Hidden Order
by John H. Holland · first published 1996
100% recommend
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"Hidden Order" by John Holland. I think of it as a programmers view of complex adaptive systems. There are many books about Emergent systems, CAS, etc. but this one changed how I think and how I see the world.
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗OMG one must wonder about a system that produces this article and especially these comments. If you are interested in this area you might consider: * Hidden Order by John Holland. Especially if you are technical, then read it from the perspective of "how would I build one of these"? (See RIP). * Signs Of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. An overwhelming book.…
on “Complex systems emerge from simple rules” ↗John Holland, "Hidden Order". Really. What is money? A message bus in a complex adaptive system. Lots of other stuff out there on complexity but this has a unique perspective. If you really want to go crazy find "Signs of Life,…
on “Ask HN: Book Recommendations?” ↗"On Becoming a Person" by Carl Rogers, not so much the content, but because the concept is foundational. And "Hidden Order" by John Holland provides a lens for our social existence. They changed how I see myself and how I see my place in the world.
on “Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?” ↗Great article. I find systems design and complex adaptive systems fascinating. I really recommend the book, "Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity" by John H Holland. It is technical but aimed at the educated, non-technical reader, with enough description that you could code along to his models. I really wish he…
on “Systems design explains the world (2021)” ↗…Mythical Man Month tells us that New York City cannot exist. And no corporation runs NYC. So clearly it cannot exist. Right? Yet it does. Perhaps we need to understand how. My attempts have started with 'Hidden Order' by John Holland. Don't follow it. Just use it as a starting point.
on “Founder Mode” ↗…priests to run the scrum meetings? Sorry. I have been in the software business way, way too long. If anyone actually wants to think about software development, my starting point would be John Holland's "Hidden Order". Don't read it. Try to implement it for software development teams.
on “The origin of the cargo cult metaphor” ↗…are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again. A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.
on “Are we the baddies?” ↗…could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents? Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism. Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally…
on “Communities Are Not Fungible” ↗The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities…
on “The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis” ↗…is analysis, the interaction view - well we don't have a really good word for that, and yet as the article points out, that is often the attack surface. Complex adaptive systems (see John Holland's "Hidden Order") have components and a messaging bus which crucially provides a way for the constituent components to interoperate. You can swat ants individually, but if you want to stop them, you destroy the ability…
on “Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs (2015)” ↗