This is relationship self-help with an “engineering mindset.” In the sense that human relationships are “software systems” (informational processes distributed between brains resulting in the participants behavior toward—and about—one another) we are all inevitably “engineers” responsible for the design and maintenance of those systems. I’m offering conceptual tools to aid in this task, though unlike most self-help, the tools I’m offering are mostly theoretical—ideas about how things work and ways of looking at things rather than your usual “tips” or “procedures.”
There are a couple partially-redundant branches here: the “core framework” (a series of posts somewhere between exploration and synthesis touching on various theoretical disciplines relevant to human relationships) and the “tools” (coming soon, I swear) mostly individual concepts pulled from the framework with particular practical application). I think of this whole thing as a “living model”—my pretentious way of saying we’re building this plane while we’re flying it—so expect all of this to have a bit of that grimy, typo-ridden, early-access, rough-draft feel.
Relationships are wild, aren’t they? And, they get even more wild the closer you look at them (is it just me, or does it smell like mandelbrot in here?) So this much more a celebration of that wildness than a guidebook for taming it—because as far as I can tell, the successful “relationship engineer” tends to function in adaptive, sustainable relationship to the metaphorical “natural environment”—i.e. your partner.
Whatever your personal relationship to the engineering discipline, I’m attempting to equip you for your work in the relationship discipline… If you’d be so kind as to join me on this intellectual adventure into the mysterious and intricate inner-workings of the complex behavioral ecosystems we call things like “friendship,” “dating,” “parenting,” and “marriage.”
In the post on complexity theory, I suggested that (viewed on the informational level, as networks of behavior) human relationships function as what are technically known as “complex adaptive systems.” One of the most important features of such systems is the fact that while they are often intricately “organized,” they are also difficult or impossible to either predict or control (at least...
My sense is that the conceptual territory we’ve covered so far roughly “hangs together” as a loosely coherent framework, so I thought it might be a good time to risk a bit of philosophical waxing in service of review and synthesis. So, here’s my meditation on a profound and simple concept that usefully weaves through the previous topics: the idea of shape. What is a shape? A shape is a...
Today, I’ll be exploring the concept of “complexity” as a kind of synthesis of ideas from our discussions on functional behavior, systems thinking, emotion, intuition, and predictive modeling. Centrally, in the cross-disciplinary field of Complexity Theory, there is this idea of a “complex system” which describes things like organisms, ecosystems, societies, market economies, languages, or the...
Much like the general lenses of function and emotion,I’d like to add a third lens to our toolbelt—er… camera bag—the lens of systems. This has been a difficult one for me to write, partly because I’ve been nervous about doing justice to the joy I felt reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems for the first time. I doubt I’ve accomplished that, especially because this way of thinking has...
As humans, we find ourselves in the strange predicament of being “rational agents” capable of logical thought and intentional decision-making and simultaneously being emotional animals whose behavior is substantially organized by our instinctive and unconsciously conditioned responses to stimuli in our environments. Our collective behavior and experience are determined by the functioning of...
If you ask me, one of the more unsettling things about being human is that we tend to experience our selves as intentional agents capable of rational thought and logical decision making; while at the same time, all of our behavior – including that ostensibly rational “thought” – is substantially influenced by mysterious forces called feelings over which we have limited control. ...
One of the most challenging “engineering challenges” we have to confront as human beings in relationships is what often get called “negative cycles,” “bad patterns,” or “downward spirals.” Basically there’s this weird thing that happens, where – even if we really like each other and genuinely want the best for one another – as we continue to interact over time, we find ourselves...
So there’s this notoriously mind-bending idea popularized by the neuroscientist Karl Friston called the “Free Energy Principle,” the technical details of which are far beyond my comprehension… but if you listen to its devotees talk about it, it starts to sound suspiciously close to a “grand unified theory of everything,” so you know, grain of salt. I’m not even going to try to explain that, just...
The idea I want to share today goes by a range of different names, connecting the school of Radical Behaviorism in psychology, to the theories of predictive processing, reinforcement learning, and active inference in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Besides being particularly elegant, it’s also a very difficult “pill to swallow,” emotionally and philosophically, but...