What is coupling? A pairing. When two people become a couple, they, by definition and by common sense, are pairing their future togethers. Of course, there are levels to how tightly coupled two systems are, but that is the rough idea. Decoupling is the same thing but in the other direction.
Now, this is a pretty simple idea. Ye, you can pair two things together and take them apart, but for some reason, I’ve been seeing this applied everywhere. Here’s a little compiled list of where I’m been seeing this.
- Lights & economic development: Okay, this is absolute insanity. It turns out that you can tie GDP to satellite images, and… just think about that for a second. Not just satellite images of buildings or what not but lights. Of course, this is becoming a bit less true now that richer places can afford LEDs, but I’m sure there’s still some way this can be applied.
- Good regulator theorem
- Neural net scaling: is magic? Never before do I think we’ve had such a tight linkage between money and “intelligence” (I use the word very loosely here). I suppose you can count making more humans through more money counts, but the fact it’s an artificial intelligence makes it all the more fascinating.
- Thermometers: The old therometers we had as a kid would have alcohol/mercury (yummy) inside a tube which would go up and down as the temperature changed. Could be considered a tightly linked system
- Malthusian Trap: For almost all of human history, we’ve been trapped between linear production of food and exponential growth of human population, but it seems we’ve finally broken free of that.
- Great horse manure crisis: Researchers predicted that London would be drowned in a sea of horse poop since productivity and horse poop (from transportation of goods and humans) were tightly linked. Although cars today have a not so great reputation for once again linking transportation with general pollution and climate change, they did manage to unlink travel from horse poop which is something I’m very grateful of. You might just see this as a negative externality where the consequences of your actions aren’t directly visible (smelly poop) and instead are invisible to the human eye yet might cause devastation to our globe.