Great post. A naive thought is that this could be a useful analogy for understanding how complex systems are resistant to outside intervention, and why reform can seem so much harder than wholesale reinvention/disruption/destruction.
Thank you! That analogy makes a lot of sense to me—it’s almost like complex systems settle into a “low energy” state over time, which makes large scale change difficult within that settled state. Reinvention / disruption / destruction could be viewed as “turning up the temperature” and providing a reset of sorts which allows for more broad changes (with the system then gradually “cooling” to a “low energy” state after the reset). Hadn’t thought about annealing in that context before, thanks for sharing :)
Also, based on that connection, think you might enjoy another post I recently wrote which uses Conway’s Game of Life as an analogy to understand the difficulties associated with changing complex systems.
Great post. A naive thought is that this could be a useful analogy for understanding how complex systems are resistant to outside intervention, and why reform can seem so much harder than wholesale reinvention/disruption/destruction.
Thank you! That analogy makes a lot of sense to me—it’s almost like complex systems settle into a “low energy” state over time, which makes large scale change difficult within that settled state. Reinvention / disruption / destruction could be viewed as “turning up the temperature” and providing a reset of sorts which allows for more broad changes (with the system then gradually “cooling” to a “low energy” state after the reset). Hadn’t thought about annealing in that context before, thanks for sharing :)
Also, based on that connection, think you might enjoy another post I recently wrote which uses Conway’s Game of Life as an analogy to understand the difficulties associated with changing complex systems.