Pattern Language
These are various “patterns” that I tend to use and reuse in my thinking. This page is inspired in no small part by Jacky Zhao’s “A Pattern Language” and her list of patterns. Is this really accurate to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language? No idea, but I find this useful.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Cultural Niche
Humans are uniquely successful due to our social learning ability.
References
- The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Joseph Henrich
- “A Rant About ‘Technology’”, Ursula K. Le Guin
- My own culture & technology reading list
Details
Humans are not the only intelligent animal; humans are not the only tool-using animal; humans are not the only social learning animal. However, humans are almost unique in their ability to socially learn across generations, slowly accumulating more effective tools, processes, thinking patterns, and organizations of relationships to solve day-to-day challenges, the sum total of which we call “culture.” Our biology is in fact evolved to promote just this ability, which is adaptable to nearly every environment; in a very real sense, our “niche” as a species is “anything we can learn to do from others.”
Cultural Evolution
Culture is subject to evolutionary pressures.
References
- The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Joseph Henrich
- Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, Noel Perrin
Details
Culture, as described above, ends up subject to evolutionary pressures. Three important points:
- Many cultural behaviors are (mal)adaptive to some problem in the environment, but the individuals engaging in the culture may have no understanding of why they behave the way they do! Henrich uses the example of manioc, a tuber native to the Americas that contains cyanide, but is happily consumed by native peoples of the Amazon thanks to a convoluted multistep leaching process that nobody understood until the introduction of modern scientific instruments.
- Additionally, different cultures are adapted to different environments in non-obvious ways. Henrich uses the example of the many European explorers who died in the Arctic, in contrast to the Inuit.
- Culture is sensitive to interventions and broken chains of transmission. The Baffin Island Inuit lost kayaks as a technology and didn’t regain it until accidentally contacting other Inuit groups. Japan had a massive influx of firearms in the 16th century, but they were banned and mostly forgot about a century later.
Dunbar’s Number
Stable human social groups are limited to about 150 people.
References
- ”Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”
- “Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas”
- “Platoons - a natural unit size for a modern army”
- Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, Robin Dunbar
Details
Robin Dunbar is a fairly prominent anthropologist — I highly recommend his books Friends and Why Religion Evolved — but he is most famous for his eponymous number, introduced in “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”. He studied the average group sizes of other social primates and discovered a striking relationship between group size and neocortex size. If you plug humans into the resulting equation, you get “Dunbar’s number” of about 150, which is the maximum size of a stable social group, or how many “close” interpersonal relationships we can have. This has been borne out by repeated studies of human social groups, from militaries to churches to Discord channels. Social groups that grow much bigger than Dunbar’s number need more complicated organizational structures to make up for the fact that most members will not, and indeed cannot, know most other members.
Scenius
”Scenes” are often more inventive than individuals.
References
- “Scenius, or Communal Genius”
- “How to Walk and Talk”
- “The Scenius Edition”, Why is this interesting?
Details
Scenius is a concept coined by Brian Eno to describe the fact that groups of creative individuals in the same time and place — a “scene”, if you will — are often much more inventive than the individuals themselves. This is arguably the “micro” version of cultural evolution as described above. There are many examples, from literary groups like the Inklings or the Bloomsbury Group, to the invention of modern climbing at Camp 4 in Yosemite, to the flow of conversation at a really good dinner party.
Spaced Repetition
Memorize anything efficiently by reviewing at spaced intervals.
References
- “Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning”
- “How to make memory systems widespread?”
- “Effective Spaced Repetition”
Details
Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curves show that the most efficient way to remember something is to test yourself at increasingly-spaced intervals. As a result, with the help of spaced-repetition software and careful choice of flashcards, you can efficiently remember virtually anything you choose to.
Rubber Duck Problem Solving
Talking through a problem in as much detail as possible can help solve it, even if you’re just talking to a rubber ducky.
References
Details
One of the best problem-solving techniques from software engineering is to explain the problem and attempted solutions in as much detail as possible. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking to another software engineer or even another person; you could even use a rubber ducky! The important part is to explain the problem in as much detail as possible, because it helps clarify your assumptions and will often reveal overlooked details.