case

they all attract the system towards failure and I think the best way to understanding attractors is if you can guess to see them like that.

Imagine you have a ball on an office shaped hill and let's say the left right position represents that you know how good or bad something is, so if the balls are on the left, okay, that means none of the central The banks are still alive, but the ball was completely to the right, which means that all the power plants have failed. The banks are all bankrupt. I also want to clarify that the up/down axis is neither good nor bad, it is stable or unstable, so if something is really if the ball is very high in the air it is quite unstable, but if it is on the ground close to the earth, It's pretty stable and now stable and unstable again the words are terrible, they have positive and negative connotations, but here's the thing, here we have a good but. unstable situation and also a bad but very stable situation and these mountains are what we saw earlier, reinforcing loops, a ball on a hill, so for example, you know AB, a reinforcing loop in the power plant, the example is that the power plant fails and cascades to the next ones. or one bank fails in that cascade to the next banks, it keeps the ball rolling and the valleys correspond to balance loops of the ball in the valley, for example, for the power plant example, you know that eventually you will run out of power plants to fail and to The banks eventually you run out of banks to go bankrupt so the ball stops at the bottom of that valley and these valleys are the attractors because they attract the ball to a certain point, in this case it fails so now imagine that you are standing next to this ball. and you're a complete moron, so you push it a little and with a little push it passes a tipping point and then gravity takes over the ball, it will quickly roll down the reinforcing loop of the mountain and into the balance loop in the valley the attractor the valley of death and also you can see that if you went down and were nice for once and tried to undo all the damage, it would take you a lot more effort than it took you to push the ball in. first place to last is why a blackout can happen in a few hours but fixing it took weeks or why recession can spread around the world in a few months but fixing it took well, we are still living the consequences sometimes it has the opposite problem instead of something bad that cascades throughout the network, the entire network has already failed and you are trying to fix it, but as soon as you try to fix one part, the rest of the system conspires against you to try to do Your part is to fail again in the jargon of systems thinking.

This is called an intractable problem, but we can also understand it visually. Just flip everything over, so now we have the same hill as before, but sliding from left to right and let's have the bad. There is something on the left and some good on the right now, so let's use an example of peacebuilding. The left is war. This part, so you're a part builder, you want to put a lot of effort into it. It will take a lot of blood sweat and it takes a lot of effort to push that ball to the small value that is up there to create a ceasefire to push forward a peace agreement and build a whole new democratic government, but the problem is that Even if you succeed, all you need is a little chaos and all your hard work has been undone and I mean, recent history has given us many examples of a new peace agreement or new democratic governments tragically collapsing again. in chaos because that is a fatality attractor that can also be visualized. this through simulations, so here's a simulation I made in emoji, hopefully it's better than the emoji movie, um, so yeah, you can visualize cascading glitches through the game, so here's the simulation what I made of an epidemic, so these are healthy people, but once, a little push of chaos, the ball keeps rolling, it affects people, it kills people and everyone dies well, almost everyone knows that half of They are fine, yes, so a little push and the ball rolls towards the attractor of doom.

Oh, and for the record, they are actually public health organizations. they use models like this not to predict but to plan and combat epidemics in real time, a feedback loop, they don't do it in a mochi, but you know, they use models, but yes, it is very difficult to do things well and it is very easy to break. Are we doomed to simply be like Sisyphus? Keep pushing the rock up the hill and wait for it to fall again to do it all over again. Well, only if we think like Sisyphus, only if we believe they are moving, are rocks moving. option, the real moral of this story is to not just movethe ball, moving the hills, which sounds ridiculous, but if you listen to me, yes, in the short term it seems that moving hills is going to be much less effective, right?

Yes, you moved the hills. hills and you change the hill slowly but it still seems like the balls stuck in the same valley you move it again and the ball seems like it still seems to be stuck in the same valley but one day you change the hills enough and now with a little push, You can get it to where you wanted to go in the first place, so now it's not only much easier to push it to the next valley, but it's also much more stable. Remember that the upper part of the city is unstable and therefore the deeper the valley is the more stable the system is in its new place and how the hills are changed, it does this by combating loops with loops, it can strengthen or weaken reinforcement or balance loops for different actions in two different loops, they are four different strategies, so you can strengthen a reinforcement loop to make a mountain higher you can strengthen a balance loop to deepen a valley you can weaken a reinforcement loop to shorten a mountain and you can weaken a balance loop to make a value valley shallower and remember again that valleys are attractors so you can weaken or strengthen the attractors at different points to guide the ball, the system to the place you want go, increase the things you value, keep the things you also value and vice versa for the things you don't want.

There are multiple valleys in all of these examples that I've given. Peter T. Coleman, the complexity scientists who apply systems to peacebuilding, has said something really interesting in his book the 5%, he knows that policymakers generally They see peace as the absence of war, that is, they mostly try. reduce conflict and assume that that is equivalent to peace, but that is linear thinking and these diagrams show us that that is not enough, that even if you make the valley of war shallower, that is not enough because it is also necessary deepen the Valley of Peace or create an entirely new valley of war. a valley where there was no one to four creates a new attractor because peace is not the mere absence of war health is not the mere absence of disease success is not the mere absence of disaster a mountain is not the mere absence of a valley let's have a story that isn't depressing for the first time sometime in the 1970s Thomas Schelling, a political game theorist, was sitting on a plane flying over his hometown in New York City and from high above Tom began to think about a big problem that exists not only in New York.

City, but also here in SF and actually in all major American cities, I mean, we are very divided by race, so here is the visualization from the New York Times depicting dots of different colors. different races as reported in the US census and this is what it was like a few years ago and imagine it has been much worse than in Tommy Schelling's time, so why is this the most common answer and a partially correct and important answer is that there are many races? top-down things that redline public housing policy, zoning, etc., but what is that that is not top-down like white flight or immigrant enclaves?

No one had a theory for how that could happen until Tom had an idea like Elizabeth McGee's 70 years before he simulated this. complex system like a board game, so imagine this old nerd making a board game on your flights, that's Thomas Schelling, so this game is for a single player and it's called segregation solitaire. Really get your name so the first step is to get out your chess board or draw your own chess board in step two place some pennies and dimes the pennies and dimes would represent different races and the board The chess board represents a C grid in which each square is a house or a place where you can live, so to start the game, place a bunch of pennies and dimes at random, make them well mixed, but leave some spaces, you know, leave some empty spaces so they can move so they can move later.

That's not how this starts. Truly integrated. Each currency has a coin of a different type. your neighbor and now, how do you play this game? What is the rule? So, there is only one rule and that's it. Each coin thinks for itself. I will move if less than a third of my neighbors are like me. These are fairly forgiving coins. Oh me. I can't hate pennies, some of my best friends are pennies. I love dimes, they have such an exotic culture, so yes, these are coins of relative tolerance if they are only upset with less than a third of the neighbors, which means everyone.

Of them, it's actually okay to be a bit in the minority, so although this is a pretty lenient rule on an individual level, this tiebreaker plays out in the full game, so let's play the game step by step, first you need to look for coins. who are the unhappy ones, so here we have two dimes, one unhappy and one happy, the top dime is unhappy because only one in five of its close neighbors likes it and the bottom one He is happy because two of his five neighbors are like that. the first one being less than a third of its neighbors, so we move the unhappy coins to a random location.

The important thing is that you don't think about this beforehand, you just move them to any random empty spot, but now this causes a cascade because this coin is now unhappy, now only one in four of its neighbors is like it, so which moves to a random empty place and this also happens to pennies and this keeps happening and happening and happening voila and now our coin society is totally divided. from the bottom up, so although each coin was quite tolerant on an individual level, on a collective level we have a completely divided and segregated society and this happens every time you play this game, it is in a state of tractor, it draws you to this type of separation. division and today we are so Tom created this as a warning and today we are separated, we are still separated by ethnicity and race, but also by ideology.

Billy Bishop wrote the book recently called The Big Sort, which argued that a lot of the political polarization that was manifesting recently has been driven by exactly this bottom-up mechanism: people are migrating to places, cities, that are more ideologically similar to them and, in any case, that is creating a loop of polarization that reinforces itself. Thomas Schelling pursued this idea for the next couple of decades and won the Nobel Prize with a happy ending for him, for the rest of us we still have to deal with the successes. Oh, by the way, if you want, you know you don't have to pull out coins and mentally calculate factions in your head, you can play this.

The game I made with Vihart is called an adaptation or bombing segregation solitaire called Parable of Polygons, so yes, instead of pennies and dimes you have triangles and squares, and like Elizabeth McGee extended the owner's game with a solution called prosperity, we. We have extended the blitz game, so the blitzes created showed us the problem and we expanded it with the solution: how to reverse segregation, how to create diversity from the bottom up, which I won't tell you about, you have to play the game to See it when it is completed. a bunch of individual parts that are simple but come together to create a completely unexpected hole called emergence, which is jargon and the words are terrible, so usually people describe this by saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is a Gestalt quote. psychologists Kurt Kafka this phrase is actually a poor translation of what Kafka was trying to say the phrase is best translated as the whole is different from the sum of its parts the emergence is everywhere in our culture political economy any human effort of the that we are capable of both the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds and lying among them is dangerously thin and it is not just the rise of humans it is also found throughout nature we have more signs of Amala that form snowflakes termites than They build complex architectures one ant step creates and acts a really efficient foraging algorithm.

I feel that the most beautiful and powerful reason for understanding emergence is what the biologist Eel Wilson called Concilium: the idea that we can unify not only all the sciences but also the arts and humanities, so here we have the physics that emerges in chemistry emerging in biology emerging in psychology emerging in sociology political economy history and technology so emergence I think is our best contender for what could really unify the arts and sciences and everything we care about now emergence is not going to be a theory of everything, but it could be a theory of everything else, so what I just gave you is a very vague word for a very vague pattern that exists in some systems.

Well, let's get down to it, what are the actual elements? emergency what are the details here how it works how it works to understand the items I like to visit an example of one of my fondest childhood memories I was 12 or 13 years old, I was very small and living in Vancouver at the time and we wouldn't need water. I don't remember why we were there, but I remember what the reef is and the starlings. Oh, you loved starlings too. Tens of thousands of them, they are beautiful and really creepy. There is like a silence. Shape-shifting Lovecraftian. beast from the sky some form of alien intelligence that you just feel that just by looking at it your minds will unravel, but in a good way because it's really beautiful because these starlings also present a mystery there is no boss, honey, organizing the choreography of all these things So how did they do it? presented this impressive collective dance no one else in 1986 the now main theory was presented by a computer scientist Craig Reynolds quickly Reynolds made a simulation called Boyd, which is how New Yorkers say Birds poit here is a more modern implementation of his program, as you can see produces quite realistic behavior even in 2d um and what's even more impressive is that the algorithm is incredibly simple, there are only three simple rules and they are rule number one: align your address with other Boyd's nearby, so pretend that you are chairs are from Boyd.

I'm here. everyone's looking this way, so I line up this way, well number two is move towards the other Boyd, so the suitors are Boyd. I'm here, okay, there, I'll move over there, oh yeah, there's a clicker that I forgot as a clicker. I can actually move, so move towards any of the Boyds unless rule number three is too close to the Boyds and therefore rule number three tells me to find a way to avoid hitting other birds. Also note that rule number one is actually a reinforcing loop because Aligning a Boyd creates more alignment, forcing the other nearby guys to align as well and then two other rules are actually a balancing loop because I It leads to a balance between how close the balance loop is, between too close and too far, so that's it.

Our two, three simple rules create these majestic flocks of starlings from the bottom up, but if you want even more lively behavior, you need a little chaos to make the starlings flock for the same reason that gazelles move their flocks or schools of fish in schools, yes, to throw. away from predators and yes darlings they only do these majestic dances only when there is a predator like a hawk that is my best hawk that is what you will get in any case they need a source of chaos but they also need a lot of starlings because 2 Sonics is not a flock, you need tens of thousands, you need a dense network of interactions, so finally here's what all the talk has been building up to: emergency elements, reinforcing loops that balance the loops of chaos and dense network of interactions, so if you want to create a map that can guide you through a complex emergent system the parts of your map your drawing tools are these faller and four elements and these are the elements you should look for reinforcement loops reinforcement loops balance network of chaotic interactions and we can really simplify Going further, you could say that the reinforcing and balancing loops are actually selection because they force the ball to roll smoothly toward a valley and an attractor, while the other two elements, the Chaos and interactions create variation.

Chaos is like a ball that really is yes, that's how chaotic and the interactions are like a bunch of balls that just crash into each other, which creates a lot of variation, so variation and selection or in other words, Evolution requires a very fine balance between variation and selection, you have too much variation and that's just random noise, you won't get anythinghelpful, but here's something that I really think, in terms of our culture and our cultural evolution, we're focusing too much on selection, you know, creating incentives for the things you want, creating sanctions. for things that aren't pushed as hard to optimize and that's fine, but if you select too much you can get stuck in a short-term solution or the jargon in evolutionary biology is Local Maxim, something like that. and also, but also neglecting the whole other half of the variation of evolution, so if you're working on environmental issues, you know that a healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity, so you find in a healthy human society, you also need diversity, yeah , diversity in gender, race, capital, diversity, that's important. but also diversity of ideas, beliefs, backgrounds, skills, solutions, etc., and here are some tips on how we can increase variation, chaos and interactions in our own society, instead of implementing a top-down solution, we could invite multiple competitive solutions.

From the bottom up, instead of separating people into different specializations, we could invite serendipity by allowing people to interact in different fields and, instead of asking people to increase productivity, let them also increase the game to doing things that are completely useless because the things that are useless are random. and things that are random are variation and variation is the true source of our evolution, so how is evolution designed? The answer is no. That is totalitarian madness. Do not do that. What you can do is design for evolution, so that one respects. people's own autonomy because it is bottom up and two, designing for evolution but not designing evolution, the system itself can surprise you with solutions you never thought of, in fact, evolution is such a good engineer that even our human engineers are copying evolution, there is a rocket. nozzles and antennas that are designed with these things called genetic algorithms that stimulate evolution, but for rocket antennas and nozzles, they create much better solutions than humans could find on their own, so all along we've been thinking in the chaos like an enemy, a dragon. kill but maybe just maybe we can create chaos our friend thinks of chaos as fuel if you're not careful thanks for getting a reference chaos is fuel if you're not careful it could set everything on fire but if we're smart and careful , chaos can be what drives us all forward and one of my favorite quotes that comes from being really used to it is that this evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design evolution greater sine revolution evolution upon revolution because the solutions of Top down generally go the way of our British colonialists and are cobra rewards, but bottom up solutions where the hole is different than the sum of its parts are chaotic, completely unpredictable and the most beautiful things ever. our universe has to offer, so it turns out that math I didn't actually say dragons here, it turns out only two historical maps have and one of them is the Lennox hunting balloon which was created in the year Oh 1510 and It is a beautiful work, it is a small hollow copper sphere, it has four. inches and a half wide and imagine this is 15 Ken, no one has ever seen a photo of the entire earth and at this point you could cut the entire world in your hands and this globe, the map was completely wrong, it was hilariously wrong Africa is like wither like you in a bath Asia is spread out like Laffy Taffy where North America is it just isn't there but as much as we can laugh at this map, um, keep in mind our own maps, not the geography, but the complex systems that actually affect and impact real people, millions of people, our maps of those systems are not much better, but we have to start somewhere and start with that piece of paper tanana, so in this 50 minute talk, Wow, now I have given three tools to map systems attractor loops and emergence and with these tools you can see and play with systems by drawing just playing doodles and these tools are just scratching the surface there are dozens of other visual tools like this stock and flow diagrams of two dimensional attractors, landscapes of evolutionary fitness, etc., but these three captured the core ideas of the systems and these core ideas will be our map and again a map shows us, yes, what we know and shows us what we don't know, but most.

Most importantly they exist to guide us so here is my personal guide on how we can tackle complex systems together one fight loops with loops to turn hills and three make chaos your friend so now that we have these tools, our maps in our guide, we can finally kill. the dragon of complexity the dragon of chaos and the answer my friends are very confident but here is something else we can do we can see the dragon honestly get out of our old linear mentality and honestly understand see this dragon as it really is and then we can play with the dragon, we will have to interact with the dragon no matter what, but we must consciously decide what kind of game we are playing, whether we are playing Monopoly or Prosperity, and we can deepen that feedback loop between us, humanity and the complex. systems that shape our lives the dragon and although we will never be the master of the Dragons nor does the dragon have to be our master we can make chaos our friend and together as a whole we can be something more than the sum of our parts thanks way of See, you mentioned in passing towards the end the Fitness landscapes.

You want to see a little bit about how, because evolution is kind of like what you have and what Fitness landscapes are, so Fitness landscapes are similar to the ball and hill examples that I showed. before, but okay, imagine, let me get the ball, imagine we have a landscape, this chair, um, so I finished the landscape, so instead, not in my first example the ball fell towards the valleys, but In the Fitness landscapes the ball is alive and trying. to get up is like trying to crawl uphill, however you don't have eyes so I can't see very far, although you can crawl uphill and realized that anything is oh I'm at the top so therefore I'm at the top, but I can't see very far, so I might miss a bigger hill like mine, so that's an evolutionary fitness scenario and I guess it works effectively the same way attractors do, just which, you know, flips over and actually to a large extent, it's like evolutionary mathematics, yes, mathematics by law of biologists, they use two-dimensional attractor diagrams to show how things evolve over time, so, as I remember, a of those fitness landscape lessons because the ball does it and they have, it's like that.

It's like trudging up the local hill and you don't see the fabulous mountain here and you just act local and blind, how can you get from that local Maxima to try it and what could be a higher heel? How does this work? variation variation Seymour, yeah, so if it's a ball and this, well, I guess it's less true and this could be true for biological evolution as well, but I'll start with how some rhythms inspired by evolution, so I'll use them, I'll try . to avoid the jargon, um, yes, as you mentioned, there is the problem that a ball can get stuck on a local hill but it doesn't know its global hills mm-hmm, the highest global hills like me, so one thing that you can do is the only one. it will get stuck only if it thinks that only if the ball only goes up hills, but if you have some variation, some chaos and it allows the ball to move downhill if you allow a lot of variation, just like this ball, Moo slid it down and bit it . of chaos ask you to go all the way down and then move even further up, if the balls are very lucky they can finally find a place that is actually higher than the previous hill and then you can start climbing to a global optimum bigger, a bigger hill.

Hill, you're using chaos to give luck a chance, but you're using chaos to give luck a chance, yes, of course, you're also giving bad luck a chance when you do that, that's true, so look, yes, that's why species go extinct, yes, the machine is actually a great explanation for why, so here's an evolutionary puzzle for why sex exists because, if you think about it, it's quite expensive that half of your offspring cannot reproduce on their own, so the main hypothesis is correct. Now you know that if you allow much more variation, you can vary 50% of your offspring's genes.

Imagine if 50% of your genes right now were randomly mutated, that wouldn't be very good for you, so mutation alone, John Holland, actually showed that evolution by mutation alone couldn't work, recombination is needed , so this is the main hypothesis for why sex exists even though it is so expensive, and it is that that extra variation that is the source of evolutionary adaptation is so advantageous that it is worth investing half your money . the offspring will not be able to create new offspring mm-hm on their own, yes, sexual selection supposedly appeared sexual reproduction, we and parasites appeared, yes, and parasites reproduce very quickly, organisms are advancing and you know, basically cloning and then the parasites could always beat them they couldn't evolve faster than the parasites unless they discovered the chaotic solution which was the right sex sex is pretty chaotic it's San Francisco I can do this show San Francisco is an attractor NOAA question in your trust game explanation sometimes you show things by concretely animating each move sometimes by abstractly graphing an entire tournament how do you decide between Wendi being concrete in the wind choosing to show abstraction I was really inspired by this interactive essay by Betts Victor, who is called up and down up and down ladder of abstraction, so your essay starts very concretely and steps one level above, goes up one level in abstraction and goes up another level in abstraction and so on, that's the type of pattern What I've been using in all my simulations and interactive games is to start super concrete and then build up to the abstractions, but as I mentioned above, understanding doesn't come from going higher and higher than the abstractions.

I guess it's better to think about it instead of going up. the ladder of abstraction, every time you pull the rung, you are actually going down the entire ladder, go back, go back to that complex diagram that that military man was showing, if we understand that the diagram will win the war, yes, and so says that group of generals. brings you in to help understand what's going on in a complex situation like, say, Syria and you get your security clearance, you're in the building, they show you all these various things interacting and water, how are you going to help them do something? more actionable? and understandable than that Graham who defeated them.

Well, first of all, I'm not going to be able to solve Syria in two minutes. I'm answering this question here, of course, but could you explain how the hill moves? How do you look for what are the reinforcing loops that make something good happen that you can strengthen? It's that kind of approach that you feel like, yeah, if I were to apply the three chaotic balls, sorry, it's the three lessons from this chat fight. loops with loops mmm change the hills and make chaos your friend okay, yeah, okay, it's not always good I guess so, a better way to say chaos is variation, um, so I'd say it's all working, you know, say, okay, let's start with all the variation selection.

The first thing is like man number three. I would think that a lot of the solutions in Syria have been very top-down and that's a lot of solutions and a lot of the peacekeeping community has been very top-down and I feel like that would be the case. It would be very beneficial to try more bottom-up solutions that get the local community to love the community and drive more efforts, which I know is a lot easier said than done, so again, I'm not going to solve this right here , but if we applied what I just mentioned to conflicts like Syria, this is how I would recommend it, so a local community story that you tell in your business around the prisoner's dilemma game that you have developed is the truce of Christmas that occurred in World War I.

I mean what happened and why it was interesting, just as background, the Christmas truce in the year 1914, sorry your nine teenagers, 14 were not there now, but the UA is honest, it was the First World War and on the front western battles. between the German and British trenches at Christmas you all know many of the trenches, not all but many, the soldiers on both sides of the trenchesthey lowered their weapons the trenches they walked across no man's land and celebrated Christmas together they buried their dead they sang songs and exchanged gifts and that's what's really amazing about this Christmas truce is that it wasn't actually a one-off, they really had a truce.

I'm very unofficial truces long before Christmas, so they had something called the live-and-let-live system that arose from the bottom up spontaneously in many of the trenches, in fact, from the top down the officers were explicitly trying to prevent this, they would order there, so okay, you have to shoot them. life in that system is, you know, you don't kill me, I don't kill you, so even when that's the case, I really like the story, even when the officers were directly ordering the soldiers to fire their weapons, the soldiers were firing weapons at very precise targets at exact times every day so each army can learn each other's patterns and even though they would shoot they would both live so if you play my game the evolution of trust is an explanation of how this trust can arise bottom up using Robert Axelrod's game theory of the iterated prisoner's dilemma and the entire business series I remember is solved by the iterated prisoner's game.

It is shown that people continue playing and basically realize what the troops have discovered. Discover that you can find a solution and pretend that you are having your or, but in reality no one dies. Yes, this is why a trench war is unique among all types of war because unlike most types of war, you most likely will not see the same specific enemy soldiers twice, if you have. Indeed, you haven't done your job, but in trench warfare you will encounter and face the same specific soldiers over and over again. Being the same specific closers is incredibly important, it was just the same general flag or enemy, so this. it doesn't work, but if it's the same specific individuals, then it's a repeated prisoner's dilemma and in that case cooperation can evolve, so there's another version of the local.

It's not just that they are not abstract, they are specific, yes, and the specific gives you the opportunity to find alternative solutions. but Kevin Kelley asked: can your ideas be used not only to understand entire systems but to build them as I age? Yes, they are like robots like artificial life that copies these things. I like how you accidentally made a mistake and said "I a because I a" it's really amazing. say more AI artificial artificial and say it today the words are terrible AI is artificial intelligence mmm I am the amplification of intelligence okay and I think a few decades ago there was a big debate about AI vs AI and the work I do I feel like it's more aligned with AI, at least its philosophy seems like the classic way right now is to replace human thinking or at least parts of human thinking, but augment and amplify our human capabilities, as I mentioned the way.

We advance not by making something abstract flow, but by acquiring incredible skills and bringing them down to our human level, so I simply showed a lot of complex and really chaotic systems and everything was done with human capabilities of drawing, seeing and that human that unique human gaming capability and Therefore it does not try to replace those human capabilities, it increases them. I think I shouldn't talk about central chaos. I've been playing with it so much or the war, yeah, so the all these elements of drink is kind of a book stopper here this is John Markoff spoke machines of loving grace or you basically detailed the history of the are the history of that discussion between a and I a and it's not surprising that he falls into the increased intelligence, which was kind of Doug Engelbart, the mother of all demonstrations, it works with the human like what they are like man anyway to answer your question Kevin , yes, so I didn't show the emotional simulation, but it is programmable and it is programmable in English, you select the sentence you want and all the code is in simple English and it is also crazy, you can program it by drawing, so right now this is the only tool I've created so far, but the good thing is a pen and paper are all the tools you really need to understand the systems deeply.

I feel like a weakness in my work that I want you to know is that it is very difficult to make it interactive and if I liked it, it is really difficult, yes, for someone else to make it interactive because the code is still stuck from forty years, but with a pencil and paper you can do it. You can draw your own systems tomorrow or tonight if you want. She originally went crazy with this dynamic he did. The prisoner's dilemma game is dynamic. What's the next interesting problem you'd like to solve that way? I don't like to figure it out, but explaining it you know knowing is half the battle yeah make visible yeah what tools came together um I really want to talk more. and show more about human cooperation because I feel like it's a really important topic, especially right now, but also, in general, okay, I want to get into jargon here, but I want to explain things like Elinor Ostrom z-- Commons governance , how people govern comments from the bottom up, so the traditional story is that, you know, the tragedy of the Commons, rational people will ruin comments completely unless they have a central authority or are privatized, but Elinor Ostrom has shown this empirically.

And in theory, yes, people cannot manage the Commons from the bottom up and that is definitely very, very important today, not only with environmental issues but also with the Commons like the democracy, norms, culture or economics, so some of the types of rules that she believes should be inferred from seeing these systems, fishing systems and water supply systems, etc., that were self-managed in a way healthy in the long term, that they needed some kind of limit, yes, and that they needed things like that, that there were rules that basically everyone had to understand and agree to, but there are also rules about how to change the rules so that they can improve this system or This is an infinite game, which would be another great project for you, thank you.

I'll make a note about the game as That or we can all relax and this actually gets to a question that Kevin Kelly has been asking for a long time. The foundations that fall now in the last 10,000 years that we can draw on in the next 10,000 years that we feel responsible for and how the type of tools that you are making clear help that process of basically thinking long term acting long term. term long term responsibilities embrace long term I mean, in a way, the vicious cycle that you showed at the beginning was that things go faster and faster and faster until it breaks, yeah and what comes out of it? what you already have or what you could have helped us achieve that would increase this type of activity framework in the long term?

So I'm not sure if this contradicts some of the Long Now members, but as I mentioned. our first prediction is for dummies so you can't predict you know the future yeah 20 years ago people didn't like both. 50 years ago, people predicted flying cars and all that kind of stuff, but no one predicted, you know the Internet or smartphones. and also for the record flying cars are called helicopters so yeah if you can even predict 50 years into the future and the technology is only accelerating how could we predict anything ten thousand years into the future? So what I was proposing in my talk is not to predict the future but to create strategies for the future.

I feel like people really conflate the words planning and prediction. I feel like I've come to completely different things, so yes, you can plan evolution, which sounds paradoxical because evolution is about things. that surprises you and there is no foresight in evolution, but you can plan it, you can create decentralized systems to allow variation, we can allow people from all fields to interact, which you know creates more creativity, so I feel that this fact strategy or variation in selection and think about feedback loops and changing attractors. I feel like that could last 10,000 years because it's worked for the last 3.5 billion years of our evolution, so hopefully it should work, so that's one of the things that came up in control theory. is that if you respond too quickly to the stimulus you can get into a total zero cycle, but if you generate a delay and they are trying to do this with things in the stock market, for example, because it became so fast that it caches multiple addresses and the Cascade kicks in, so you know what the how would you explain how that kind of delayed response process works.

Yes, that's what I mentioned in the section about the hills changing. Okay, so we have the stock market which is a mountain because there is a reinforcing loop and thanks to technology, robots not even robot stock brokers trade stocks in milliseconds. The waterfalls can jump from robot - robot immediately, so this mountain is now okay, it's just a big long mouth and I guess mm-hmm, so if I wanted to do it and you know to have an incredibly long Johnson if you fall off the top that's really bad mm-hmm so changing the hills by adding those delays would be the equivalent of weakening those reinforcement loops which is the equivalent of shortening that mountain you know more human scale so if you fall you probably won't break the whole thing mm -hmm I like it um here it is yes, here is the mountain of balls Ted give me that ball it's not for you the answer is the question that Molly asked are there examples of negative of negative? loops that resulted from the extinction of one or both actors sorry negative negative negative loose if that's the same as positive the dad positive that's actually yeah the equivalent of the positive feedback loop because you have to multiply the you know, yeah, like that that if you have less than like this a B less less of a cause more sorry more of a cause less of B but because it is turned unless it is cause more of a which makes it appear less each one causes murmurs which must be more more more than a is a classic negative feedback loop which is positive feedback negative negative double negatives are positive right that's right he said that's how he got it right best question Gerald Harris oh sorry Molly that wasn't no , that was Molly's, it's a negative negative, my favorite, well. my favorite, but I guess my nose, I don't think it's a good negative loop, um, okay, personal example or at least my favorite personal example, motivation and depression, okay, here we go, it's a negative loop, more motivation It supposedly means less depression and more depression.

It means less motivation, so it's a vicious cycle, it's a positive feedback loop again. Yes, the reinforcing cycle is the fragment of words that are terrible, it's a reinforcing cycle because if you're more depressed that means less motivation, but less motivation means you're more depressed. which means less motivation more depressed it's a vicious cycle it's a reinforcing loop so here we go that's a concrete example of how a negative negative loop can be reinforcing it's a great girl Gerald Harris as a piece of music this system is now listening and You choose the system if you think about mapping music or if you think about mapping music, that's interesting, it's the first thought that arises: you experience sound in a completely linear way.

You know, what we'd love to work on. This would be with Brian Eno. all of our other speakers actually yeah, you're right. I should have said that you experience sound linearly because I know, you know, I thought about that. I guess the question, the answer is regression, is the answer. I haven't thought about that, we'll try. maybe it's Jam lovino, well, you guys together see what happens, thanks for doing this, this is great.