complexity

How do you make frameworks? (what is the meta-process behind Essay Architecture?) I think it starts with the patience to sift through a lot of complex noise. You need an everything-relates-to-everything openness to shift through possible groupings of things. Once you find something, you then shift to reductionist thinking, and see how well all the

Timeless art should strive for ordered complexity. Consider Plato, or a Beatles song, or a book you can read over and over. Sure, there may be a simple high-concept, but beneath it is cascading patterns, a hyper-object that the narrow-band of human attention can’t consume at once. Complexity is timeless, because every time you revisit it, there’s s

Thinking in utopia or dystopia is too black and white. We need to consider transtopian matrices. You know that Tim Urban graph that shows a single line going to the right, forking out into more and more possibilities in the future? While we can’t predict precisely what society will be like in 2045, we can map the categories, questions, and dualisms

“This guy thinks” (proper reaction to a complex Miro board).

Timeless works have an organized complexity within them. It is a vast universe, containing more wisdom than the mind can behold at once, meaning every time you dip in, you might notice some new layer you missed before (since you’ve evolved in the interim).

Sometimes, when you dive into an intellectual universe (Plato, McKenna, Emerson), it’s overwh

Creators shy away from complexity because it’s not instantly legible or memeable. This leaves serious wisdom unshared. The power of AI is that a bot can encapsulate the full complexity of a given trade. It becomes accessible one bit a time, based on user input. Instead of crafting a meme, you’re ordering a universe of truth.

When you dive into complexity, it’s so off the trail (in the thickets) that you’re forced to invent & touch the source of language to share it.

Some points to defend the POV that “essay quality is objective.”

• Specific scope: You have to set the scope small enough to “essays.” Books, memoirs, newsletter and other written mediums have their own criteria. Songs and films are even more different. I think it’s important not to get bogged down in genre, and instead to see genre as a culturally a

“Complexity wrangler”…