2025-06-09 - Beginning learning from Osinga chapter 4

I tried starting by giving the chapter to Gemini 2.5 and saying “please make high level flashcards from this chapter”, but that made me realise that there are things that I need to run specific Deep Research reports on, to learn them properly.

E.g., “complex adaptive systems” aren’t fully explained in Osinga chapter 4, so I’m going to run a report, read & make flashcards from this, and then probably make some additional reports from things surfaced by that report…

I think I might actually start by re-reading chapter 4, or a chunk of it at least. It’s been probably 2+ months since I read it the first time, and since then I’ve thoroughly flashcard-ed and rabbit-holed chapter 3, so I imagine I’ll find reading this chapter to feel quite different now.

It’s 42 pages - I might re-read the first 10 and then make flashcards from them and see if I need to make further reports.

(For context, chapter 3 is called “Science” and goes into the scientific zeitgeist that Boyd was immersed in, and chapter 4 is called “Completing the shift”, and goes over the science that he was immersed in that wasn’t covered in chapter 3. From memory, chapter 3 is like:

• Epistemological revolution (Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi)
• Cognitive revolution (Simon & Newell, early AI, George A Miller & cognitive science, mental models, internal representations)
• Complexity science, chaos theory
• Uncertainty and the “new physics”
• Cybernetics

And now chapter 4 is going to cover:

• Complex adaptive systems in more detail
• Some other stuff that I haven’t made flashcards on yet so isn’t currently in my brain

Onwards!