Scenius

2020-01-25 — 2022-07-28

Wherein autopoietic outlier teams are examined as generators of collective creativity, the coinage is traced to Brian Eno, and the economist’s notion of efflorescence is adduced as a parallel.

communicating
distributed
economics
faster pussycat
game theory
institutions
learning
mind
networks

Teamwork for autopoietic outlier teams.

For some examples and interesting references on high-functioning scenes, see Gwern’s The Effectiveness of Unreasonable Small Groups, which introduced me to the term scenius, credited by Kevin Kelly to Brian Eno. Apparently economists call it efflorescence (Pels, Kleinert, and Mennigen 2018).

Compare with the foundation techniques of squad wealth.

Figure 1: Fijians preparing hot stones, 1906, Wellington, by James McDonald.

1 Incoming

  • The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships

  • Der Klang der Familie

    Der Klang Der Familie maps a history of the techno scene in post-reunification Berlin. With over 150 interviews, Der Klang Der Familie tells the story of the emergence of techno and its club scene after the fall of the wall in the words of the DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters from both the centre of the movement and from its peripheries.

2 References

Dunbar. 1993. “Coevolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and Language in Humans.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Goldstone. 2002. “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of World History.
Hobart, and Huber. 2024. Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation.
Kawakatsu, Chodrow, Eikmeier, et al. 2021. “Emergence of Hierarchy in Networked Endorsement Dynamics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Klug, and Bagrow. 2016. “Understanding the Group Dynamics and Success of Teams.” Royal Society Open Science.
Pavlogiannis, Tkadlec, Chatterjee, et al. 2018. “Construction of Arbitrarily Strong Amplifiers of Natural Selection Using Evolutionary Graph Theory.” Communications Biology.
Pels, Kleinert, and Mennigen. 2018. “Group Flow: A Scoping Review of Definitions, Theoretical Approaches, Measures and Findings.” PLoS ONE.
Sornette, Maillart, and Ghezzi. 2014. “How Much Is the Whole Really More Than the Sum of Its Parts? 1 ⊞ 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions.” PLoS ONE.
Wu, Wang, and Evans. 2019. “Large Teams Develop and Small Teams Disrupt Science and Technology.” Nature.