7 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

      Example: ant pheromone paths

      Within ants, there can be a path left for others to follow, but what about natural paths in our environment that influence us to take them because of the idea of the "path of least resistence" or the effects of having paved cow paths.

      Similarly being lead by "the company that you keep".

      relathionship to research on hanging out with fat people tending to make one fatter.

  2. Apr 2022
    1. three steps required to solve the all-importantcorrespondence problem. Step one, according to Shenkar: specify one’s ownproblem and identify an analogous problem that has been solved successfully.Step two: rigorously analyze why the solution is successful. Jobs and hisengineers at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, immediately got towork deconstructing the marvels they’d seen at the Xerox facility. Soon theywere on to the third and most challenging step: identify how one’s owncircumstances differ, then figure out how to adapt the original solution to thenew setting.

      Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

      The last step may be the most difficult.


      The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.


      Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

      Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

      Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

  3. Oct 2020
    1. The react community has become a big cargo cult. There are some good ideas in the community and many Bad Ideas™. Paving the bad idea cowpaths lends a sense of legitimacy to these bad technical ideas that is not merited.
    2. I agree that "it feels gross" is a bad reason. "not paving a bad cowpath" is a much better reason.
    3. If the react cargo cult didn't have the JSX cowpath paved for them and acclimated to describing their app interface with vanilla javascript, they'd cargo cult around that. It's really about the path of least resistance and familiarity.