3 ms·
I’ve been thinking about this too. There’s this notion of variety popularized by cybernetics folks a long time ago. Variety is like the state space of the syst
by jefffoster 2mo ago
I’ve been thinking about this too.
There’s this notion of variety popularized by cybernetics folks a long time ago. Variety is like the state space of the system. Then there’s a law that says “only variety absorbs variety”.
So if a method has high variety then it must have an equally complex implementation to handle the variety.
When there is a mismatch it means that either the method has parameters that aren’t useful, or that the body of the method isn’t covering cases it should.
https://fffej.substack.com/p/only-variety-can-absorb-variety https://fffej.substack.com/p/only-variety-can-absorb-variety was my attempt to write it up more fully.
- Vgoose 2mo agoThanks for sharing, I've never heard of variety before and that was an interesting read. It makes me think of a broader term I've been using to describe the run time state of the system: Entropy. I've given up on measuring that for now and I'm settling for a compile time proxy through measuring the _semantic_ cardinality of types as this seems a bit more approachable for a POC. One drawback I ran into was that the variety/entropy of scalars tends to dominate everything else. I'm clamping them to 1 for now but that's also not great as it punishes more descriptive systems.