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Magical systems thinking

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Re: Magical systems thinking

#51

Post by firesteelrain »

vslira wrote: post #3
voidhorse wrote: post #2

This essay focuses on a very narrow section of systems thinking and systems theory. There's an entire field, with many different subdisciplines beyond just the Club of Rome stuff (and which influenced them directly) that, quite explicitly also deals with systems that "fight back". In fact, any serious definition of systems thinking usually has said dynamics baked into it—systems are assumed to evolve from the start.…

Any particular resource to recommend?

“Thinking in Systems: A Primer” is the best first read.

Then, “Meltdown” and finally “The Fifth Discipline”

Re: Magical systems thinking

#52

Post by karmakaze »

samstokes wrote: post #20

What an interesting and strange article. The author barely offers a definition of "systems thinking", only names one person to represent it, and then claims to refute the whole discipline based on a single incorrect prediction and the fact that government is bad at software projects. It's not clear what positive suggestions this article offers except to always disregard regulation and build your own thing from scratc…

The article seems to think that systems thinking only applies at a certain lower scale. Even bringing up the bullwhip effect, and talking about it in certain kinds of systems is itself systems thinking, just not at the subcomponent level which doesn't show it. Systems thinking is about interactions and context.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#54

Post by mallowdram »

Wait until "world models" fail to work along these lines. Models are always wrong. They're useful only as interpretations, they can never reproduce, reference, or mimic the events in question.

Another great example is Tansley's ecological systems model that he worked on for over many years with influence from Forrester only for the Odums to develop models, attempt to reproduce them in controlled environments and watch them fail miserably.

The cybernetic, computational, systems, world models are illusions all. AI has the same limitations simply because the infinity of tasks can never be modeled or automated.

Most of the ideas in the article can be seen, very clearly and cleverly narrated, in Curtis's best series "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" particularly episode 2.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#55

Post by whatever1 »

wvlia5 wrote: post #50
whatever1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire field of process design & automatic process control. This literally is the O.G. job description of a chemical engineer. The field of grid design and balancing. Again job description of an electrical engineer.

Yes, but in all your examples it's the same: you learn the specific subject and you are implicitly learning "systems thinking"; it's not like you learn "systems thinking" first as the hard part, and then you learn electronic components as an implementation detail to become a electrical engineer.

I see your point. Indeed we do learn it bottoms up. But why do you think the opposite is impossible? It seems like a transferable skill across domains.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#56

Post by wtbdbrrr »

samstokes wrote: post #20

What an interesting and strange article. The author barely offers a definition of "systems thinking", only names one person to represent it, and then claims to refute the whole discipline based on a single incorrect prediction and the fact that government is bad at software projects. It's not clear what positive suggestions this article offers except to always disregard regulation and build your own thing from scratc…

> assume the system will react to resist intervention

Systems don't do that. Only constituents who fear particular consequences do.

Systems also don't care about levels of complexity. Especially since it's insanely hard to actually break systems that are held together by only the "what the fuck is going on, let's look into that" kind. Hours, days, weeks, later, things run again. BILLIONS lost. Oh, we wish ...

At the end of the day, the term Systems Thinking is overloaded by all the parts that have been invented by so called economists and "the financial industry", which makes me chuckle every time now that it's 2025 and oil rich countries have been in development for decades, the advertisement industry is factory farming content creators and economists and multi-billionaires want more tikktoccc and instagwam to get into the backs of teen heads.

If you are a SWE, systems architect or anything in that sphere, please, ... act like you care about the people you are building for ... take some time off if you can and take care of must be taken care of, ... it's just systems, after all.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#57

Post by bloqs »

controversial opinion, while learnable to a degree, systems-orientated thought is fundamentally aligned with something biological, either born or developed in early years. People align more with "things" or "people". It's extremely rare someone is truly aligned with both.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#58

Post by nakamoto_damacy »

If you think about it, all thinking is magical (in the sense that we, the universe and any of this exists at all.)

Having said that, there is no magical thinking in asserting that the government is bad at software. The government is bad at 99% of the things it does, but that 1% is keeping stuff running, despite the government trying really hard to fail at that 1%, too.

Stupid comment, I know.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#59

Post by DonHopkins »

samstokes wrote: post #20

What an interesting and strange article. The author barely offers a definition of "systems thinking", only names one person to represent it, and then claims to refute the whole discipline based on a single incorrect prediction and the fact that government is bad at software projects. It's not clear what positive suggestions this article offers except to always disregard regulation and build your own thing from scratc…

Applying the idea of "starting with a simple system that works"̀ to Factorio, Shapez (and now Shapez 2) is like Factorio for abstract geometric shapes and colors.

It's got all the essential elements of Factorio that make it so interesting and compelling, which apply to so many other fields from VLSI design to networking to cloud computing.

But you mine shapes and colors and combine them into progressively more complex patterns!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapez_2

Re: Magical systems thinking

#60

Post by gharlan »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #45

The citation to the beer game is a pretty fun one. About 15 years ago, John Sterman (a Forrester disciple) held a beer game "world championship" at a system dynamics conference, and my mother and I brought what we think is the optimal strategy and completely dominated the competition. Ironically, if you apply "systems thinking" in the right way, the beer game is a relatively simple thing to play extremely close to op…

This sounds interesting. Do you have a more fleshed out write-up of the strategy somewhere?
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