Thinking in promises / Mark Burgess.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burgess, Mark, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Promises.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (194 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Sebastopol, California : O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2015.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Imagine a set of simple principles that could help you to understand how parts combine to become a whole, and how each part sees the whole from its own perspective. If such principles were any good, it shouldn’t matter whether we’re talking about humans on a team, birds in a flock, computers in a datacenter, or cogs in a Swiss watch. A theory of cooperation ought to be pretty universal, so we should be able to apply it both to technology and to the workplace. Such principles are the subject of Promise Theory, and the focus of this insightful book. The goal of Promise Theory is to reveal the behavior of a whole from the sum of its parts, taking the viewpoint of the parts rather than the whole. In other words, it is a bottom-up, constructionist view of the world. Start Thinking in Promises and find out why this discipline works for documenting system behaviors from the bottom-up.

Contents:

""Copyright""; ""Table of Contents""; ""Foreword""; ""Letter to the Reader""; ""Chapter 1. Promises and Impositions""; ""Promise Engineering""; ""From Commands to Promises""; ""Why Is a Promise Better than a Command?""; ""Autonomy Leads to Greater Certainty""; ""The Observer Is Always Right""; ""Culture and Psychology""; ""Nonlocality of Obligations""; ""Isn't That Quasi-Science?""; ""Is Promise Theory Really a Theory?""; ""The Main Concepts""; ""How Much Certainty Do You Need?""; ""A Quick User Guide""; ""Just Make It Happen""; ""An Exercise""; ""Chapter 2. With a License to Intend""

""An Imposition Too Far""""Reformulating Your World into Promises""; ""Proxies for Human Agency""; ""What Are the Agencies of Promises?""; ""What Issues Do We Make Promises About?""; ""What Things Can Be Promised?""; ""What Things Can't Be Promised?""; ""The Lifecycle of Promises""; ""Keeping Promises""; ""Cooperation: The Polarity of Give and Take""; ""How Much Does a Promise Binding Count?""; ""Promises and Trust Are Symbiotic""; ""Promoting Certainty""; ""Some Exercises""; ""Chapter 3. Assessing Promises""; ""What We Mean by Assessment""; ""Kinds of Promise Assessment""

""Relativity: Many Worlds, Branches, and Their Observers""""Relativity and Levels of Perception""; ""Inferred Promises: Emergent Behaviour""; ""How Promises Define Agent-Perceived Roles""; ""The Economics of Promise Value: Beneficial Outcomes""; ""Human Reliability""; ""The Eye of the Beholder""; ""Some Exercises""; ""Chapter 4. Conditional Promises-and Deceptions""; ""The Laws of Conditional Promising""; ""Local Quenching of Conditionals""; ""Assisted Promises""; ""Conditional Causation and Dependencies""; ""Circular Conditional Bindings: The Deadlock Carousel""

""The Curse of Conditions, Safety Valves""""Other Circular Promises""; ""Logic and Reasoning: The Limitations of Branching and Linear Thinking""; ""Some Exercises""; ""Chapter 5. Engineering Cooperation""; ""Engineering Autonomous Agents""; ""Promisees, Stakeholders, and Trading Promises""; ""Broken Promises""; ""What Are the Prerequisites for Cooperation?""; ""Who Is Responsible for Keeping Promises?""; ""Mutual Bindings and Equilibrium of Agreement""; ""Incompatible Promises: Conflicts of Intent""; ""Cooperating for Availability and the Redundancy Conundrum""

""Agreement as Promises: Consensus of Intent""""Contractual Agreement""; ""Contracts and Signing""; ""Agreement in Groups""; ""Promoting Cooperation by Incentive: Beneficial Outcome""; ""The Stability of Cooperation: What Axelrod Said""; ""The Need to Be Needed: Reinterpreting an Innate Incentive?""; ""Avoiding Conflicts of Interest""; ""Emergent Phenomena as Collective Equilibria: Forming Superagents""; ""Guiding the Outcome of Cooperation When It Is Emergent""; ""Stability of Intent: Erratic Behaviour?""; ""When Being Not of One Mind Is an Advantage""; ""Human Error or Misplaced Intent?""

""Organization: Centralization Versus Decentralization""

Notes:

"Designing systems for cooperation"--cover.

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed July 7, 2015).

ISBN:

9781491918487

1491918489

9781491917862

1491917865

9781491918494

1491918497

OCLC:

914166367