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)
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I think the other sense originates with Bateson maybe?
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Yeah I associate it with Bateson, Buckminster Fuller and early Whole Earth Catalog stuff. monoskop.org/images/0/09/Br
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Oh yeah Stewart Brand is descended from that lineage, I forgot. Fred Turner covers that fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/upl
That article is rather undermined by repeating over and over again an incorrect history of the term hacker, Brand and Levy reclaimed the original meaning (or rather continued to use the original meaning as it never went away)




