Learning to walk through walls An Article by David R. MacIver drmaciver.substack.com I have a running joke that one of the most useful things I do when coaching or consulting is to say to people “Yes, that does sound like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” Part of why this is a joke is that actually most of the useful work happens prior to the point - the hard part is actually articulating what is going wrong well enough that it seems like a soluble problem - but there is genuinely something useful about this, because often it feels people are looking for permission. Without the external prompt, solving their problem is not something they noticed that they were allowed to do. A Burglar's Guide to the City problemsgames
Delight in the imperfect An Article by David R. MacIver drmaciver.substack.com I think part of the difficulty in allowing ourselves to properly delight in the imperfect, comes from conflating delighting in something with wanting it to happen. This isn’t the case. You can appreciate something as it exists while acknowledging its problems. You can see that a fire is beautiful without becoming a pyromaniac, and you can appreciate the absurdity of your political situation without thinking it’s good. Even if a delight in the imperfect causes you to want more imperfection in your life (and it should), there is no shortage of imperfection to seek out. The imperfect is not scarce, it’s abundant. If you find imperfection delightful, you will never be short of things that delight you, even if you fix any given problem. Solving problems and smoothing out imperfections doesn’t remove the source of delight, it merely opens up new vistas for it. You could give yourself over totally to delight in the imperfect and never run out of things to explore, even without creating your own. flawshumorproblems
We are surrounded by ghosts An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com I'd like to call the more general phenomenon that this is a specific instance of "ghost knowledge": It is knowledge that is present somewhere in the epistemic community, and is perhaps readily accessible to some central member of that community, but it is not really written down anywhere and it's not clear how to access it. Roughly what makes something ghost knowledge is two things: It is readily discoverable if you have trusted access to expert members of the community. It is almost completely inaccessible if you are not. In this sense, most knowledge is ghost, particularly if you take an expansive view of what counts as an epistemic community. knowledge
Trust beyond reason An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com In this sense, trust is a polarizing strategy, and it's one that is important to apply early on in the relationship before someone becomes important to you. If you trust someone excessively and it goes badly, but they don't matter to you, you can just kick them to the curb. In general, trusting someone at a level that seems slightly excessive for their level of importance to you will help you sort people in your life who you want to be more important to you than they are from those who you want to be less important than they are. And it does need to be excessive. It needs to be trust beyond reason. Not beyond all reason, but somewhat beyond what currently seems reasonable. If it is not, then unless they are prepared to take the first move, you will never find the signs you need to move to a higher level of mutual trust. Sometimes this will go badly, but you need to be able to try bad things. trustlovefriendship
The fastest way to learn something is to do something An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com Suppose you have a problem to solve. What do you do? Well, you sit down and think real hard, and after extensive and careful planning you try the well thought out and rigorous solution that you have thought up. Right? No, wrong! Bad. The correct thing to do when you have a problem is: Think for a short amount of time. Make sure it is safe to try things. Try something you think will work. Observe the result. If you succeeded, yay you solved the problem! If it didn't work, think about what that means for the nature of the problem and try again. The Feynman Algorithm problemsprototypesfeedback
Coevolution and the bad take machine An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com So when you have a bad take machine, you get the following processes: They make a bad take. People are outraged and talk about it. The bad take machine likes it and does more of that behaviour in future. If, on the other hand, they make a take and nobody cares, they do not get reward and the behaviour is selected against. The behaviours drove the spread of the outrage replicator, and the outrage replicator provides the selection mechanism for the behaviours. Thus, via the spread of our outrage on Twitter, we have operant conditioned the bad take machine into producing worse takes. Which is to say, it's bad on purpose to make you replicate it. How to write a high-engagement tweetA bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea mediaanger
Notes on the Legibility War An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com The basic idea of legibility is that the act of making something comprehensible enough to control is itself an act that shapes the thing to be controlled, often with far greater consequences than the control itself. This is because it removes complexity that is deemed as irrelevant that makes it harder to control, and that complexity may be in some way essential to the health of the system. controlsystemscomplexitylegibility
Things you didn't know you can be bad at An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com I wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to. ...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect. Idiolect skilllearningpractice
The Timeless Way of Building A Book by Christopher Alexander www.patternlanguage.com Mind of no mindThe quality without a nameAn objective matterBitternessThe most precious thing we ever have+27 More Some emptiness in usDeliberate actsNo kindpatternsof.designA Pattern LanguageNon-architectsThe Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris AndrewsThe usages of life architecturemakingbuildingurbanismbeautyconstructionzen
The quality without a name There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. There are words we use to describe this quality: alive whole comfortable free exact egoless eternal But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it. No words to describeThis language without words beautylifemeaningspirit
An objective matter We have been taught that there is no objective difference between good buildings and bad, good towns and bad. The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and divided ness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwholesome and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable. ethics
Bitterness The quality which has no name includes these simpler, sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life. It is a slightly bitter quality. melancholy
The most precious thing we ever have In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have. And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me. life
When our forces are resolved When a person’s forces are resolved, it makes us feel at home, because we know, by some sixth sense, that there are not other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company. Each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us. And for this reason, each one of us can also recognize this quality when it occurs in buildings. The doctrine of salvation by bricksA sense reflected in the plans happiness
Patterns of life If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again. Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more. There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t. life
Fabric And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town. connectionurbanismpatterns
They are the atoms of our man-made universe Further, each pattern in the space has a pattern of events associated with it. We realize then that it is just the patterns of events in space which are repeating, and nothing else. Nothing of any importance happens in a building or a town except what is defined within the patterns which repeat themselves. Each building gets its character from just the patterns which keep on repeating there. Each neighborhood is defined, too, in everything that matters, by the patterns which keep on repeating there.
Forces of conflict A pattern which prevents us from resolving our conflicting forces leaves us almost perpetually in a state of tension. For, if we live in a world where work is separated from family life, or where courtyards turn us away, or where windows are merely holes in the wall, we experience the stress of these inner and conflicting forces constantly. We can never come to rest. We are living then, in a world so made, so patterned, that we cannot, by any stratagem, defeat the tension, solve the problem, or resolve the conflict. In this kind of world the conflicts do not go away. They stay within us, nagging, tense…The build-up of stress, however minor, stays within us. We live in a state of heightened alertness, higher stress, more adrenaline, all the time. Fucking up the world
The multiplicity of living patterns The more living patterns there are in a thing—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name. The right overlapEach element performs many functions complexity
To fly past each other In our own lives, we have the quality without a name when we are most intense, most happy, most wholehearted. This comes about when we allow the forces we experience to run freely in us, to fly past each other, when we are able to allow our forces to escape the locked-in conflict which oppresses us. But this freedom, this limpidity, occurs in us most easily when we are in a world whose patterns also let their forces loose. Just as we are free when our own forces run most freely within us, so the places we are in are also free when their own forces themselves run free, and are themselves resolved. The quality without a name in us, our liveliness, our thirst for life, depends directly on the patterns in the world, and the extent to which they have this quality themselves. Patterns which live, release this quality in us. But they release this quality in us, essentially because they have it in themselves.
When a building has this fire And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself. beautynaturearchitecture
Modularity One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture. Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail. The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same. naturearchitecturemakingdetailsmodularity
It is going to pass The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death. When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass. naturemelancholydeath
The gate To reach the quality without a name we must build a living pattern language as a gate. beauty
The patience of a craftsman Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps. makingcraftpatience
An infinite variety The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.
Each pattern is a rule Each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which it defines. It is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. There is an imperative aspect to the pattern. The pattern solves a problem. It is not merely “a” pattern, which one might or might not use on a hillside. It is a desirable pattern; and for a person who wants to farm a hillside, and prevent it from erosion, he must create this pattern, in order to maintain a stable and healthy world. In this sense, the pattern not only tells him how to create the pattern of terracing, if he wants to; it also tells him that it is essential for him to do so, in certain particular contexts, and that he must create this pattern there. It is in this sense that the system of patterns forms a language. problems
The network of connections Each pattern depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the larger patterns within which is is contained. Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patterns that help to complete it. It is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language. connectionnetworks
The grammar of the language An ordinary language like English is a system which allows us to create an infinite variety of one-dimensional combinations of words, called sentences. A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinite variety of those three-dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens, towns. It tells us which arrangements of words are legitimate sentences, in a given situation, and which are not. And, furthermore, which arrangements of words make sense in any given situation, and which ones don’t. It narrows down the total possible arrangements of words which would make sense in any given situation. Second, it actually gives us a system which allows us to produce these sentences which make sense. So, it not only defined the sentences which make sense in a given situation; it also gives us the apparatus we need to create these sentences. It is, in other words, a generative system, which allows us to generate sentences that are appropriate to any given situation.
Rules of thumb Of course, these patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners. Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5 percent of all the buildings in the world. Most buildings, streets, shops, offices, rooms, kitchens, cafes, factories, gas stations, freeways, bridges… which give the world its form, come from an entirely different source. They come from the work of thousands of different people. Each of them builds by following some rules of thumb. And all these rules of thumb - or patterns - are part of larger systems which are languages. Every person has a pattern language in his mind. This is true of any great creative artist, as of the humblest builder. At the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch. Even when a person seems to “go back to the basic problem,” he is still always combining patterns that are already in his mind. It is only because a person has a pattern language in his mind, that he can be creative when he builds. The rules of English make you creative because they save you from having to bother with meaningless combinations of words. A pattern language does the same.
Ordinariness We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things - that they are extraordinary. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful – these are not less ordinary than most things – they are more ordinary than most things. And it is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core. The natural thing to do beautyspirit
A genetic process The mere use of pattern languages alone does not ensure that people can make places live. The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings in a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. So long as the people of society are separated from the language which is being used to shape their buildings, the buildings cannot be alive.
Discovering patterns In order to discover patterns which are alive we must always start with observation. Try to discover some property which is common to all the solutions which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don’t feel good. Knowledge of the problem then helps shed light on the invariant which solves the problem. Sometimes we find our way to this invariant by starting with a set of positive examples. At other times, we may discover the invariant by starting from the negative examples, and resolving them. Occasionally, we do not start from concrete observation at all, but build up the invariant by purely abstract argument.
How things ought to be It is hard to give up preconceptions of what things “ought to be,” and recognize things as they really are. The way of things wisdom
You must make the language first It is the structure and content of the language which determine the design. The individual buildings which you make will live, or not, according to the depth and wholeness of the language which you use to make them with. One you have it, this language is general. If it has the power to make a single building which lives, it can be used a thousand times, to make a thousand buildings live.
It must constantly be re-created A language is a living language only when each person in society, or in the town, has his own version of this language. To reach this deeper state, in which each person has a pattern language in his mind as an expression of his attitude to life, we cannot expect people just to copy patterns from a book. A living language must constantly be re-created in each person’s mind. As he modifies his language, and improves it, depends it, throughout his life - he does it, always, by creating, and improving rules which he invents. Once people share a language in this way, the language will begin evolving of its own accord. The language will evolve, because it can evolve piecemeal, one pattern at a time. As people exchange ideas about the environment, and exchange patterns, the overall inventory of patterns in the pattern pool keeps changing. Of course, this evolution will never end. evolution
Repair Within the larger language, it is impossible for any act not to help repair the larger whole. It is impossible for any act of building to remain an isolated act: it always becomes a portion of the flux of acts which is helping to maintain the whole. Even the laying of a brick, to mend a wall, will not only be used to mend that wall, but will be used to help repair the seat, the terrace, or the fireplace which that wall helps to form. 104. Site Repair repair
The process of unfolding The sequence of the patterns for a design - as generated by the language - is therefore the key to that design. The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time.
Chopped and disfigured The details of a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts If the builder wants to build the room from modular four-foot panels, he must change the size of the rooms, and change their shape, to fit his panels. In such a building system, it is impossible for a person to create a plan which reflects the larger subtleties of site or plan. Each plan will always be chopped and disfigured to make it fit the building details. To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context. What's suitable for each unique condition modularity
Until we leave the gate behind And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind. Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves. At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language. This is the final lesson of the timeless way. The natural thing to do zenending