The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated.
Simplification Trap
Simplification enables breakthroughs or destroys value.
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From a genetic point of view, the European stock had been created by dipping a teaspoon into the sea of genes in Peru and Bolivia. ... Because potatoes are grown from pieces of tuber, he was unknowingly promoting the notion of planting huge areas with clones—a true monoculture. ... One was a crazy gumbo, its ingredients unclear; the other was an orderly array of identical parts.
Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property. ... (Cattle breeding over centuries has done much the same thing but not to the same degree.) The cost of increased production is lowered resilience.
Yet paradoxically, diversity can be unleashed by a type of uniformity. The uniformity of a standard writing system (like an alphabet or script) unleashes the unexpected diversity of literature. ... The rigidity of an alphabet has done more to enable creativity than any unhinged brain-storming exercise ever invented.
He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. ... Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.
Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do.
The best result for any technology is to solve meaningful problems in impactful ways. The best design reduces work. The best computer is unseen.
“We are on a deletion rampage!!” he wrote in one. “Nothing is sacred. Any remotely questionable tubes, sensors, manifolds, etc. will be deleted tonight.