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Magical systems thinking

worksinprogress.co

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Re: Magical systems thinking

#81

Post by rorytbyrne »

homarp wrote: post #49
voidhorse wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cybernetics was the birthing place of neural networks. Hardly niche. I don't think commenters should be expected to provide full overviews of topics just to inform others. Parent gave plenty of pointers beyond metacybernetics, all of which are certainly discoverable. If you are curious, read about it. It's not the responsibility of random strangers to educate you.

>cybernetics was the birthing place of NN would https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Sturgis_McCulloch be what you mean? and if not,can you give the right pointer?

Cybernetics is essentially control theory, and many of the methods in neural network research came from there. For example backpropagation can be traced back to Pontryagin in the 1950s.

Training a nonlinear system to behave in a way you want is the raison d’etre of optimal control theory.

But I wouldn’t say it’s the birthing place of neural networks, personally.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation#History

Re: Magical systems thinking

#82

Post by samstokes »

timkam wrote: post #64
samstokes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One could interpret the title that way, but not consistently with the rest of the article, which includes assertions like "in the realm of societies, governments and economies, systems thinking becomes a liability".

I think there's plenty to agree with in the article's descriptions of failure and hubris. What the critical commenters are taking issue with is that the article blames those symptoms on a straw man. It's a persuasive article, not a historical review, so it's reasonable to debate its conclusion and reasoning as well as its supporting evidence.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#83

Post by mlinhares »

marcosdumay wrote: post #35
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…

There is something about Club of Rome to systems thinking that is similar to the Dijkstra's observation about Basic and programming. Articles debunking them are always full of fundamental misunderstandings about the discipline. (The ones supporting them are obviously wrong.) And people focusing on understanding the discipline never actually refer to them in any way.

That's because its much easier to write an article dissing on a discipline if you don't really understand any of it.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#84

Post by cgio »

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…

Maybe anecdotal, but in solution design I have often encountered designs that try to be generic for the sake of generality, also designs that complicate a simple repeatable task to accommodate arbitrary potential complications. I would argue that in many cases we like to introduce complexity to feel like we are doing something advanced. I like to design systems with a view that they do one thing only and that thing right but there is, to your point, arbitrariness and art and judgement in deciding the thing.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#85

Post by GMoromisato »

The suggestion, start with a small system and eventually replace the old one, is what we software engineers do to replace/evolve a legacy system.

Of course, software people have not had much success lately fixing physical/bureaucratic systems.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#86

Post by sinuhe69 »

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…

That’s why we often model dynamic systems with feedback loops using control theory and when uncertainty is involved, with stochastic control theory and probabilistic equations. This way, we can account for the system’s possible reactions and transitions to new states, or put differently, we can even model how the system might fight back.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#87

Post by Ozzie_osman »

timkam wrote: post #64
samstokes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, it's a fallacy of systems thinking but it's not intrinsic to it. In fact, system thinkers tend to understand that complex systems, are, well, complex and not easy to reason about.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#88

Post by ghugccrghbvr »

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…

Brilliant comment.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#89

Post by lucas_membrane »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #65
wtbdbrrr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail when things change. Most of the hugely successful firms of today focus more on controlling their environment than on developing a capacity to adapt to unforeseeable consequences of unforeseen changes in their environment, even the ones that they cause themselves.

Re: Magical systems thinking

#90

Post by sandbags »

I want to say “prediction is hard, especially about the future” and it is no surprise that the predictions of a model built in the ‘70s might not hold some 50 years later. That they held so well for so long should, perhaps, be the headline.

Does Forrester’s model get updated and re-run?

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