When dealing with networks consisting of 1000s of entities and relationships, it is extremely difficult for an editor to detect redundant links. Routines can be designed to analyze the network around an anchor point for different types of redundancy, but the results to date have proved difficult to interpret because they cannot as yet be related to a visual map.

3.1 Network analysis (text)
An increasing number of applications of graph theory have emerged in the social sciences. GRADAP is an especially powerful package for the definition and analysis of large networks of social entities. Many other packages exist but few are able to handle more than a few 100 nodes or relationships between them. Like all of them, however GRADAP offers no means of actually mapping the networks in a visually comprehensible form. The results are presented as indicators or tables.

3.2 Identification of vicious and serendipitous loops (text)
There has long been recognition of how one problem can aggravate another and of how several problems can reinforce each other. There has been no attempt to identify systematically the existence of vicious loops or cycles through which 4 or more problems constantly reinforce one another. A computer program has been developed to explore the many pathways amongst the world problems documented in this Encyclopedia and isolate such loops. This suggests the possibility of moving from a focus on problems as though they were isolated, of which few are, to one in which the focus is on the many vicious loops of which a problem may be a member. See also examples of loops.

3.3 Q-Analysis (text)
This technique gives precision to understanding of the challenges of comprehensibility amongst communities of people or organizations. Specifically it shows how more complex patterns of understanding, or concepts of greater complexity, can only be communicated with great difficulty by losing important dimensions, or not at all, through certain patterns of relationship. It demonstrates how complex messages can only be usefully communicated through communication channels that can handle such complexity. In the absence of adequate channels, complex notions do not “travel well”. It raises the question of how to design communication networks adequate to integrative communications of any kind.

if i understand this correctly, this is a list of approaches to cope with societal challenges (ala engelbarts intelligence augmentation)

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