Nash died this week, sadly, in a traffic collision. That’s isn’t how I’m going to remember him. My first introduction to Nash was from a book I found in a used book store titled “Game Theory and Canadian Politics”. There was a whole chapter on the Nash Equilibrium and the prisoner’s dilemma in there. This was the diving board for further exploration into game theory and, it was the gateway drug into the Garbage Can, Arrow, and the Genetic Algorithm. He offered up a thread of thought: this idea that collectively, as people, we are capable of creating such sub-optimal outcomes. I didn’t like that one bit. I spent time trying to disprove it. It was Arrow that would end[…]
Month: May 2015
Previously, I wrote about communication overhead in tech and the two cultures around it. Broadly, I perceive two broad camps: there are the shippers and there are the talkers. Shippers ship. Talkers talk, then ship. In this post I’ll describe three forms of written communication and how they link up with current cultural megatrends. There are those that can write instructions that a human can reliably compile and execute (management). There are those that can write instructions that an organization can reliably compile and execute (governance/policy). There are those that can write instructions that a computer can reliably compile and execute (development). There are instructions that can be typed that cause performance in people. Such parameters include the outcome, the instruction,[…]