the goal of your platform
what 17th century philosophy tells us about ai agents and poly relationships
abstract; in this essay, i present philosopher gottfried wilhelm leibniz’s idea that the perfect world is one of “the most order, the most variety under the fewest rules possible,” as a general-purpose framework for understanding what humans do when identifying problems, selecting trade-offs, and conducting general analysis across a wide range of abstractions (platforms), including software product design decisions, organizational challenges, romantic relationships, living situations, and personal productivity systems.
to start, what’s a platform? i define a platform is a view of a foundational boundary condition that frames potential interactions within a shared conceptual or operational space.
within this large1 definition of a platform, your life is a platform, your relationships are platform, society is a platform, a country is a platform, her software is a platform. platform catform flatform shlatform.
the general idea i am going to argue is that the goal of your platform, no matter what it is, is about creating the maximum order and maximum variety with the fewest rules possible. this idea is a couple hundred years old from a philosopher named leibniz.
gottfried wilhelm leibniz was a german polymath and philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most important intellectual figures of the 17th century (i would argue he’s in the goat conversation). born in 1646, leibniz created foundational ideas across numerous fields, including mathematics, logic, philosophy, physics, and law. leibniz was a diplomat (he was a big hustler) and historian, often working in courts across europe. (we do not have an equivalent of him today!). he is best known for co-inventing calculus independently of isaac newton and for developing the binary number system, which became foundational to modern computing. in philosophy, leibniz introduced the idea of monads, indivisible units of reality, and advanced the principle of sufficient reason, which asserts that everything that happens has a reason or cause (see computation).
anyways, in this blog we’re going to explore a lot of the things that leibinz had to say, but this piece is about his max order max variety idea.
‘the means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order...is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.... . ‘perfection is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.’ — gottfried wilhelm leibniz, 1680
this general idea of maximum variety and maximum order with the fewest word possible is reductionistly (is that a word?) echo’ed to different degrees across different practices and ideas. ashby's law of requisite variety tells us that a system must have enough internal variety to match the complexity of its environment to maintain control. occam’s razor — the idea that the simplest is the best can be seen as implying that simpler systems with fewer rules are more efficient and often more robust when solving problems. in microeconomics pareto efficiency – achieving the most output or utility (order/variety) with the least input (rules/resources). in design, it’s often known that constraints drive creativity — limited rules can spark maximum creative exploration. stephen wolfram’s cellular automata – should us how simple local rules generate highly complex global behaviors, such as conway’s game of life. the lean startup methodology and lean system designs is about minimize waste while maximizing productivity and flexibility by reducing unnecessary rules and overhead. general ideas about fractals and fractal systems – maximum variety is achieved through recursive structures governed by simple, repeating rules.
if your a software startup, and your building an agent based ai system the goal is to design a platform that can do the most amount of things (variety) without those things being sloppy (order) via building as few features as possible. if your an engineer, the architecture should have as few modules as possible that can do the most while incurring the least amount of debt2. if your the ceo/coo your designing your company as a system that can do the most (order/variety) with the fewest rules. this is the general thing we are doing behind the activities of setting values and/principles at a company level.
look at a company like salesforce has done or what ripplings full-stack go to market3, or all that one can do on amazon. these are all vehicles for the maximum amount of variety and maximum amount of order. if openai or claude fails it’ll because it failed at having the right type of variety at the internal organization or product offering level.
many organizations fail (and i’ve learned this the hard way!) because of a lack of order. here’s ventakesh rao with a good illustration of this point: ‘arguably, a large fraction of startup organizations failing to get off the ground is a result of coordination headwind problems rather than bad ideas or lack of a need. in larger organizations that already exist, arguably an even larger fraction of efforts at change fail because of these problems. i’d estimate somewhere between 60% to 90% of all efforts to start new organizations or scale existing ones fail due to coordination headwind problems.’4
if your company fails it’s because it did not have the right rules which did not generate the right variety.
‘surprising that so many organizations find difficulty in learning and evolving in a fluid way. indeed, as peter senge of mit has pointed out, most organizations seem to have severe learning disabilities; most “die” before the age of forty.’ — gareth morgan, images of organization.
if your employee retention is not what it should be it’s because the offering lacked the general variety.
‘the ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man's higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.’ ‘the employee downgrades the intrinsic importance of work and substitutes higher pay as the reward for meaningless work. barnard observed almost 40 years ago that organizations emphasized financial satisfactions because they were the easiest to provide. he had a point— then and now.’
if i think about relationships, especially romantic ones, one can consider them pretty consistently on a scale of variety and order. in cases where the relationship brought variety, there is often a lack of order. in cases where there was a lot of order, there is often a lack of variety. infidelity, role-playing, staying committed — all push on the variety/order lever by adding or subtracting rules. polyamorous relationships or anything in that adventurous realm are attempts at variety that often fail due to a lack of order.
in your personal productivity system, your selecting rules in the form of routines or rituals or habits or whatever words you want to use. your designing your environment and so forth. the thing your after is to produce a system that produces the most amount of order and most amount of variety and doing so with the fewest rules. if your system is off then their is either not enough order, not enough variety and that’s a function of the rules that have been selected.
if you’re putting together a general theory, what you’re aiming for is something that explains the most, in the richest detail and with the highest precision, while using the fewest ideas or variables (rules). the best theories are the ones that manage to do all of that with simplicity and elegance.
‘to state it in terms of my new favorite frame, tessellations are something like metaphors for protocols of knowing and being. given the right set of tiles, you can know the world and be in it, in a powerful way. perhaps this is one way to understand the story of robert moses, architect of new york. he tessellated his world with tiles of his choosing. ideally, you want the richest, most complex tiling possible to cover a “blank” world, such as the 2d euclidean plane, to maximally reveal the possibilities latent within it. yes, you can cover the euclidean plane with a boring regular grid of square tiles, but you can also cover it with strange aperiodic tilings, and in some ways, the latter constitute a truer “theory of the plane.” the intuitively appealing principle that you should look for the richest possible tessellation is a kind of dual to occam’s razor. instead of choosing the simplest explanation that covers a given world of facts, you choose the covering that produces the most complex world of facts. ideally, the maximally complex set of facts. instead of solving for explanatory parsimony, you solve for generative profligacy.’ — i really liike venkatesh rao
if you're thinking about where to live, the ideal place would be one where your home is completely surrounded by beautiful nature, free from sound, air, and advertising intrusion, but where you can also take a short walk and enter a city with all its liveliness and general benefits, and take a short walk in another direction to experience small-town charm. this might seem subjective, but i don’t think anyone would disagree. why? max variety, max order, fewest rules. nature is awesome, but just being in nature isn’t as awesome as having access to both nature and a city, which is still less awesome than having access to nature, a city, and small-town vibes. we all want the maximum amount of variety and the maximum amount of order with the fewest rules.
if you have the maximum order and maximum variety with the fewest rules possible, what do you have a lot of? not money, not fame, (but a life of maximum variety may have those things as well) but a lot of life.
‘... we recognize degrees of life, or degrees of health, in different ecological systems ... one forest more tranquil, more vigorous, more alive, than another dying forest ... life occurs most deeply when things are simply going well, when we are having a good time, or when we are experiencing joy or sorrow – when we experience the real...in historic times, and in many primitive cultures, it was commonplace for people to understand that different places in the world had different degrees of life or spirit. for example, in tribal african societies and among california indians or australian aborigines, it was common to recognize a distinction between one tree and other, one rock and another, recognizing that even though all rocks have their life, still, this rock has more life, or more spirit; or this place has a special significance.’ — christopher alexander
‘life is a vitalizing property of all matter. life is in and of all matter. man's concept of life is not logical. man conceives life to be a property apart from matter, quickening compound elements of inorganic matter into living, functioning, organic beings. man defines organic matter as that in which life begins to function, imbuing it with vitality and intelligence, defines inorganic matter as those elements or compounds of matter in which there is no life and in which there is no vitality nor intelligence. man conceives life as spontaneously generated in matter at favorable temperatures and under favorable conditions. life is in and of all things from beginning, always and forever. life is eternal. life is in and of all inorganic as well as all organic matter. life is in and of all of the elements and atoms of the elements and the compounds of the elements.’ — walter russell, universal one
as i previously described in my toe, god as the grand organizing design is the a system that creates the most life by means of the most variety, and order with the fewest rules possible. by designing a software platform, a relationship, an organization or our personal productivity systems with the maximum order maximum variety and fewest rules possible, we are literally creating a system that is mimicking/appreciating the general system architectural of god.
the insight here and i’ll cover it at a later date is that words have sizes. words are tools that capture and represent universal phenomena, serving as bridges between abstract concepts and reality (words are abstractions, and remember abstractions are information at a distance). by expanding or narrowing their meanings, we can adapt words to encompass broader or more specific phenomena, reflecting the interconnectedness and diversity of reality. a word's "size" refers to how much conceptual territory it covers. a larger size might mean a broader, more metaphorical usage, while a smaller size might indicate a narrow, specific definition. for example, "drug" in a medical context might be small and precise, while in a philosophical discussion, it could grow to include anything with mind-altering effects.
actually its more like the right amount of debt. see apenwarr’s piece on technical debt for more on this; https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230605
see john luttigs; rippling and the return of ambition https://blog.johnluttig.com/p/rippling
another good quote by stafford beer i think — ‘it is no accident that most organizations learn poorly. the way they are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact (not only in organizations but more broadly) create fundamental learning disabilities. these disabilities operate despite the best efforts of bright, committed people. often the harder they try to solve problems, the worse the results. what learning does occur takes place despite these learning disabilities —for they pervade all organizations to some degree. learning disabilities are tragic in children, especially when they go undetected. they are no less tragic in organizations, where they also go largely undetected. the first step in curing them is to begin to identify the seven learning disabilities: lacking a holistic approach: from a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. this apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. we can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. when we then try to "see the big picture," we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. but, as physicist david bohm says, the task is futile— similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether.’