Quality after System Equalization: Beauty and Complexity

I have been working on this brain dump for such a long time that I forgot what was the fundamental trigger for it.

A few days ago I was investing some energy into thinking - or rather, into being aware - whether I did not have a strong need to do brain dumps lately. I suppose this can be seen under different lights. On the one hand, I possibly found a way to absorb data and distill information (knowledge?) from it without necessarily overloading my system; on the other hand, it might be that there was not enough data flowing in my brain and, consequently, nothing needed to be dumped. The only argument that makes me lean towards the first option is that we know human systems are open. In my defence - if I even need to defend myself - the nature of this brain dump is rather complicated and, I suppose, it touches on several disciplines in which I know little or close to nothing.

The most accurate memory I have of the trigger for this brain dump is the following question:

Can the functional equalisation of a system reduce its quality ?

This might sound counterintuitive, as some normalization efforts can lead to improved quality. I am thinking for example about this example, where I can easily imagine this enhancing the life of people who travel across countries. I guess a counter question in this case would be: "What is the benefit in this context of diversity (of phone chargers)? Does this diversity in the market and manufacturing bring advantages?" A better question would probably be: "To whom does this diversity bring advantages?". To the manufacturers? To the users? To the system as a whole? I guess this depends on how we look at the system, or what we consider the system boundaries to be.

I have the impression that the nature of my question goes deeper than a purely economic or technological matter. Although this might look like brain gymnastics, sometimes I cannot help but ask myself this sort of question. Some would probably claim that these are rather philosophical questions; I will leave it up to others to label and categorise.

A proper (better?) way to formulate an answer to the question above would be perhaps to first perform some methodical and qualitative research. On the other hand, I am no researcher either and I don't know how such research must be carried out. The best I can do is try to formulate a coherent brain dump and eventually return to it in the future, should I have collected new insights in the meantime.

Although the original question above is about the quality after system equalization, which is by itself a very complex concept to describe, the trigger of this brain dump was rather related to beauty. This might be a mistake, as it opens up an entire philosophical branch, namely that of aesthetics. I cannot avoid but accept this risk and potentially add aesthetics to the list of disciplines I need to carry out qualitative research into, should I ever decide to wear the "researcher" hat.

I don't remember exactly if this brain dump was triggered by this post I saw on X or whether something was already "cooking" in my brain in this direction. Certainly, at some point the two paths (my line of thoughts and the post I noticed) crossed, and with them the topic too; not surprisingly, the topic of architecture. It is also quite interesting to notice that this brain dump was "parked" in my brain since December 2023; this brain dump is being written in February 2025.

Back in July 2024, I bumped into a reference on the topic of beauty where Sabine holds the position that “physicists rely on beauty”, and this is a problem in the physics community. I have a different position on this topic, but this can be a completely new brain dump by itself.

To the main question of this brain dump, the most concise way I can use to help myself move forward is by drawing the following sketch:

In this brain dump, I am not focusing on the lack of passion, since it taps into personal individual motivations, which is not a topic I wanted to touch on at this time.

The focus at this time is when too much pressure is exercised to functionally equalize the system so that not enough time is available. The claim is that this leads to lower quality in the outcome and this manifests, among other ways, in a reduced intrinsic beauty. It is also important to highlight that the focus here is on the energy invested into equalizing the system, not on increasing the speed of execution. The latter would fall under a "speed and quality" discussion, in which it could be argued that as one improves one can accelerate whilst still maintaining quality.

What if I had to make a concise claim out of the considerations above?

Trying to equalise - normalise or standardise - reality too much brings value at the cost of quality. This can be balanced by taking speed and safety into consideration; we might need to reduce speed in order to guarantee quality, beauty and safety.

There are two major notes I am thinking of:

• the nature of power laws and the fact that reality seems to follow a Pareto distribution (certainly comes from complexity science, I grasp the concept but not fully the details)

• the “too much” wording; how much is too much? Metrics and heuristics?

I am sure other people spent way more thoughts on this topic than I have. Unsurprisingly, the following explanation comes from the field of complexity science and it does a much better job of codifying most of this brain dump. Equalizing or standardizing the system, for example, by dictating a common mission and common values in an organization (the substrate from which culture emerges?), is to some extent equivalent to trying to eliminate differences. This is dangerous because it does not allow for coherent heterogeneity, which, as a consequence, removes requisite varieties and reduces innovative capacity (ref).

It has been rather challenging to formulate the above concepts so that they make some sense to me. To the extent I understand complexity, I know that in complex systems there is no linear causality. The diagram I drew above looks very much like a causal linear chain but I confide in the following:

• the blocks are not meant to be point-like, but rather sets, and I think there exists at least a relationship between elements of those sets in the direction of the arrows

• the diagram is not meant to describe a mathematical function, even less so in the linear algebra

The diagram helped me bridge some concepts so that this brain dump has - to the extent of my perception and knowledge - some sense.

Reaching the end of this post, two final considerations are important, providing both an opportunity for further explanation and an argument for relaxing some parts of this reasoning while possibly helping to steer the thoughts in a slightly different direction:

1. There is a huge conceptual leap in the jump from time to pressure, especially if the focus is on "the energy invested into equalizing the system, not on increasing the speed of execution". Here physics could be helpful.

2. Unless a different level of abstraction is used (e.g. art), anything described here remains constrained by the limitations of language and terminology (ref), even, I think, in the case of algebra and mathematics.

Edit: Considering the topics I touch in my brain dumps, I find myself going back to this particular one after reading the following passage from The Mathematical Theory of Communication:

"One has the vague feeling that information and meaning may prove to be something like a pair of canonically conjugate variables in quantum theory, they being subject to some joint restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the other.

Or perhaps meaning may be shown to be analogous to one of the quantities on which the entropy of a thermodynamic ensemble depends. The appearance of entropy in the theory, as was remarked earlier, is surely most interesting and significant. Eddington has already been quoted in this connection, but there is another passage in "The Nature of the Physical World" which seems particularly apt and suggestive:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories - distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody. I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody, and not with the first three. Entropy is only found when the parts are viewed in association, and it is by viewing or hearing the parts in association that beauty and melody are discerned. All three are features of arrangement. It is a pregnant thought that one of these three associates should be able to figure as a commonplace quantity of science. The reason why this stranger can pass itself off among the aborigines of the physical world is that it is able to speak their language, viz., the language of arithmetic.

I feel sure that Eddington would have been willing to include the word meaning along with beauty and melody; and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see, in this theory, that entropy not only speaks the language of arithmetic; it also speaks the language of language."

Picture created by the author using GenAI