Abstract Ideas applied to Complex Problems

Abstraction is the ability to boil things down to its core by ignoring unnecessary details and instead focusing on whats common with something else. The ability of abstraction is a defining characteristic of humanity: We can talk about a book , even though every book has a different content, color, languages or size. The concept of a book  is an abstraction of all the different concrete books and every other human understands what we mean.  Through abstraction we are able to draw connections between seemingly unconnected things. Making sense of the world requires abstraction. In his famous monologue Goethes Faust wishes in German Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält That I may detect the inmost force Which binds the world, and guides its course The better we can abstract things, the better we can model the different aspects of the world around us. This enables us to better understand how things effect each other, allows us to make better predictions of the ...

The theory of constraints (TOC) is an approach for maximizing the throughput of a given system. It was proposed by Eliyahu M. Goldratts and has been applied in manufacturing as well as DevOps. Personally, I like the idea because of it's simplicity and iterative nature.  Let's first define what we mean by a system. A system is a directed acyclic graph with some sources (nodes that do not have any incoming edges) and some sinks (nodes that do not have any outgoing edges). Work in such a system enters the system at some source node and is processed at different nodes, representing workstations, until it reaches a sink node, marking its successful completion. Below you can find a simple system with four nodes. Work enters the system at the right, is split across two different nodes and the completed in the node on the left. The throughput  of a given system is defined as the rate of work units that can pass through the system per unit of time. For example in a car manufactur...

How can we obtain a better understanding of the world we live in? In his book "Factfulness - 10 Reasons we are wrong about the world" the author Hans Rosling gives 10 different reasons that tend to give us a systematically wrong impression of the world around us. He discusses how it is possible that in surveys more than 50% of the participants think the world is getting worse, while all global statistics suggest exactly the opposite.  One of the main reasons for this systematic misconception is that we often look at the current state without comparing it to anything. Without frame of reference, everything global seems pretty bad. Consider the fact that in 2010 there were 760 Million undernourished people in the world. In our mind we see a mass of starving humans and feel like we are living in a horrible world. However, in 1970 there were 1 Billion undernourished people on the planet. While this shows an improvement of about 25%, it is still not the full picture: In 1970 the ...