Extrinsic and intrinsic effectiveness
We need to understand the difference between intrinsic effectiveness and extrinsic effectiveness. These are the terms I use. I believe they unambiguously capture a noteworthy attribute of systems. Intrinsic pertains to things internal and essential, and extrinsic applies to those attributes from without. Effectiveness in the sense of systems is their value, and anything’s value to itself will be related to its continuation—its autopoietic strength.
Most people think about extrinsic effectiveness when it comes to their code or engineering projects. It’s your typical performance measurement. It’s your acceptance criteria or your metric for success. In effect, extrinsic effectiveness is how well the system performs when measured against your selected goals, the measurements someone above you in a hierarchy would be concerned with, or the ones the market responds to. It’s often the part you want to maximise or adjust to reap the amplest bounty.
Elements can straddle the gap between these domains. Anything that does well according to its extrinsic metric will likely be repeated, continuing the system based on extrinsic values. In effect, introspective systems turn the extrinsic effectiveness of their components into intrinsic effectiveness by being an environment that selects for those attributes.
Opposing forces
The intrinsic effectiveness domain relates to the performance of any system in regard to maintaining its existence, that is, the system’s inherent survival traits. It’s not the same as extrinsic effectiveness and can often be opposing. Consider the power of poorly managed agile development. The system of badly implemented Agile principles is powerful because, like governmental systems, anyone inside the system saying it’s not working and it’s hurting more than helping will be told, ‘It’s not X’s fault. You’re not doing X right’. The intrinsic effectiveness of a system can be its immunity to contradiction or removal. You might recognise this as the attributes of a virulent meme.
Remember, each system has two different areas of effectiveness. Systems with intrinsic effectiveness include those of doomed complexity. Such as when an architectural design or pattern appears to be more flexible or cleaner than the straightforward dumb technique, but needs fix after fix after fix for each corner case encountered, thus rendering the clever, clear solution neither clear nor valuable. But it is clever in an evil way, as it is self-maintaining.
Another example is that when patches or workarounds become the norm, people should consider how patches affect normal operation. Current CPU architecture results from our coding techniques over the last few decades. If you honestly want to get the most out of the available materials, you can’t. I mean the literal material, as in silicon, copper, and gold. The architecture we have these days is not an optimal solution. Rather, it’s a solution to a different problem, the problem of running code as it has been written up until now.
Similarly, GPU drivers are the result of the most commonly used graphics techniques. The Vulkan® API came about because the set of capabilities of a GPU had stabilised, and the rate at which new clever optimisation techniques were arriving was slowing down. The new API removed some of the previous limitations.
We will likely see the same pattern play out every decade and a half. New technology will eliminate the complex helper functions that burden the highly efficient architecture developed under the previous generation’s best-performing solutions.
Some people believe this happened with mobile CPUs and will occur with newer architectures, but the CPU domain is strange in that the dominating consumer PC operating system holds it back from taking on new technology. A walled-garden operating system allows for easier migration, and we have seen that happen multiple times with Apple® switching architecture not just once or twice, but three times. The intrinsic effectiveness of the x86 instruction set is the symbiotic relationship with the Microsoft Windows™ operating system’s commitment to backwards compatibility.
Extrinsic and intrinsic effectiveness are orthogonal to each other. You can have one without the other. The problematic systems are those tenacious ones with weak extrinsic effectiveness. And that leads into the next section: patterns that exhibit strong intrinsic effectiveness but have weak or even negative value to their inhabitants.