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Magical systems thinking

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Re: Magical systems thinking

#71

Post by scotty79 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #59
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 comple…

What Factorio started, grew up into entire genre. Various ideas are vigorously explored by various games.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#72

Post by tomhow »

wvlia5 wrote: post #23

[flagged]

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Magical systems thinking

#73

Post by devenson »

api wrote: post #12

I studied biology in college and this has always been obvious to me, and it shocks me that people with backgrounds in e.g. ecology don't understand that living systems are unpredictable auto-adaptive machines full of feedback loops. How a bunch of ecologists could take doomerism based on "world models" seriously enough to cause a public panic about it (e.g. Paul Ehrlich) baffles me. Human cultural systems are even wo…

> non-linear computationally irreducible systems cannot be predicted

How confident are you of your ability to identify such systems?

Many systems are not such and therefore easy to predict.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#74

Post by satyarthms »

I have a bone to pick with the paragraph:

> But, as we now know, the results were also wrong. Adjusting for inflation, world GDP is now about five times higher than it was in 1970 and continues to rise. More than 90 percent of that growth has come from Asia, Europe, and North America, but forest cover across those regions has increased, up 2.6 percent since 1990 to over 2.3 billion hectares in 2020. The death rate from air pollution has almost halved in the same period, from 185 per 100,000 in 1990 to 100 in 2021. According to the model, none of this should have been possible.

Okay, forest cover increasing and death rate from air pollution decreasing contradicts the prediction from 1970, but I feel these trends are a result of richer countries being able to outsource their environmental pollution/destruction to the global south and scavenging it for raw materials. I wonder if the forest cover statistics count the massive expanses of land deforested and replaced with monoculture plantations (palm oil, etc.) that end up having a giant effect on biodiversity (and will no doubt come back to bite us in the ass)? Even if this outsourcing of externalities couldn't be modeled 50 years ago, I feel like that doesn't detract from the spirit of the takeaways from the Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#75

Post by rcxdude »

alphazard wrote: post #69
cl3misch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's just not a great one because an open freezer or fridge will not cool a room at all, anyway: it pumps heat (with some inefficiency, i.e. more heat) from inside itself into the room, so it will on average heat up a room if it's left with its door open.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#76

Post by estearum »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #30
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…

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.

But this is a core idea in systems thinking which the author claims is ignored by it

Re: Magical systems thinking

#77

Post by dcreater »

Categorize this under a journalist with a passing interest/insufficient research/prejudiced agenda/narrow understanding of a field and making bold statements they're not qualified to make.

Within the current state of the world, we need more systems thinking+research, done with quality, sophistication and in the public. Not less - this article does not help and spreads the wrong ideas.

summary and smackdown by Opus 4.1: https://claude.ai/share/1e8fec5e-ec6a-4c6f-a3d7-b74b0801e5b9

Re: Magical systems thinking

#78

Post by lanstin »

devenson wrote: post #73
api wrote: post #12

I studied biology in college and this has always been obvious to me, and it shocks me that people with backgrounds in e.g. ecology don't understand that living systems are unpredictable auto-adaptive machines full of feedback loops. How a bunch of ecologists could take doomerism based on "world models" seriously enough to cause a public panic about it (e.g. Paul Ehrlich) baffles me. Human cultural systems are even wo…

> non-linear computationally irreducible systems cannot be predicted How confident are you of your ability to identify such systems? Many systems are not such and therefore easy to predict.

Not many important systems are predictable.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#79

Post by pevansgreenwood »

dcreater wrote: post #77

Categorize this under a journalist with a passing interest/insufficient research/prejudiced agenda/narrow understanding of a field and making bold statements they're not qualified to make. Within the current state of the world, we need more systems thinking+research, done with quality, sophistication and in the public. Not less - this article does not help and spreads the wrong ideas. summary and smackdown by Opus 4.…

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