Pit-traps for rationalists: the seductive appeal of seemingly-universal frameworks that hardly ever work in practice.
You can waste your entire career on one. You can waste an entire academic discipline and billions of dollars of research funding on one.
ribbonfarm.com/2019/01/10/rem
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Feel strange as i call myself a system thinker *because* i believed that a grand model is not possible and that models are at best local (in all dimensions).
That said, i may just live in different circles than the author ;)
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Yes I think “systems thinking” is used two mean two almost opposite things. Rooted in disagreements among the founders of cybernetics in the 1950s I think. Cc
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More 60s. In engineering, it's usually either called controls or systems and control. People who use "systems theory" tend to be either Wiener-cybernetics people, or from the "system dynamics" fork due to Jay Forrester (stock-flow diagrams and such... Limits to Growth for eg)
I have no opinion on the colloquial usage with no technical/disciplinary implications. But people who use it in a technical, but not engineering sense, in my experience, tend to be one-big-model types. And here I obviously mean relative to declared scope, not universe.
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I think the other sense originates with Bateson maybe?
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Bateson was in cybernetics gang iirc. He extended it into social sciences. I don’t know that I’d say there’s really 2 uses of the term. The truly distinct thing would be Santa Fe/chaoplexity crowd who do things in a meaningfully different way and call it complex systems theory
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There is yet another "systems view", which is to do with the project management of massive tech systems, almost always military/aerospace. This is where get "system integration" from, and why everything engineers build is called a "system". Also came out of WW II.
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