Systems Thinking and Quality

Same thing: greedy algorithms. Mostly imposed by companies "living by algorithms".

Your post really reeks of intellectual arrogance and a semi-religious glorification of formal methods.

If you had focused less on your crusade, you might have noticed that the original talk was given by Russ Ackoff, one of the pioneers of Operations Research and former Professor of Mathematics, Philosophy, Systems Sciences, Management Science, Fellow of the American Statistical Association and many more honors and titles.

You might say that Ackoff has helped bring formal methods to business and is surely he was very aware of their value and when to use them.

The fact that you find many of the points stated there obvious, doesn't mean they are not valuable to repeat. In fact it seems likely that a lot of these ideas have become so wide-spread in the meantime, that you don't even recognize their origin in these fields.

Specifically asking Prof. Ackoff if he has heard of the term "bottleneck" is just cringy and embarrassing.

This talk was given towards the end of his career as a summary of his learnings about systems. Maybe you would do well in considering if other sources of knowledge besides formalism and "science" have value in our society.

"systems thinking" might seems obvious to you as a software engineer, but most public-policy, corporate and medical decisions still suffer from massive Reductionism, ie. trying to solve problems in isolation without regard for feedback loops that might compromise the overall system or lead to unintended consequences.

Don't elevate yourself over others just because you know python, you are doing our whole profession a massive disservice by acting out your insecurities in this way.

I'm certainly not idolizing Prof. Ackhoff, I hadn't even heard about him before this post. I simply engaged critically with what I was reading, meaning I took a look at the primary source that this article was based upon and looked at the academic and historic context. I think this is the minimum one should do before engaging in snarky rants like yours: Try to understand the thing that triggered you. > Your post is called appealing to authority. I don't know Russ Ackoff and I don't care. I'm not challenging him, I'm challenging this article.

I wasn't appealing to his authority, I was simply pointing out how a little humility goes a long way if one is genuinely interested in understanding. You started your post with two rhetorical questions that weren't questions at all, you already had made up your mind. You can't fix that by evoking a nicely branded "logical fallacy" (appealing to authority).

> You telling me this guy invented the definition of the word "system?" and is simply just repeating it now? Give me a break.

I didn't say anything of the sorts. I simply said that some ideas become so common place that we forget that they also had an origin, and that we certainly were not it. I don't know if this is true, but your usage of "bottleneck" definitely strikes me as an outgrowth of the intellectual tradition criticized by you.

> "If we have a system of improvement that’s directed at improving the parts taken separately you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved."

> Which is something that has zero truth. You and anyone who believes this trash should be the one who is embarrassed.

> If your idol knows what a bottleneck is, where does this trash come from?

You didn't really make an effort to deconstruct this thesis, you simply call it trash and assign an arbitrary "truth" value. For somebody that is so concerned with rigor and logic, that surely doesn't seem right.

He is simply saying that a framework for improvement that is organized around local improvement (local measurement, local interventions) will lead to global failures. Examples for this principle are myriad, the book The Goal/Theory of Constraints comes to mind which is arguably one of the most influential books around bottlenecks. Why you would call that thesis trash, just because the word "bottleneck" was not used is beyond me.

> Why don't you reread my post. I literally used the word intuition somewhere. Find it and figure out what I'm saying before crafting a meaningless response.

You did use the word intuition:

> In conclusion, this is not a good way to think. If you want a good systematic way to analyze the world and "systems" the way to do it is to have a very clear notion about the difference between science, logic and intuition. Know the strength of each pillar and know the weaknesses.

> The above article above is all just intuition with logical flaws due to lack of rigor or science to back up its points.

Namely you called it "not a good way to think ''. I wouldn't even call the basis of knowing that is used in the talk "intuition". It's a collection of heuristics derived from the experiential knowledge of somebody who practiced his craft of optimizing systems in many fields spanning multiple decades, elaborating his thinking over and over in a huge body of work.

I would love to hear your definition of "science", because I for my part have found that most intellectual self-aware avoid this kind of "Referral to Science!" (as in "I fucking love Science!").

> Knowing python isn't impressive AT ALL.

"Woosh" would be the right response to that I guess.

> The disservice comes from you. Intellectual idolization is the greatest disservice of all not just to software engineering but to all of science. Try to make your points without dropping a name or credential.

My point was not to argue against your point. You didn't really have a point, except maybe "This article is mumbo jumbo". My point was to show you how easy it is to take a gut reaction and lazily deride something for the sake of self-elevation, while clearly displaying a total lack of critical engagement with the source material. This is literally the cancer of online communities.

> We are on a site called "Hacker News" so this article is likely directed at hackers not business people. So when I say this stuff is obvious... I am saying that it is obvious to "Hackers." The context is Relevant. Understand?

Sorry there is so much dumbness in that one paragraph that I have to go over it in detail and feed the troll.

> We are on a site called "Hacker News" so this article is likely directed at hackers

How does the aggregator though which you find an article say anything about the intended audience of the original author?

> not business people. This place is operated by a venture capital firm, so this whole community here was literally made by business people for business people. The fact that they called it "hacker"-news is simply a marketing ploy that you fell for beautifully.

> So when I say this stuff is obvious... I am saying that it is obvious to "Hackers". Where is your rigor in even using such a debased word like "hackers"?

Let's use the definition of the one who named this platform: "Among programmers it means a good programmer." "It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack."

So a hacker is somebody who is very good at his craft and can either beat a system or can deal with it in non-formal "ugly" ways. So the essence of a hacker is non-scientific and very much "look-at-the-system-poke-it-and-see-what-happens", which is the only way to really deal with systems successfully, hence "systems thinking".

> The context is Relevant. Understand? Exactly my point. You can't just take an article, make no effort and just piss all over it. Well you can, but it makes you look mean, insecure, lazy and reinforces the stereotypes people have about mean and insecure programmers.