Magical systems thinking

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 worse than non-human living systems: they actively fight you. They are adversarial with regard to predictions made within them. If you're considered a credible source on economics and you say a recession is coming, you change the odds of a recession by causing the system to price in your pronouncement. This is part of why market contrarianism kind of works, but only if the contrarians are actually the minority! If contrarianism becomes popular, it stops being contrarian and stops working.

So... predicting doom and gloom from overpopulation would obviously reduce the future population if people take it seriously.

Tangentially, everything in economics is a paradox. A classic example is the paradox of thrift: if everyone is saving nobody can save because for one to save another must spend. Pricing paradoxes are another example. When you're selling your labor as an employee you want high wages, high benefits, jobs security, etc, but when you go shopping you want low wages, low benefits, and a fluid job market... at least if you shop by comparing on price. If you are both a buyer and a seller of labor you are your own adversary in a two-party pricing game.

I personally hold the view that the arrow of time goes in one direction and the future of non-linear computationally irreducible systems cannot be predicted from their current state (unless you are literally God and have access to the full quantum-level state of the whole system and infinite computational power). I don't mean predicting them is hard, but that it's "impossible like perpetual motion" impossible.

I also wonder if we are being fooled by randomness when we think we see a person or a technique that yields good predictions. Are good prophets just luck plus survivorship bias? Obviously we forget all the bad prophets. All lottery winners are lucky, therefore lucky people should play the lottery. But who is lucky? The only way to find out is to play the lottery. Anyone who wins should have played, and anyone who loses should not have played.

Both of the books "Systems Thinkers" and "The Emerging Consensus in Social Systems Theory" are nice broad introductions into the historical developments, various lines of thought, and the massive space that is systems thinking. They should both give you a good initial starting point for further research.

I've seen this too. In particular there seems to be a huge dividing line between systems research stemming from the physical-mathematical heritage of formal dynamical systems, and the other line mostly stemming from everything Wiener did with cybernetics (and some others who were contemporaneous with Wiener). Both sides can be profitably informed by the other in various ways.

"Metacybernetics" is a concept with a small handful of Google hits, some of which appear to be obscure research papers and some appear to be metaphysical crackpottery on blogs.

I think it's worth considering that the theories you're familiar with are incredibly niche, have never gained any foothold in mainstream discussions of system dynamics, and it's not wrong for people not to be aware of them (or to choose not to mention them) in a post addressed at general audiences.

Further, you just missed the opportunity to explain these concepts to a broader HN audience and maybe make sure that the next time someone writes about it, they are aware of this work.

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 scratch, which is ... certainly consistent with the Works In Progress imprint.

The way I learned "systems thinking" explicitly includes the perspectives this article offers to refute it - a system model is useful but only a model, it is better used to understand an existing system than to design a new one, assume the system will react to resist intervention. I've found this definition of systems thinking extremely useful as a way to look reductively at a complex system - e.g. we keep investing in quality but having more outages anyway, maybe something is optimizing for the wrong goal - and intervene to shift behaviour without tearing down the whole thing, something this article dismisses as impossible.

The author and I would agree on Gall's Law. But the author's conclusion to "start with a simple system that works" commits the same hubris that the article, and Gall, warn against - how do you know the "simple" system you design will work, or will be simple? You can't know either of those things just by being clever. You have to see the system working in reality, and you have to see if the simplicity you imagined actually corresponds to how it works in reality. Gall's Law isn't saying "if you start simple it will work", it's saying "if it doesn't work then adding complexity won't fix it".

This article reads a bit like the author has encountered resistance from people in the past from people who cited "systems thinking" as the reason for their resistance, and so the author wants to discredit that term. Maybe the term means different things to different people, or it's been used in bad faith. But what the article attacks isn't systems thinking as I know it, more like high modernism. The author and systems thinking might get along quite well if they ever actually met.