8 Comments
User's avatar
Maxim Raginsky's avatar

ā€œ Indeed, I’d rather look at recurring patterns in artificial structures to identify commonalities and general principles.ā€

This is why I keep propagandizing this stuff:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/3384

Nicholas Mancuso's avatar

I am but a simple man: I see DEVO reference I must like

Ben Recht's avatar

Thank you for finding a serious typo in this post: I corrected the capitalization upthread.

Nicholas Mancuso's avatar

I have finally contributed something of value 🫔

Todd Sformo's avatar

I should have added that I like it because it brings together both science and humanities: architecture/engineering, human organization, and contemporary condition. It seems the statement could be the beginning Master's or PhD in interdisciplinary studies.

Todd Sformo's avatar

Great sentence: "A theory of architecture can’t neglect a theory of human organization. Both artificial structures work together to create the complex infrastructure underneath our contemporary condition."

Kev's avatar

Only tangentially related, but I recently read the "Can a biologist fix a radio" piece which was recommended by a colleague as a must-read, curious if you have also read it? It's a cute thought experiment, but obviously as you mention, biological systems are not artificially engineered and organized like a radio or the internet, despite the parallels.

Zoƫ Ruha Bell's avatar

Coming out swinging with an apropos of nothing side-swipe at theory of computation lol! Imo depends on what kind of "impact" you care about. In my areas of research, ToC has had a huge impact on the cryptography used in many everyday contexts and differential privacy has changed the way that the US Census data is released, and in general the field has had extensive impacts on combinatorics, graph theory, spectral theory, Boolean function analysis, number theory, algebraic geometry, lattice theory, topology, category theory, logic, formal methods, optimization, computer security, quantum physics, statistical physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, economics, social computing, and more...