Came here to say this! Donella Meadows lays out a nice compact catalogue of recurring patterns that you’ll start seeing everywhere.

Another good book on patterns also comes from Chelsea Green: Seeing Nature, by Paul Krafel. It’s been out of print for a while, but it’s been republished by a friend of mine as Shifting. You can find it on Amazon https://www.amazon.ca/Shifting-Natures-change-Paul-Krafel/dp/9198917218 (no affiliate marketing, don’t worry).

This book is a memoir of Krafel’s time with the US National Park Service, and at first it feels like only that — just a collection of disjointed stories. But after a while he pulls it all together tidily. The patterns he identifies echo Meadows, David Holmgren/Bill Mollison (co-creators of permaculture design) — I mean, that’s inevitable with patterns; it’s what makes them patterns ;)

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the late Christopher Alexander, the creator of the pattern language concept. His book A Pattern Language is extremely hard to find, and it’s focused exclusively on human habitation systems (rooms, houses, neighbourhoods, all the way up to nations) but a lot of the patterns are surprisingly relevant outside that context.

And of course Ward Cunningham and others cribbed the pattern language concept for their own domains, so much so that pattern languages have become their own pattern now :)

Benford’s Law
Pareto’s law

Ooh, look: they’re re-inventing the hippies.

Yes, a great lesson in interacting with this giant computer (or what ever we are “part” of):
Tune in and stimulate softly; get rewarded with similar subtle stimulation.

We see faces in wood, animals in clouds, process light waves, sound waves, feel emotion from music, conflate correlation with causation often…

Herd and social mentality favours doing less and copying patterns set by others, our whole society is founded on a hierarchy, where orders are (often, not always) passed down like waves from the top and this is seen as correct.
Pushback and you’re a rebel, a nuisance, until enough people copy you, and your “wave” becomes the stronger one.

It’s almost like we were designed as our sole (soul?) purpose for recognising and interacting with waves.

Perhaps Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy wasn’t just a story, maybe we are a giant computer.

I wonder if this is intentional- a commercial pilot once told me that they had, on occasion, intentionally caused this gentle roll left and right to help calm down a crowd of passengers who were upset at having their alcohol service cut off.
I don’t know if it was just a joke to them at the time or more widely used trick, but aircraft manufacturers do tune some other parameters (eg light levels), for maximum passenger docility, so it wouldn’t exactly surprise me.

Waves
Cybetics/Control theory/feedback/feedfoward
Evolution
Tensors/matrix/networks/high dimensionality
Linear algebra
Thermodynamics
Ecological systems
Frequentist statistics
Bayesian statistics
Mass flow/unit analysis
Calculus
Turing machines
Postmodern critique