Systems Thinking: Clumping Fields and Adulthood

by phil on Friday Feb 6, 2004 12:11 PM
aging, systems, clumping, systems, niching

Imagine a field of a million magnetic pins all with the same attractive potential. They're all stationary, all evenly spaced. Then imagine that one of them gets just a little more attractiveness than the others that it starts to grab its neighbor. The two pins start to act as one pin with double the magnetism. Then they start to attract other pins, until a bundle of them forms. In the places left behind by the uplifted pins, the magnetism is weaker, pushing pins past the frontier further away from the bundle, and then they start to form their own groups elsewhere. Clumps beget clumps, and pretty soon you get sharp mountains and deep valleys all over.

This is the same phenomena that happened as the Hydrogen and the Helium after the Big Bang condensed into the early stars. This is the same phenomena that happens when political parties form around loci that are easy to rally toward.

And this is the same phenomena that is happening to me. I'm entering that phase of adulthood that I worried about my whole life: self-acceptance. I'm now accepting my faults as unfixable, and moving on to highlight my strengths. Instead of being a vast field of diverse, but weak talents, I'm abandoning the weaker ones and focusing on the winners. Attention to the things I'm good at will suck attention away from the things I'm bad at, and pretty soon you'll have my skillsets fully differentiated.

I'll shrug off things that are out of bounds by employing some natural defense mechanism, while I'll tightly hug the things I'm into. This field of mine will concresce into this mountain range, and then we will go from there.

<../../scans/ NOTEss ... On the other hand, since humans are entering this age of the reversal of natural systems, could I possibly develop the mountains without the valleys? Or could I lift everything up into a mesa? That would be sweet, but I don't think we have the know-how yet to develop that way. Nor do I think I'm willing to be a guinea pig.