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Magical systems thinking

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Re: Magical systems thinking

#61

Post by alphazard »

The article is right to be critical of "systems thinking", but only because people who advocate "systems thinking" usually don't have a concrete definition of "system" or any unique method of thinking.

The complicated systems that are alluded to here, are usually best modeled as optimizers or control systems. Both have clear definitions and vast mathematical corpi.

In a house with heating, it's difficult to cool the whole house or even a single room by leaving the freezer door open. Why? because the system is programmed to be a certain temperate and has a mechanism continuously driving it to that temperature. It's difficult to knock over one of the Boston Dynamics robots for the same reason.

If the government declares that rents cannot be higher than a certain price per square foot, then mysteriously only the renters with impeccable financials and renting history will be able to get houses. And some houses will stop being available for rent. Why? Because the market is optimizing for value creation. Honest, considerate renters devalue the property less during their stay, and some properties are worth more than the maximum rental price when used for another purpose. If you limit the price, agents will fallback to other mechanisms to determine the most valuable course of action. In this example that is minimizing missed payments, evictions, and property damage.

Unless you affect the controller or optimizer hidden in each system, you can't manipulate the system effectively. Usually you aren't able to do this, and so the system is difficult to control. It's easier to rip out a thermostat than to disable the desire of millions of humans to create value. If you can't model the system in a rigorous way, and then use math to predict and explain it, then you won't be able to manipulate it. Saying that you are using "systems thinking" won't change that.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#62

Post by photochemsyn »

Sounds like the Club of Rome was enamored of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series:

> "The Club of Rome asked an even more intricate question: how would social and economic forces interact in the coming decades? Where were the bottlenecks and feedback mechanisms? Could economic growth continue, or would the world enter a new phase of equilibrium or decline?"

The problem is, as systems grow more complex they often start to demonstrate sensitive dependence on conditions, eg with tiny variations in inputs to one node of the system resulting in wild swings in outputs from that node. Equally problematic, nodes in a complex system can change their connectivity to other nodes if conditions change enough (think of a breakdown in trade between nations due to wars, natural disasters, diseases etc).

The ideal systems to depend on are stable (not hypersensitive to small forcings, with predictable behavior) and have consistent structure. They can still be complicated but should fail gracefully back to simpler structures under stress, eg an emergency power supply for electricity at a hospital that normally relies on the grid.

From this perspective, our electrical grids are well-designed systems - not given to huge power fluctuations - that will nevertheless need major expansions and improvements if electricity demand keeps rising with data centers and eVs etc. However, expanding the grid isn't adding fundamental instabilities, it's just modular addition in the same pattern as the existing system.

In contrast, the USA's current financial-monetary system is not that stable, predictable, or reliable. All kinds of fundamental instabilities exist, and wild swings in behavior under pressure are expected - and since everything else relies on it, eg you can't update the electrical grid without capital input, you risk avalanching catastrophes by relying on such an unstable system.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#63

Post by pclmulqdq »

gharlan wrote: post #60
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?

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7360108

Re: Magical systems thinking

#64

Post by timkam »

samstokes wrote: post #33
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't feel like he was refuting the whole discipline. Rather, he seems to admire Forrester and the whole discipline. The argument just seems to be, even with great systems thinking, you can't build a complex system from scratch and that existing complex systems are often hard to fix.

The title of the article is an intentional conflation of "systems thinking" with "magical thinking", which is not a compliment.

Couldn't one interpret "magical systems thinking" as a fallacy that people may commit when applying systems thinking? More broadly, I find some of the comments here rather harsh, also considering that many observations in the article are intuitively true for anyone whose ever been exposed to bureaucracy on the meta-level.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#65

Post by catlifeonmars »

wtbdbrrr wrote: post #56
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…

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

These are part of a system. Ignoring these components gives you an incomplete model.

(All models are incomplete, by definition, but ignoring constituents that have a major influence greatly reduces the effectiveness of your model)

Re: Magical systems thinking

#66

Post by cl3misch »

alphazard wrote: post #61

The article is right to be critical of "systems thinking", but only because people who advocate "systems thinking" usually don't have a concrete definition of "system" or any unique method of thinking. The complicated systems that are alluded to here, are usually best modeled as optimizers or control systems. Both have clear definitions and vast mathematical corpi. In a house with heating, it's difficult to cool the…

> it's difficult to cool the whole house or even a single room by leaving the freezer door open

I think cooling with an open freezer is impossible in general? Or is that your point and I don't understand the argument?

Re: Magical systems thinking

#67

Post by Terr_ »

growingkittens wrote: post #4

This article does not begin to cover systems thinking. Cybernetics and metacybernetics are noticably missing. Paul Cilliers' theory of complexity - unmentioned. Nothing about Stafford Beer and the viable system model. So on and so forth. The things the author complains about seem to be "parts of systems thinking they aren't aware of". The field is still developing.

On that note, a relevant recent book-read: "Unnacountability Machines" - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...

There was some hard to follow explanations in it, but the author tries to connect the history and goals of cybernetics versus modern problems like being unable to get support from a company.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#68

Post by tbrownaw »

wtbdbrrr wrote: post #56
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…

>> > assume the system will react to resist intervention

Systems don't do that. Only constituents who fear particular consequences do. For example, the human body is pretty decent at maintaining a fixed internal temperature.

Cities supposedly maintain a fairly stable transit time even as transit infrastructure improves.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#69

Post by alphazard »

cl3misch wrote: post #66
alphazard wrote: post #61

The article is right to be critical of "systems thinking", but only because people who advocate "systems thinking" usually don't have a concrete definition of "system" or any unique method of thinking. The complicated systems that are alluded to here, are usually best modeled as optimizers or control systems. Both have clear definitions and vast mathematical corpi. In a house with heating, it's difficult to cool the…

> it's difficult to cool the whole house or even a single room by leaving the freezer door open I think cooling with an open freezer is impossible in general? Or is that your point and I don't understand the argument?

The point is that just dumping an arbitrary amount of cold into the house is unlikely to change the temperature because the thermostat has access to more heat, and has a different goal.

That example was meant to illustrate why simple one off actions have a diminished or imperceptible effect on the system.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#70

Post by scotty79 »

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 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.

All valid criticisms, but somehow it sounds exactly like something a member of inept bureaucracy would say.

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