organizations [...] produce designs which are copies of [their] communication structures (Conway's Law)

--- Programmer Melvin Conway (1968), in How do Committees Invent?, Datamation 14 (5): 28–31 [pdf] (h/t John Helm, see also Wikipedia, Conway's law)

Conclusion of the Datamation article

The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.

This criterion creates problems because the need to communicate at any time depends on the system concept in effect at that time. Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.

Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity. The development of such a philosophy promises to unearth basic questions about value of resources and techniques of communication which will need to be answered before our system-building technology . can proceed with confidence.

Conway's Law is sometimes invoked in the slogan, “Don’t ship the org chart” (see, e.g., Marcelo Calbucci post on LinkedIn).

 

Metaphysics is the art of bamboozling people methodically

 --- Physiologist A. V. Hill, quoted by his grandson Nicholas Humphrey, "How did consciousness evolve?," Royal Institution lecture, Sep 21, 2023, at 1:13

From the video

His field was biophysics. Mine is psychophysics, verging on metaphysics. Grandpa Hill was a down to earth a scientist as they come. He once gave me his definition of metaphysics. "Metaphysics," he said, "is the art of bamboozling people methodically."

Judging by the Wikipedia entry, Hill was amazing:

• He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge as third wrangler in the mathematics tripos.
• In his very first publication (1909), while still an undergraduate, he derived what became known as the Languir equation (1918).
• He was a crack shot.
• During a home leave in WW I in 1915, he proposed a two-mirror method to determine planes' heights and then assembled a team to calculate the required data tables.
• He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• In 1935 he served with Patrick Blackett and Sir Henry Tizard on the committee that gave birth to radar. 

 

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us

--- Winston Churchill, speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, October 1943, Hansard, HC Deb 28, volume 393, cc403-73 (accessed hansard.millbanksystems.com on December 7, 2023), cited by QuoteInvestigator, Quote Origin: We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us, June 26, 2016 (accessed on December 7, 2023)

From Hansard

I beg to move, "That a Select Committee be appointed to consider and report upon plans for the rebuilding of the House of Commons and upon such alterations as may be considered desirable while preserving all its essential features." On the night of 10th May, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. Having dwelt and served for more than 40 years in the late Chamber, and having derived fiery great pleasure and advantage therefrom, I, naturally, would like to see it restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity.

QuoteInvestigator goes on to describe related quotes:

• Henry David Thoreau, "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools ."
• John M. Culkin in “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan”, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."
• William J. Mitchell, "Now we make our networks and our networks make us."

the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become

--- Bruno Latour, in Pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies (1999: 304), cited in Blackboxing, Wikipedia, accessed 7 December 2023

Wikipedia cite:

[Blackboxing is] the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Desire is the presence of absence

--- Alexandre Kojève, quoted by Samantha Rose Hill in "The scar of identity," Aeon, 21 March 2023

From Hill's piece:

Instead of Hegel’s roundabout of self-consciousness that exists in itself and for itself but always and only in relation to another, Kojève gives us: self-consciousness is the I that desires, and desire implies and presupposes a self-consciousness. Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human. People know what it feels like to desire, to want, to crave to be seen, to feel understood. Desire is the hunger one feels to fill the absence inside themselves. Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.’