The Plato Plateau

This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone: 

The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

1. Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.  
2. Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
3. Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
4. Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
5. When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
6. Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral. 
7. GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
8. When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
9. Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
10. Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual. 
11. Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
12. Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
    1. Survival – laws and tactics oriented
    2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette 
    3. Systems level order – algorithms and protocols oriented
    4. Self Knowledge and Meaning – reflecting on existing and consciousness 
    5. Meta-systems – theorizes about theories
13. Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises. 
14. Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
15. Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.

Just published a preprint I've been working on:

Gödelian Constraint on Epistemic Freedom (GCEF)

A topological limit on embedded cognition — how agents inside systems can’t fully model them, and why that constraint refracts through science, AI, and consciousness.

https://zenodo.org/record/15875975

Looking for readers, critics, weird minds. Let’s talk.

Slides and video on “Thinking with Time: A brief introduction to Systems Changes Learning” by #ZaidKhan for Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at @ocad "Understanding Systems" course are an easier way into recent progress on #SystemsThinking foregrounding temporality.

https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/thinking-with-time-zaid-khan/

#Immigration courts are separate and unequal to the #American criminal justice system.

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2025/07/11/ice-immigration-court-deportation-injustice-251119

Ontario’s jail conditions are inhumane and disgraceful, judges say. Criminals are serving shorter sentences as a result

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/ontario-s-jail-conditions-are-inhumane-and-disgraceful-judges-say-criminals-are-serving-shorter-sentences/article_2eea957e-d411-4c75-b900-8b50fe88b0c7.html

> As the premier calls for bail reforms that would see more people locked up while awaiting trial, Ontario’s jails are “in a state of growing crisis.”

#abolishPrisons

#RealJustice

Conway’s Law:

«[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.»

— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

So, we're building an open-source Theory of Change platform in public, starting with our initial musings.

https://www.eventidesystems.com/toc-platform-starting-at-the-start/

Any feedback welcome.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The system is not just broken—it’s designed to be.

The housing crisis will not be solved with money alone.
It’s not a numbers problem — it’s a systems problem.
And pouring money into a broken system just breaks it faster.

We’ve built a system that makes it hard to create the kind of modest, incremental, people-scaled housing our communities actually need and then we act surprised when affordability collapses.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025/6/19/housing-is-not-a-numbers-problemits-a-systems-problem

PDF #SystemsThinking https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/114731684691493053

If you’re on this Earth, you’re not a passenger. You’re part of the crew. Let’s act like it. #Leadership #CollectiveResponsibility #ClimateAction #Sustainability #Teamwork #Belonging #WorkplaceCulture #ESG #ActNow #BeTheChange #SystemsThinking
https://medium.com/@mohindroo.sanjay66/there-are-no-passengers-on-spaceship-earth-we-are-all-crew-marshall-mcluhan-23ea7f2100c2

Functional detachment... in an age of Systemic disintegration:

In an era saturated with information yet starved of wisdom, there exists a cognitive threshold - quietly crossed - where the accumulation of knowledge ceases to be empowering and becomes corrosive.

This state, which may be termed functional detachment, arises when the mind, confronted by the scale of systemic contradiction, undergoes a silent rupture. It is not a breakdown. It is the consequence of seeing too clearly.

To live in modern society is to endure a relentless dissonance. One must accept ecological destruction as progress, political corruption as governance, economic exploitation as growth, and curated illusion as truth.

Institutions meant to protect and inform instead obscure and mislead. Even language is repurposed.. weaponised to conceal intent and maintain power. Under such conditions, clarity becomes a burden.

Functional detachment is not apathy or despair. It is the body’s refusal to participate in cognitive and moral falsehoods that no longer reconcile. It begins with hyper-systemic awareness: the capacity to perceive not isolated failures but the interwoven dysfunction of economic, ecological, social, and informational domains. Solutions address symptoms, not causes. Narratives conceal the logic of their own reproduction. Institutions demand submission to illusion.

This state is glimpsed across disciplines. In psychology, it resembles dissociation under extreme stress. In philosophy, it evokes existential nausea.. a collapse of meaning structures. In systems theory, it mirrors epistemic crisis: the moment when contradiction overwhelms coherence.

Society does not accommodate such awareness. It pathologises it.. calling it cynicism, dysfunction, or pessimism. But this is a reversal. The dysfunction lies not in the individual who detaches from corrupted systems but in the systems that demand complicity in contradiction.

Yet if left unexamined, functional detachment risks hardening into paralysis. Seeing everything as broken can neutralise dissent and isolate those who see. The task is not to restore belief in collapsing structures but to build new modes of orientation. Not to rejoin the spectacle, but to stand outside it and create new forms of sense-making, connection, and resistance.

This requires a cognitive ethic:

One that embraces truth without collapsing into nihilism.
One that accepts decay without mistaking it for destiny.
One that sees clearly - and acts anyway.

To live lucidly now is to reject complicity. Not to retreat into apathy, but to cultivate strategic clarity. Functional detachment is not an end. It is a threshold.. the beginning of a post-illusion life.

From here, one does not retreat. One reorients.

I fraking LOVE systems thinking and theory, emergence and procedural generation, and system design.

Im sitting in my local library with a book (borrowed via inter-library loan) about game design ("Advanced Game Design", Sellers 2018) and it starts with a lot of unpacking of systems thinking.

The educator panic over AI is real, and rational.
I've been there myself. The difference is I moved past denial to a more pragmatic question: since AI regulation seems unlikely (with both camps refusing to engage), how do we actually work with these systems?

The "AI will kill critical thinking" crowd has a point, but they're missing context.
Critical reasoning wasn't exactly thriving before AI arrived: just look around. The real question isn't whether AI threatens thinking skills, but whether we can leverage it the same way we leverage other cognitive tools.

We don't hunt our own food or walk everywhere anymore.
We use supermarkets and cars. Most of us Google instead of visiting libraries. Each tool trade-off changed how we think and what skills matter. AI is the next step in this progression, if we're smart about it.

The key is learning to think with AI rather than being replaced by it.
That means understanding both its capabilities and our irreplaceable human advantages.

1/3

AI isn't going anywhere. Time to get strategic:
Instead of mourning lost critical thinking skills, let's build on them through cognitive delegation—using AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement.

This isn't some Silicon Valley fantasy:
Three decades of cognitive research already mapped out how this works:

Cognitive Load Theory:
Our brains can only juggle so much at once. Let AI handle the grunt work while you focus on making meaningful connections.

Distributed Cognition:
Naval crews don't navigate with individual genius—they spread thinking across people, instruments, and procedures. AI becomes another crew member in your cognitive system.

Zone of Proximal Development
We learn best with expert guidance bridging what we can't quite do alone. AI can serve as that "more knowledgeable other" (though it's still early days).
The table below shows what this looks like in practice:

2/3

Critical reasoning vs Cognitive Delegation

Old School Focus:

Building internal cognitive capabilities and managing cognitive load independently.

Cognitive Delegation Focus:

Orchestrating distributed cognitive systems while maintaining quality control over AI-augmented processes.

We can still go for a jog or go hunt our own deer, but for reaching the stars we, the Apes do what Apes do best: Use tools to build on our cognitive abilities. AI is a tool.

3/3

In my STEM studies, the content is typically objective, factual, mechanical, and devoid of humanity.

More recently, first through #leanthinking, and then into #agile, #systemsthinking, #industrialengineering, I've come to realize that engineering with humanity creates progress for everyone, for the long term.

Thinkers like Galbraith, Follett, and Matthews show us a fair path, showing the bigger picture and putting humanity over profits.

IMHO, @debcha belongs in that same pantheon.

1/

Golden Dome dangers: An arms control expert explains how Trump’s missile defense threatens to make the US less safe

#systemsThinking

https://theconversation.com/golden-dome-dangers-an-arms-control-expert-explains-how-trumps-missile-defense-threatens-to-make-the-us-less-safe-258048

> Missile defense systems are nothing new. History shows that even if they work as advertised – a big if – they’re a bad idea if your aim is to make your country safer from nuclear attack.

How do we anticipate vital needs through livable #systems?
Which methods feed each other without #waste?
What does #innovation look like when not limited by profitability?

Contribute from anywhere to build an #openknowledge bank.

REGISTER INTEREST: https://makeinplace.org