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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because they're both related to complex wetware systems.

> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.

> People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.

This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:

> A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years.

https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html (one of my many blogs)

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That analogy is bit weak because strikes don't go on forever and trash pickings always resume. The city is not in the same state of perpetual trash everywhere it was in before setting up/contracting the waste management company.

Also weird example because it's basically describing the process of improving efficiency.. picking up trash every day is a waste of human resources and petroleum. Non-standard cans waste the potential benefits of automation. Poor labor relations are wasteful by hoarding the benefit of an enterprise away from the workers who make it a viable endeavor, and shunting responsibility for the workers' healthcare, retirement, safety nets, and wellbeing onto society.

Thanks for the perspective. I agree that improving efficiency is a fair counterargument.

> picking up trash every day

Yeah, I think that Gall should have started with "twice a week" instead of daily (he might actually use "twice a week" in the book, and the "daily" reference is an error on my part). When you start from bi-weekly to weekly, I'm not sure if the improving efficiency argument holds up that well. I could see twice a week being as efficient as once a week.

Not sure about the automation argument in terms of improved efficiency. Brazilian trash collectors work very quickly and do not rely on automation. However I think they're also subjected to more occupational hazard by personally handling more trash. Maybe they're not more efficient. Even if you are more efficient, does the "anergy" (i.e. shifting the problem) idea mean that your improved efficiency essentially enables the community to generate far more trash per capita?

Re: unions to be clear, there's no moral judgment intended. It's just another example of the system opposing its own intended function. The purpose is to collect trash, striking workers is one of the ways that the system opposes itself. Also it might be relevant to remember that Gall was writing back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure there strikes were a lot more frequent back then.

You can replace the trash collection example with the US federal taxation system if the details of the trash example are distracting. Think of all the ways that the taxation system is set up to push against its own clear goal of collecting tax revenue. It's not really about explaining why it is that way, the most profound insight for me is this curiously common phenomenon of a system opposing its own purpose. One day I dream of coming up with a rigorous analysis of this in terms of entropy

I don't think Gall would disagree with you. He says "systems tend to oppose their own function". He doesn't flat-out say "systems don't work." He would probably explain its functioning in terms of these axioms:

> A Simple System, Designed From Scratch, Sometimes Works.

> A Complex System That Works Is Invariably Found To Have Evolved From A Simple System That Works.

He might also direct your attention to this one:

> The Total Amount Of Anergy In The Universe Is Constant. Gall defines anergy as the negative of energy. See also clonal anergy. “The sum total of problems facing the community has not changed. They have merely changed their form and relative importance.”

You have reduced the trash on the streets, but where did you shift the anergy by reducing the "trash-on-street" issue?

The real fun IMO is contemplating all the other axioms in combination with the trash collection system:

> New Systems Mean New Problems.

You started out with a trash problem, and now you've got a union problem. Maybe also a powerful mafia-connected monopoly problem.

> The Bigger The System, The Narrower And More Specialized The Interface With Individuals.

To the waste collection company I am surely just an address, 1 trash bin, 1 recycling bin, and 1 compost bin.

The purpose of the waste management company is not to manage waste, it is to gain control of waste management. That's the difference.

If you have a problem, often your solution just means you have the same problem but now lack the agency to control it.

Once the waste management company has control, they can then extract the majority of surplus from the problem being solved so that if your cost if the problem is unsolved is x, your cost if the problem is solved becomes x-ε.

The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.

The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.

> The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.

> The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.

That's a good argument for bigger governments instead of a governments hiring private entities whose only goals are to capture surplus :).

Government departments are not immune to this structure. It's a fundamental property of organizations. It's why you'll find empire building in private companies too.

Interestingly, this happens even if you remove the profit motive, say by making it a government entity or a non-profit with fixed pay structure. The surplus just goes into diffuse inefficiencies instead of being efficiently channeled into someones pocket.

Maybe it's just that people still profit from bigger organizations by means of prestige, influence, etc. Whatever the cause, most organizations seem to try to grow to the size equivalent to the value of the solution, not the cost of delivering the solution.

Yes! Exactly! I think that's the insight there. It's not the specifics of the org structure that manifest the behavior.

These all boil down to “any collection of organisms will act the same as one organism”. It will focus on survival and self interest first. It’s an emergent property from the incentives of the (potentially well-meaning) individuals

Useful for thinking through questions like “does my organization/city/etc need this new team/committee/department to exist?”

Human body is made of trillions of cellular organisms, the healthy ones know when their time is up and they die off via apoptosis

When they stay longer than they're due, and divert blood that's better spent elsewhere, that's cancer

Your point being?

> The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.

This quote applies to more than the people at the top. I thought office backstabbing and power plays happened at the senior management level when I was young, which left me unprepared for how much subterfuge and infighting came from ICs trying to be king of their little circle within a company. Recognizing and getting away from the people who compete by putting others down is a valuable skill in the workplace for anyone, not just the king.

Yes, totally applies to everyone within the system. When I first read that I immediately started pondering how my actual work is different than my stated role. The example of the king is just the most quickly grokkable example IMO

IMO the most valuable function a manager can perform is to quickly identify and fire toxic people.

Unfortunately few managers seem able to do it.

It feels similar to the way agile development sometimes ossifies into rigid processes that defeat the purpose.

Humans just seem wired to want to find “the solution” and the call things done.

> even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years

That smuggles an assumption that US will never have draft again

It also maybe implies that the selective service is responsible for it's own funding and ignores that it's entire a creature of DoD and Congress. It's hardly a bureaucracy run amok for its own purposes. The funding in 2022 was $31.7M. DoD has a lot of contingency plans and that's not a lot of money to spend to fund one of them even if the likelihood putting it into action is small.

31 million dollars is actually a lot of money to waste on an arguably immoral program. Multiply those tens of millions by the 40 years of the program and you are talking about a lot of money that should not have been spent.

It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.

The nature of warfare has changed. You can't give someone a few weeks of basic and throw them on the battlefield anymore. They need to be experts on a variety of technical topics as well as how to do combined arms maneuver in large formations. You need trained professionals.

If the US is ever placed in a position so desperate that a draft is done again, rebuilding a new selective service administration overnight will be a trivial problem compared to everything else going on.

You don't need to throw everybody onto the battlefield.

The standing armed forces and reserve will need a lot of logistical support that can be done with little additional training. Plenty of people are forklift drivers and cooks in their day jobs.

That said, it's not like the SSA is really needed. If a war got bad enough to need a draft I'm sure congress would let the IRS fork over a list of 18+ males. Or even say 18+ males with certain occupations on their tax returns (i.e. Doctors).

Like most systems, on the surface it appears extremely simple. You start to look at the issue deeper and it becomes extremely complex. Start drafting all the doctors? Sure, what happens when you draft an ophthalmologist? Are they even useful for more than TikTok videos? What if they have asthma? How many Doctors can we take without crippling the home front?

Furthermore, we start up a draft. We draft the guy who does calibrations for Maverick missiles in factory. Come to find out, it takes 3 months to train that guy and there are very few of them. It's also really important weapon system. Now what?

SSA constantly holds mock drafts to try and answer all these questions.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine implies otherwise.

It's unlikely the US will find itself in such a conflict soon due to their technological advantage. However, multiple simultaneous engagements can stretch the available manpower to such an extent that a draft is needed.

The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.

If the US military stepped into the Ukraine war, and there was somehow no possibility of nuclear escalation, the Russian military would be decimated within a matter of a week or two, and that's not overly optimistic thinking on my part. The incompetence of the VKS as well as Russia's mechanized formations has been gallingly clear.

> It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.

It's more likely that it will, the longer it exists. Saying "it will never", implies a pessimistic view of US durability. I think this is a fair interpretation, I can agree with. I understand this is not exactly what you meant.

The presumption that a draft is inevitable over growing time is exactly what I'm saying is nonsense.

I don't know why anyone would believe that, as I implied. The future is unknowable, but history has shown it takes less than a generation to militarize any nation. Assuming it will be different this time around, is not "overwhelmingly" likely.

I don't know - there were several effective land armies in WW2 - Germany, US, UK (though small), Russia from 1942 or so. They didn't have it much easier then. There was technology then, which was simpler but also more raw. What they did have was good officers, NCOs and training. I don't see reason to believe that a side in the Ukraine war has these.

The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. The need for human material is so large, that the Ulranians are considering forcing citizens that are in other countries to return and submit to the draft.

Any war that will be fought between powers that can easily destroy each other will be fought in the Clausewitz way: Throw bodies at each other until one side is not willing to suffer the losses anymore.

Should the US be China ever go to war, that will be the war that we will see. And since China would pick a battle ground south of the topic of cancer ( NATOs southern border) , that bodycount would mostly be US.

FYI Hawai is south the topic of cancer.

The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.

Please explain to me how the trench warfare in Ukraine is relevant to a potential war with China, which will be fought almost entirely by the Navy and Airforce. In fact, the Marines are so convinced of this they gave up all their tanks to reorganize as a more agile force that could island hop while deploying anti ship missiles.

The idea that a war with China will require an infantry draft is preposterous. It's no longer 1940. Attempting any form of amphibious landing without naval and air superiority is suicide. That means if China ever lands boots on Taiwan, the war is already over, and a draft would serve no purpose.

Let me design my personal nightmare scenario:

1. Conservative forces in the southern states continue to claim that the Federal Government is trying to change the voting dynamics by naturalising immigrants.

2. Some form of legal argument is made against the legality of the vote of naturalised citizens in state level.

3. Hawaiian nationalists, secretly backed by China adopt that.

4. Some form of secession movement in Hawaii is formed.

5. China recognises independent Hawaii.

6. The US cannot accept to loose its influence in that part of the Ocean.

7. War by proxy, on US soil.

This is all very unlikely, and would make a good plot for a Novel BUT:

Historically the US has a much weaker claim on Hawaii ( which was annexed agains the will of the population) than China on Taiwan and there is already friction with the native Hawaiian population e.g. by Zuckerberg circumventing traditional local inheritance laws to build his mansion.

I don't think there's any reason to talk about a civil war in that sense. It's pure fantasy. That's not to say I'm unconcerned about right wing extremists but that sort of scenario is just nonsense. If anything they'll try to capture control of US military leadership instead.

Ukraine is a war of attrition because its primarily being supplied by other countries which are dripfeeding supplies while Russia has to slowly unmothball a lot of kit.

If the USA actually went to total war it would likely be over long before the average Joe Blogs can be turned into a useful warfighter.

maybe the American way to have a draft is to fight a civil war?

It seems as though there is essentially no scenario where the American public would accept a mandatory draft. Times have changed.

It will happen, and the American people will accept it, for the same reasons they accept tons of things today that are done against their best interests: Ideological divisions and loyalty, propaganda saturation, fear of an outside enemy, (possibly) religion, and the general desire to use the political system to punish "others" rather than help themselves.

> will happen, and the American people will accept it

America will automate warfare before that happens.

Seemed that way in 1940 too

Did it? Every single person who was draft-eligible in 1940 was born before WW1 ended.

I’ve done this arithmetic a few times now and I think you’re wrong: someone born the week after ww1 ended (November 1918) would have been 22 in November 1940, when the first draft registration was held for men who had reached 21. So there should be about 12 months of births in there.

all I'm saying is how mandatorily drafting people to go fight a war in another continent is extremely hard

whereas getting people to fight in a way that's happening near YOUR (meaning their particular case) state border is super easy, barely an inconvenience

Yeah, but no draftee is going to do a backflip, snap the bad guy's neck and save the day. Drafting people gets them killed.

Gall mentions the example of an organization founded to conquer polio. With that disease all but eradicated, the foundation almost collapsed, but instead changed the goal to conquer genetic defects. Very little changed about what the organization did, and the new goal is one that isn't likely to ever be completely achieved.

That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though. Once you have an organization built up to solve a problem, shifting those resources into solving another problem is a reasonable next step. This is not the same as TFA, which talks about organizations preventing the problem from being solved.

> That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though.

Not at all. It's an example of a good pivot. Probably Gall thought it rare enough to mention it in a book otherwise full of wisdom about how systems go wrong.

I disagree. When you've solved the problem the best thing to do is to celebrate, give resources back, and then organize to solve another problem if you want. Switching missions is a bait and switch for your supporters and should be avoided.

Organizations are expensive and hard to build. If you liquidate an organization, you might free up some modest amount of cash in a bank account (and maybe some furniture, office supplies, etc.) but the cost of rebuilding that same organization will be vastly higher than the money freed up. It’s like tearing the copper out of a working industrial air conditioner and selling it for scrap: a huge waste and a loss of value in absolute terms. Perfectly reasonable to give back money to recent donors who opt out and raise it over again, though.

This is a classic problem. The best example I have of it is probably Mozilla. They went out in the beginning to set up the open web. They won. Complete and total success. The web is uniformly open and standards based. The major browsers are open source and on open source engines.

Unmitigated and total victory.

So what's next? Well, that's what they're struggling with. What to do with a non profit that achieves its goals?

I'm sure you can find a better example, because Mozilla's goal needs continuous maintenance. If they don't continue providing a competitive browser, Chrome might start playing the role of the IE of old, free to disregard those standards you mention.

Selective service is a terrible example because it is designed to draft for an unknown future war, not for a current one.

Systemantics (1977, 1986, 2002) > Contents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics#Contents

New printing might be coming up! His wife (and heir) suggested to a friend that he might be invited to write the forward to the next one. He has cases and cases of books in his basement, and has given them to all his students for years :)

That would be fantastic. I was hoping for a new edition.

Linked Data! IDK YAML-LD for TinaCMS in Git, but then also Jupyter-Book because it supports notebooks and Index generation with Sphinx.

Aarne-Thompson-Uther ATC character/plot story codes as Linked Data would be neat, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...

IIRC I sent an email to a robotics team about cataloguing metadata for supported procedures as (JSON-LD) Linked Data; there also so that it's easy to add attributes and also to revise the schema of Classes and Properties.

Compared to Ctrl-F'ing a PDF copy of an ebook,

Client-side JS to fuzzy search (and auto complete) over just the names of the patterns/headings in the book would be cool; and then also search metadata attributes of each.

The facts in Mediawiki (Wikipedia,) infoboxes are regularly scraped by dbpedia. Wikidata is also a Wikipedia project, but with schema.

Dbpedia:

dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm: https://dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm

dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms

dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns: https://dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns

IIRC there used to be a longer list of {software, and project management} antipatterns on wikipedia? It may have been unfortunately and sort of tragically removed due to being original research without citations.

Anti-pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

Also there's an Antipatterns catalog wiki: https://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog

There are probably more useful systems patterns to be mined from: the Fowler patterns books like "Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)" [1] and "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture", Lamport's "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport", Leslie Valient's Distributed Systems work,

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234304

Perhaps there's also general systems theory insight to be gained from limits and failures in [classical and quantum] Universal Function Approximation; general AL/ML limits and Systemantics.

Universal approximation theorem; simulacra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...

Whoops, I mixed up the comment forms:

More notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497800

> Your city has a problem with trash

...doesn't that entire problem rest on the fact that the unstated goal is to pick up the trash at the lowest cost labor will bear? That yields service reduction, automation, and labor disputes. When you look at it that way, the organization is seeking the goal, not fighting it. I think there is truth in the general idea, but a correlary that no one sees value in continuing to solve a problem that has been solved once. They always imagine it will get cheaper, meanwhile those who create expertise in it see themselves as more valuable with time, and that creates tension.

> Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.

Isn't that just free association?

Unless they signed a binding agreement that prohibited striking whatsoever, I can't see why they shouldn't be able to.

I didn’t see a moral judgment against striking, just an observation that the elaborate systems set up to collect trash sometimes end up intentionally not collecting trash.

The union and its member's intentions sure, not the intention of the overall 'elaborate system'. Because the union and its member are only components of the larger system.

i.e. A system that doesn't take into account the free association of its components is incoherent.

I think you’re missing the original point. It was nothing about unions or free association. In fact, the point was that ALL systems become incoherent as they scale.

The existence of unions and free association is built-in to the argument that systems designed to pick up trash sometimes intentionally do not pick up trash.

It’s not a moral judgment that these systems are broken and therefore workers should be slaves. It is an acknowledgment that complex systems end up having to meet conflicting priorities and therefore become, as you say, incoherent.

Failure to collect trash during a strike is not "becoming incoherent as [it] scale[s]".

Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not a failure of a trash collecting system.

Inability to regularly collect trash is the failure mode we're concerned about.

>Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not a failure of a trash collecting system.

Of course it is. If your phone fails to make calls under certain conditions, that is a failure of the system, and we try to fix it (for example by deploying more antennas, or by fixing software bugs in it).

If workers refuse to pick up trash, we can also fix that (ask Ronald Reagan).

There's no expectation of continuous (24/7) trash pickup, unlike your phone where (these days) you expect it to work all the time.

If the regular collection schedule is every 7 days, and it turns into 14 or even 21, for the most part your trash is still being collected within the bounds of "yeah, my trash gets collected".

This was exactly what came to mind. Thanks for posting the reference

Great book. I learned from its Wikipedia page that the author (John Gall) pitched 30 different publishers, got rejected by all of them, and then published it himself. It got discussed in academic papers and then the New York Times picked it up. And we're still talking about it 50 years later. Given that the central theme of the book is "systems barely work" I very much like to imagine Gall taking all of the rejections in stride because he was able to view the publishers as just another system that has its own goals and perhaps isn't really working as it should.

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