jsebrech

Could it be the reverse, not a central theory of collapse but a central theory of formation, where you need a number of elements in place to have a sustainable civilization and if any are missing civilization will not form or will collapse?

I’ve noticed that meetings create their own necessity. When 4 people are in a meeting they can only tackle one problem at a time, instead of 4 problems. When problems pile up the solution is to plan more meetings to tackle more problems, which means even less time to work separately, which causes more work to pile up, which necessitates more meetings. Eventually you reach a point where everyone is in meetings all day and still the team can’t catch up with their workload.

Smart organizations adopt asynchronous work patterns and use meetings in a limited and strategic way to ensure the individual asynchronous work is synchronized and reviewed.

Meetings should be used to explain or review work, not to do the work. That way does not scale.

Both of those topics get explored extensively in the show Real Humans. Definitely recommend people check it out.

An example of 1 are constraint satisfaction solvers like optaplanner. We use this in the city where I live for scheduling all schools in all swimming pools, because the possible combinations are too large for a human to adequately explore. The system was adopted because not all schools managed to get swimming pool slots, and there was a belief that the city had to invest in another swimming pool. The solver found a schedule where everyone was slotted into the existing swimming pools, and the investment in a new pool was avoided. However, humans had to set the goals that the solver has to meet, and the first year there were some very odd assignments (like schools having to bus students past several swimming pools to get to a pool on the other side of the city). The rules of what was "optimal" had to be tweaked and remain a work in progress.

You might imagine the mother of all constraint satisfaction solvers that continually solves the resource allocation for a whole society, but then you also have to imagine the most complicated book of rules ever devised to define what an optimal allocation means, and no human has a hope of ever comprehending that or getting it right.

I think solution 1 is no solution at all when we're talking about getting rid of money.

Do the social media entrepreneurs engage with social media in their personal lives as well? Are there differences in how they as social media experts engage with their product compared to their average user?