What Systems Optimize For — and What They Don’t
#reflection #systems #leadership #society
Parts of what follows grew out of several older posts I wrote on different topics that, at first glance, did not seem to belong together. Looking back, I realized they were circling around the same question from different angles. To prevent repetition I pulled them from the blog. I thought about deleting them, but decided to try and rewrite them. I played around with the local AI support in Brainiac and synthesized the bigger picture from those posts. As it seems, it came out pretty nice. It follows the ideas from the original posts, but is partly also very “intellectual” 🙂.
In education, in technology, at work, and even in private life, systems tend to drift away from what builds long-term capability, resilience, and alignment. Instead, they optimize for what is easier to reward, easier to explain, or simply more attractive in the short term.