[jefffoster]

I’ve been thinking about this too.

There’s this notion of variety popularized by cybernetics folks a long time ago. Variety is like the state space of the system. Then there’s a law that says “only variety absorbs variety”.

So if a method has high variety then it must have an equally complex implementation to handle the variety.

When there is a mismatch it means that either the method has parameters that aren’t useful, or that the body of the method isn’t covering cases it should.

https://fffej.substack.com/p/only-variety-can-absorb-variety was my attempt to write it up more fully.

[Vgoose]

Thanks for sharing, I've never heard of variety before and that was an interesting read. It makes me think of a broader term I've been using to describe the run time state of the system: Entropy. I've given up on measuring that for now and I'm settling for a compile time proxy through measuring the _semantic_ cardinality of types as this seems a bit more approachable for a POC.

One drawback I ran into was that the variety/entropy of scalars tends to dominate everything else. I'm clamping them to 1 for now but that's also not great as it punishes more descriptive systems.