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I am sure readers will dislike the genius claims, but I think it would be missing the main point to get distracted by the tone. The point I hear most loudly is
by vessenes 6y ago
I am sure readers will dislike the genius claims, but I think it would be missing the main point to get distracted by the tone.
The point I hear most loudly is that some sort of systems thinking combined with math is a pretty useful and powerful way to think about the world, but for some reason people don’t care to learn that way of thinking.
I think this is pretty profound. Systems theorists are super quirky, (I highly recommend the systems bible btw) and some of the earliest writers were not mathematically inclined - they tend to balk at hard predictions for a variety of reasons. It is a vanishingly small group, but I think one that has a lot to offer.
Anyway, I charitably read this as a plea to care about the systems that make up the world, and second that plea.
- solipsism 6y agoWould you say the contents of this article indicate that the author is "mathematically inclined", in any significant way (compared to, for example, the early systems theorists you refer to)?
- morelisp 6y agoAs someone who has followed Crawford's trajectory for the past 15ish years I have to say his biggest problem may be the opposite. He is so tightly married to the idea that narrative simulations must produce concrete, written, book-like stories that he misses how effective modern simulation games (not just computer games, but also boardgames, RP, consims, "paxsims", etc) can effectively engage systems literacy - even though they do not process "natural-language" textual inputs, through a mathematical ur-model, into "natural-language" textual outputs. I think the average group of analysts running a matrix game is considerably more "mathematically-minded" in that they are much more interested in what the simulation does than whether it produces a particular form of output.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]