I thought this would be an interesting exercise – having done similar on my own blog.

Top ten:

1. Tables of Soyga: the first cellular automaton? Anders Sandberg – an oddly popular post, blogged here in 2019 from a 2014 post
2. Marshall McLuhan – extensions and amputations – inspired by Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer – super interesting stuff! (From 2019)
3. Our Theory of Change « The Berkana Institute – the two loops model: useful and mythopoetic stuff
4. Conscious Purpose versus Nature – Gregory Bateson – which I described back in 2018 as ‘very big and important’ – accurately, I think!
5. Is there an actual source for the Kurt Lewin quote “You cannot understand a system until you try to change it”? – a post which pretty much fulfils Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
6. Marshall MacLuhan’s Tetrad of media effects – second impactful visitation of MacLuhan, undoubtedly a systems | cybernetics | complexity thinker, but not in the usual canon!
7. Biocentrism – Robert Lanza – biology as the central driving science in the universe. I’m sure I thought twice whether to weblog this one or not (in 2018)
8. A schema for better understanding systems leadership and systems change – it me
9. Hospicing The Old – TheFarewellFund – Cassie Robinson – the two loops model again
10. Gregory Bateson and the Counter-Culture – Bateson again but a pretty weird take, and including an image the original bloggers had stolen from someone who stole it from Howard Silverman, so – much as I find the connections from both cybernetics and organisational development to ‘the dark side’ of cults, MK Ultra etc fascinating (and parallel to some of the military origins of some systems approaches, and then use in e.g. RAND Corp and Vietnam war ‘planning’), not a piece I would actually recommend for anyone serious – check the comments on the original blog.

I’m fascinated and intrigued, and assume that a lot of this is just accidental googlewhacks etc – there’s a clear exponetial curve with the top four running at 1,210, 1,029, 636 and 444 respectively, and the tenth at 277 visits – then another 30ish posts before the hit count drops to under 100. And I know a number of people read these posts by email.