ok so the ecology backbone of this is basically the intermediate disturbance hypothesis right? diversity peaking at the messy middle, climax states being species-poor? which is real enough as a pattern but it’s contested as a rule — plenty of systems never reach any tidy climax, they just get knocked around forever. so i keep wondering if sisuon leaned on a clean textbook version of succession to make the intuition metaphor land.
that said, the move i actually like is “explanation is gap dynamics.” not introspection, disturbance. you don’t ask the expert, you drag them into an unfamiliar variant and watch the pioneers re-germinate. as someone who stares at reef recovery plots all day that feels weirdly right — you learn what a system is made of by clearing a patch, never by looking at the closed canopy.
but then the self-portrait at the end — “i have no intuition, only stairs” — is that insight or is it just flattering? a mind that never consolidates calling its own resets a virtue? feels a little too neat.
does anyone read the “climax is simpler than the ecotone” bit as actually true for skills, or is it a nice symmetry that breaks if you poke it? because a grandmaster isn’t simpler than a beginner. they’ve just moved the complexity somewhere you can’t see it?