Unravelling the ball of wool

This is a blog about my reasoning on how the world works. That is what the name of the blog is about. A ton of my knowledge is second-hand, but I’ll try to at least quote some sources I remember or find that are hard to find. Wikipedia, especially for historical context and events, is a source I will use.

The world is a black box, and there is no way to perfectly simulate the entire universe¹. A good, current example, of a black box model is social media algorithms. We know what data goes into it, something happens in a black box, and we get a recommendation. And very few people understand how these black boxes work². Another good example is the human brain. We still need psychologists, medication and other help to keep functioning. But we don’t exactly what happens inside. We know what we put in, something happens, and we have a decent idea of what will happen. I cannot call myself a (former) socio-technical modelling student without mentioning George E. P. Box’ famous quote: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”³

This black box I like to see as a tangled ball of wool. I can pull on a string, hoping the other side comes out the way I want, but I cannot see if I’m choking down other strings or maybe giving some some more space. This is not an exact science, or at least not exact as in it has a singular answer. That is the point of the blog. I’ll try to be anecdotal and use techniques like Fermi estimations ⁴⁵ to try to trace some of the threads in the world and try to make sense of it all.

Lastly, three concepts are core to looking at the world in an agile way⁶.

Sphere of influence, sphere of control and what this specific image calls “everything else”. I’ve seen it described as sphere of concern, but my favorite name for it is “the situation”.