Imagine you are a senior construction executive with experience in very large international projects. You are now CEO of today’s global decarbonization effort whose goals are defined by the consensus around the UN IPCC.
1/22 If it were a real project, you would immediately fire its managers (if you could find them) as incompetent.

But it’s not a real project. It’s a pretend project. Would you expect any kind of success? That’s what this essay is about.
2/22

Common and seemingly universal political beliefs, when applied within systems of unanticipated size or degree of connectivity, have the potential to become massively destructive.

I’ll be showing you an example here that’s both familiar and surprising.
1/46 You might interpret this example as demonstrating a bug in capitalism, but that’s not my point.

The larger point is that conventional political reasoning without systems thinking can be, and in fact has become, dangerous.
2/46

While it’s still possible:
THANK YOU to my followers and all of you who have responded to my tweets.
I test my ideas by shouting them into the void. It’s reassuring when I see evidence that somebody is out there listening.
1/5 Having said that, I confess that my primary hope for Twitter has failed: to begin a cross-discipline conversation around this idea:

https://twitter.com/conways_law/status/1544693906851463171

2/5

There is a common abstract model for groups of people who bear a shared exclusionary narrative, including conspiracy theories and political agendas. This leads to a common network notation we can use to describe the operational structure of any particular such group.
1/38 This operational structure identifies interactions that account for the group’s cohesiveness. It is these interactions that suggest possible points of intervention.
2/38

Every so often there will be a burst of Twitter conversations on the “Reverse Conway Manoeuver” and related topics.
I find this encouraging, but not for a reason you might suspect.

Hear me out; this is important.
1/28 These conversations are signs of the development of a sub-community within the software community that is aware of structural design (as distinguished from aesthetic design) as an important discipline unto itself. Aside from the field of Architecture, I think this is rare.
2/28

@IntuitMachine In this light you can read what is going on on dozens of US states to disenfranchise minority voters as the last gasp of the population you call "rural" before they are overwhelmed by demographic change and the general urbanization of America.
Acknowledging this,...
1/ @IntuitMachine I am looking for a different phenomenon (see below). My writings on this have been very fragmented; it's a new model with (1)many moving parts (2)from different normally non-communicating disciplines (such as personality theory and network analysis).

https://twitter.com/conways_law/status/1371879714005061639

2/

Humanity is an intelligent Individual organism.

(Please read that again.)
1/19 It is a one-of-a-kind Individual that we’ll give the name “Humanity” here.

Humanity’s major components at any moment are the humans alive at that moment.
2/19

If I were to start a book today about my research, I imagine that I would begin Chapter 1 this way.
* * *
“What do you do?”
I write about politics.
“You mean, things like party strategy?”
No, it's much more basic than that.
“Ok, what do YOU think politics is?”

1/31 *Politics is one of mankind’s first, and by far its most successful, force-multiplier technologies.*

Politics is the technology by which human groups govern their activities purposefully at scale.

Its history is as old as, and is at the root of the success of, our species

2/31

To: @ericevans0, @mathiasverraes, @swardley, @jessitron, @ruthmalan, @PezeshkiCharles, @personalitygeni, @FareedZakaria, and all others, named and unnamed, in the general design and strategy communities:

1/48 This essay is a trial run for a more accessible presentation intended for a general audience including historians, journalists, and other public intellectuals. I see you as a vanguard into this broader audience. Please share this with your colleagues.

2/48

Early in the 1950’s in Air Force ROTC I learned this mis-quotation of von Clausewitz: “War is politics by other means”. Little did I realize that 70 years later I would apply it to US politics by turning it inside out. Let me explain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_…

1/9 My work is modeling how affinity groups, from cults to social clubs, stick together. Until very recently I have been focusing on the peculiar dynamics of the Republican party.

https://twitter.com/conways_law/status/1398276057095098371

2/9

Setting aside momentarily, just to simplify the conversation, the urgent need for rapid change, if you think in terms of decades, children are in fact the drivers of change. This is inevitable, as the adult holders of power naturally pass from the scene.
1/7

https://twitter.com/MasoomaR_/status/1384272476146790403

From this perspective, the strategic question then becomes how best to harness this dynamic.

The late Clayton Christensen has provided a strategy in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that is sometimes called "disruptive innovation".
2/7

.@personalitygeni: Your question shows how early in the discovery process is my work. At the same time it points out the power of the object-model approach, because it points out parts of the model that must be present.

Or not, which is where the power lies.

1/5

https://twitter.com/personalitygeni/status/1383958045345026052

An object model can lead directly to an agent-based model of the individual. This will be a complicated thing that can be duplicated, creating social thought-experiments that can then be tested against our understanding of realistic behavior.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-bas….

2/5

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM CONSIDERED HARMFUL

I was a card-carrying Libertarian once. Fortunately my brain continued its development. Now I see that part of my political history as a hangover from my adolescence.

1/38 A person in an adult body who self-reports as a Libertarian is describing a case of arrested development.

At this stage in American history the institutional forms of rugged individualism such as Libertarianism are leading us down a massively destructive path.

2/38

The beating heart of emergence is a special kind of synergy.

Two levels of description are necessary to clarify emergence: the “Entity” level of description and the “Emergent” level of description.

1/10 The synergy occurs among some of the entities at the entity level, but the emergent phenomenon shows up at the emergent level.

But it’s an unusual kind of synergy, specifically not among these entities but among the ways *neighboring entities interact*.

2/10

Here I will demystify “emergence” and make it utterly concrete.

Most people, if they think about it at all, regard emergence as a vague, “woo-woo” concept that philosophers and mystics deal in.

1/27 If you attempt to read this Wikipedia article on emergence and you’re like me, your reaction is probably going to be: “Good grief!”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

2/27

I am building a theory of collective human behavior that I expect to model the fracturing of America into groups with contradictory beliefs. It’s too big for Twitter, so I plan to put it out in parts.

By publishing in parts I also hope to get a conversation going.

Intro 1/10 Here are the four parts as I see them now.
1. Descriptive stories vs. generative stories. This brings Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiable prediction into social science through agent-based simulation. The justification requires emergence.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popp…

Intro 2/10

Crime and Government

Here we’ll examine certain US Government processes starting with the crime family as a model.
We’ll look at the special case of Donald Trump first. But examining the “normal”, pre-Trump case is even more instructive, as we’ll see.
(h/t: @sarahkendzior)

1/17 Here is the general structure of a crime family.

I’m including the “customers” because they complete the transaction loop that makes this a marketplace, and it’s the dynamics of the marketplace that will give us some interesting results.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caporegime

2/17

One thing I have noted in melconway.com/CBH/Historical…
Is that one-dimensional value metrics (such as that stated by Milton Friedman 50 years ago that the sole duty of corporations is to make money for its shareholders) are invasive species.

1/9 Friedman’s doctrine in particular has captured American politics over the last half century and, I am coming to suspect, has quietly spawned a hidden river of money on which today’s politics floats. (That’s what @SenWhitehouse seems to be suggesting.)

2/9

“Man is a story-telling primate.”

I thought that was just my core belief. But it’s turning out to be an axiom in a theory of politics. This is a work in process but I’ll give you an outline here.

1/14 The ancient human practice of forming alliances through stories told around the campfire is embedded deep in our brains. In other words, “I believe” and “I believe in” are about personal association, not semantics.

Association is primary; truth and logic secondary.

2/14

Imagine two body-building gyms, A and B.

Gym A beautifully enlarges the left side of your lower body and the right side of your upper body. Gym B does that to the other two quarters of your body.

1/5 That’s what “Higher Education” has done to our brains. It has created two slightly overlapping populations of partially developed people.

I call them
The Reading-list People
and
The Problem-set People.

It’s worked OK, we think. Or has it?

2/5

TOOL NEEDED

It’s primarily a graphics tool for building clickable entity-relationship networks (in the broadest sense) that are viewed in web browsers. Ideally it’s open source with a publicly editable form, like a wiki.

1/8 It should be possible to drill down to any level, where each node can be a web page built by this tool.

2/8