[HN Gopher] Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker
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Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker
Author : the-mitr
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-06-13 09:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.edge.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.edge.org)
| dang wrote:
| One relevant past thread:
|
| _How to Be a Systems Thinker_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 - April 2018 (82
| comments)
| Arubis wrote:
| Wow, there's a name I didn't expect to run across on HN!
|
| For what it's worth, Bateson just passed away this year. She'd
| had a fascinating life, living and working in many vastly
| different cultures and countries since childhood. As a literary
| work, "Peripheral Visions" is a little discombobulated, but it's
| a fun read just to see all the perspectives and lenses she'd
| adopted over the years.
| endiangroup wrote:
| AD: Systems Thinking is getting out of date, but in the spirit of
| knowledge sharing, another fantastic systems thinker is Donella
| Meadows, heres her most linked piece on leverage points in
| systems: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-
| places-t.... Her book 'Thinking In Systems' is a fantastic read
| to open your mind to continuous systems and modelling them, as
| well as the counter intuitiveness of larger systems.
|
| To expand on 'out of date' - systems thinking is centred around
| command and control, IIRC it came out of Cybernetics ala Norbert
| Weiner, Ashby and others. The command and control angle is based
| on the assumption that with enough information any system can be
| mapped, predicted and controlled. Whilst not wrong, it excludes
| another type of system which is truly complex and precludes
| mapping and prediction by the fact there are either/all too many
| variables to model or the very act of measuring or acting changes
| the system or the agents of the system can change the rules of
| the system.
|
| These systems are deemed by the sense-making community to be
| Complex Adaptive Systems or Anthro-Complex (specifically for
| human systems). To approach these systems you have to become
| comfortable with uncertainty and re-arrange your thoughts on
| cause-and-effect, which is a whole new world view for many of us
| in software.
|
| https://cynefin.io/ is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name
| in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of
| complexity.
| blackadder wrote:
| Been reading about Systems Thinking lately. I think the command
| and control assumption comes from the influence of System
| Dynamics (Forrester, Meadows, Senge), which attempts to
| simulate the system. This seems to be a North American view of
| systems thinking due to the popularity of Systems Dynamics. But
| the European views have a focus on emergent behaviour and
| critically looking at hierarchies and power structures.
| Although Meadows emphasises 'dancing with systems' in contrast
| with controlling systems.
| ismail wrote:
| I would not called Systems thinking out of date [0]. I would
| rather say some approaches to systems thinking are now out of
| date. There have been multiple generations of systems thinking
| approaches.
|
| Let us take cybernetics as an example, we began with 1st order
| cybernetics (command and control), then moved on to 2nd order
| cybernetics, and now we are moving towards 3rd order and 4th
| order cybernetics.
|
| Similarly for systems thinking, we had the "hard approaches" to
| systems thinking which viewed the system as "out there" (i.e
| Cybernetics) then it evolved into 'soft systems' approaches.
|
| We have seen a shift from functionalist approaches, to
| interpretive then emancipating and now post-modern approaches.
| We are moving towards ethics, aesthetics, perception, eco-
| systems etc.
|
| Complex Adaptive systems that Snowden writes about is a subset
| of these systemtic approaches. Put another way, yes there are
| some approaches to systems thinking which may be 'dated' (i.e
| Hard systems), there is quite a bit that is very relevant
| today.
|
| [0] Here is some of my writing on this subject:
|
| https://www.notion.so/zyelabs/Systemic-Approaches-HN-0d22752...
|
| Edit: Quote from the paper attached in the link above.
|
| "The VSM & Cybernetics was heavily influenced by Claude
| Shannon's discovery of information theory. The 10th theorem of
| Shannon is the basis for the law of requisite variety. Further
| the lines drawn within the VSM could be regarded as the
| communication channels."
| endiangroup wrote:
| Thanks for the insight!
| beaconstudios wrote:
| While systems thinking did grow out of cybernetics (also
| Bertalanffy's general systems theory), both fields have
| diverged from control - cybernetics to epistemology, and
| systems thinking to influencing complex systems through
| leverage points (see
| https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ and
| https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-
| places-t...).
|
| Cybernetics originated in engineering and mathematics so it
| makes sense that it would be concerned with control as we tend
| to explicitly limit and constrain complexity in order to
| control and predict our systems - ML being the first notable
| counter-example. Systems theory started out in biology and
| ecosystems so AFAIK it never held that complex systems could be
| either fully known (total knowledge of the state), or truly
| controlled.
|
| Daniel Schmachtenberger is also working in the field of
| sensemaking so his talks and writing may be of interest to you
| - https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ (& lots of talks on
| YouTube).
| endiangroup wrote:
| I linked to the same article! Isn't a leverage point an
| attempt to control a system?
|
| Thanks for the additional info! Interesting to hear. I will
| check out Daniel Schmachtenberger.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Sorry, so you did! I'm on mobile so links are truncated, my
| bad.
|
| I think there's a subtle distinction between control and
| influence - control is trying to get to a specific end
| goal, and influence is trying to improve on the current
| state incrementally. Giving up control is accepting that no
| matter how much you want it to, you can't make a river flow
| uphill; not all system states are stable and viable, you
| need to find an attractor state (and an incremental path to
| get there) that is desirable. This inherently involves
| experimentation and iteration - creating a hypothetical
| model of the system, attempting an intervention, seeing if
| your hypothesis held up and the new state is what you
| expected. It's an interactive approach to change rather
| than one you can declare by authority alone.
| ryanjamurphy wrote:
| In my work in systems change, we look for leverage points
| and other systems features in order to design strategies
| for change. (e.g., https://designdialogues.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/11/Syste...)
|
| You can't control complex systems--heck, you can barely
| dance with them!--but still, we must find ways of working
| with them as effectively as possible. This is the only
| way we'll make real progress on the wicked problems of
| our time.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Absolutely - the reason to confront systems problems is
| precisely because reductive approaches don't work; the
| alternative is to do nothing, or be surprised by
| unintended consequences when you try to apply a reductive
| approach.
| qznc wrote:
| I didn't like Meadow's book that much:
| http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/thinking_in_systems.html
|
| It is too superficial for me to be useful. I have books from
| Gerald Weinberg and John Sterman on my to-read list.
| gerbler wrote:
| I really like Sterman's book. I think the top comment really
| nailed the challenge with this approach - it's very difficult
| to identify the components of a system.
|
| I used this modeling approach quite a bit for a few years -
| my struggle was trying to quantify casual relationships. This
| is non-trivial (in so many different fields), which makes it
| really hard to have a reliable System Dynamics model.
| endiangroup wrote:
| I think your intro about covers it, it's a great intro book,
| not an exhaustive compendium. I certainly found it useful for
| my mental modelling and world views. YMMV!
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Think of systems thinking as an alternative to the analytic
| approach (break the problem apart and solve the pieces) for
| scenarios where that doesn't work - DM's book is meant to
| teach the basics of that approach. It's not designed to give
| you all the tools needed to solve these problems - for that,
| you'll need to pick up a couple of books on nonlinear
| dynamics if you're wanting formal modelling, or just wade in
| and try to think in systems terms if you're working in a more
| intuitive environment.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I met Donella Meadows in California once long ago, at an event
| called Hackers in the Santa Cruz mountains (along with a lot of
| other interesting people). I had no clue but she was obviously
| holding a combination of respect and a playful affection among
| a lot of the attendees. It was fun; recently I read the
| wikipedia page and found out about her tenure and whatnot on
| the East coast.
| asplake wrote:
| The cybernetics community was very aware of the limitations of
| command and control. If anything, ahead of its time on that
| philosophically as well as having the maths to prove it. Read
| some Stafford Beer (the father of Viable System Model).
| svieira wrote:
| > It's important to be aware of it, to realize that there are
| limits to what we can do with AI. It's great for computation and
| arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me
| that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It
| doesn't mean you can't bring those things into your interactions
| with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other
| human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and
| wisdom -- I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-
| dimensional -- are going to be lacking.
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