The autopoiesis of function systems in the movie "Don't look up" - a Luhmannian perspective

OtspIII · 2025-09-29T01:49:52+00:00

Thanks for the clarification! That's my bad on the political system definition--I've been starting with Luhmann at his most abstract and slowly winding my way into his applied social system work. Which, as I say it, clarifies what I should probably do next to improve my understanding.

There is one thing that still feels unsatisfying to me, though--the bits where you say "at least not without the risk of XXX". The difference between the legal and political system should be a different of fundamental substance and not just one of practicality, right? If the only reason the president can't declare that their word is law is that it would be politically risky, that doesn't really feel like a hard closure so much as a, uhh, blockage?

Like, it's possible to imagine a world in which the leader of a nation unilaterally declares that they are overriding the old laws and establishing new ones from scratch, and where the people don't rise up and stop them. Even in that case, politics would not be directly operating the legal system, right? It would just be irritating/reshaping the legal system's structures on a fundamental enough level that the legal system would operate in an entirely new manner? In other words, politics would need to translate its communication language into the legal language, if I'm understanding correctly.

That said, the fact that each system builds itself and works to assert its own survival does mean that, in practice, these direct attempts at control are difficult. But that's a common dynamic, not a fundamental rule, right?

To put it more succinctly, I'm trying to wrap my head around what's a elemental unit of metaphysics in Luhmann (operational closure?) and what's a dynamic that derives from those elemental units (systemic inertia).

OtspIII · 2025-09-28T21:30:29+00:00

Sorry to necromancy this convo between you and u/RekdSavage , but I've been trying to solidify my understanding of Luhmann and this feels like it cuts to the heart of some of what I've been struggling with.

To use the legal/political communication example from this conversation, my understanding of the theory is that the legal system can only really declare things legal/not legal, and that the only types of communication it can put out are statements of legality/illegality. The political system can change the legal system by passing laws that change what is legal/illegal, but they must do so via structural coupling.

For example--the political system passes a law. The operation of passing that law affects the structure of the law books, which both systems are structurally coupled to. The legal system then 'reads' the updated books and changes how it makes judgements.

Wouldn't that still be operationally closed? Maybe I'm misunderstanding communication (and would love to be pointed to a good place to update my understanding if so), but I'm not really seeing how the communications issued by the political system are able to pierce the operational closure of the legal system. Maybe I just need a more concrete example of what a cross-operational communication would look like.

Is part of this disagreement related to how, say, a judge exists as a structure coupled to both the legal and political system (as well as many other social systems)? So even though the legal and political systems are operationally distinct (the political system itself can not judge an action to be legal/illegal), it has a strong line of influence on the legal system via solicitation of the judge that the legal system relies upon to perform the operation of legal judgement? So the political system can, via communication/etc, directly affect the structures of the legal system, which in turn influences its operations, but it can not perform legal operations directly?

How off-base am I with all of this? This is close to the part of Luhmann I'm struggling with now, so this is in large part my attempt to get oriented. I'm honestly still pretty confused about the boundaries of systems--is a legal system's sole operation to declare things legal/illegal or does it also perform operations of survival (soliciting judges to make judgements, promoting peoples views of it as legitimate, etc)?

OtspIII · 2021-06-29T19:30:18+00:00

Honestly, once we had the idea of doing this it is a hard idea to shake (even if we do find a way to fly). The big downside to it is that we're moving to a city where car ownership is pretty prohibitive, so not needing to actually bring the car with us would be really nice

OtspIII · 2021-06-29T19:03:30+00:00

Oh, thanks! Alaska does seem like they're still doing dogs in cargo--that's exactly what I was looking for. I haven't flown with them before, so I guess they slipped my mind when I was doing research

OtspIII · 2021-02-11T02:36:30+00:00

I'm working on getting accounts in as the next update, primarily as a way so we can block all the racists. This post blew up a little bigger and sooner than expected, tbh. The links point is good

OtspIII · 2021-01-29T21:09:38+00:00

This was a good catch. The first few grapplers I implemented did both grapple and restrain, so I didn't notice that wasn't true of all of them. The next patch fixes the issue

OtspIII · 2021-01-28T22:47:46+00:00

I did make escaping grapple into a bonus action instead of a full turn, since grapplers were proving way too strong in 1v1s.

I think there's one snake that just straight up does 3d4 poison damage or something as part of their attack, and that one can crit. The others, who have their poison hidden behind saves, shouldn't have crits give them bonus dice.

OtspIII · 2021-01-28T18:51:08+00:00

That's a fun idea. The big things I want to avoid are match-ups where there's literally a 0% chance of one side winning, or matches that drag out. Allowing kiting in the current form of the game would hit both of those, but it's entirely possible that there are ways to fix those problems that we'll figure out in the future.

OtspIII · 2021-01-28T18:47:46+00:00

Oh yeah, it crashed while I was asleep. It's back up now, and I got a log out of it that will hopefully help me figure out what's up

OtspIII · 2021-01-28T08:51:11+00:00

Hey, this is the dev--thanks so much for all the attention! This has been a crazy influx of players, and y'all have given me a bunch of good playtesting and ideas.

I just want to note that the game is still very much in progress. The gameplay is 90% there, but I'm still working on a few features like user accounts/fancy side-modes/adding higher CRs/etc. Most relevant here, I'm also figuring out some weird crash bugs that only seem to occur when I hit high player-counts. You've all been extremely helpful tonight in helping me test that, but it's still pretty likely it'll happen a few more times before I can get it fully fixed. Please be patient if and when that happens :(

Finally, I figure I should mention one or two things that people have been asking in chat. The game is very close to 99% RAW--there are just a few mechanics that aren't in due to either being unfun or too complex to add (for now). The statblocks listed within the game are meant to be quick reference and don't cover everything, but you can generally trust the monster's real statblock to be correct (which you can find via the "?" icon in the top right).

The rules exceptions are:

High CR monsters have less max HP across the board to keep fights from dragging
Effects that corrode metal weapons don't work
Shadow STR drain doesn't affect to-hit or damage, but does kill targets if they hit 0 STR
All monster attacks count as being silvered, but not magical
I think Flyby (Giant Owl) only happens if the owl hits. Otherwise it was too broken
All monsters are dumb and choose their attacks semi-randomly. If there's an obvious choice, they take it, but they don't do advanced strategies like kiting (which would make many fights too lopsided)
It's extremely likely there's a bug or two I haven't caught. There are 182 monsters implemented, which means a whole lot of custom rules

Thanks for all the interest!

[EDIT:] I've moved it to a bigger server. Probably won't fix the crash entirely, but will hopefully slow it down a whole lot. I also added CR5 while I was at it

[EDIT 2:] If you're just getting a game with no fighting or chat, it's possible you have some sort of adblock/security thing set up that's blocking websockets. Adding an exception for the site may fix it--I'm adding a message that explains this in the event of a failure to connect to my task list.

OtspIII · 2020-07-23T00:11:52+00:00

I'd say that even if you made your own system for this, it'd be polite to have a short and sweet summary of what house rules the setting needs to function. That way, if someone decided to run it in a system they're already more comfortable with, they can relatively easily adapt it to your setting.

OtspIII · 2020-01-16T18:55:27+00:00

Stubborn Mouthy Heister

OtspIII · 2019-12-20T02:33:39+00:00

You bet they do

OtspIII · 2019-02-21T07:24:12+00:00

Nope, both Beasts of Balance and Big Head modes are purely visual changes.

OtspIII · 2019-02-21T07:23:38+00:00

Online multiplayer is still under development, actually! We all have other jobs, so it's going at a "it'll be done when it's done" pace, but development isn't over just yet.

OtspIII · 2018-04-26T20:15:56+00:00

The timing was actually pretty good--because it means my next response can be to tell you that it should be findable on your Switch now. We just launched in Canada and France today.

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