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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The two opposite things being?
1. A grand model to capture all models?
2. No grand model. Just local models?
1. Epistemic more important?
2. Instrumental more important?
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Maybe something like “we can understand and control complexity if we just use better math” vs “the world is so complex and indefinite that it can be understood only partially, and only influenced, not controlled, so we’ll get better outcomes if we accept that”?
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You’re getting at a more important distinction obliquely: how much a controller needs to “know” about thing being controlled. Two seminal results. The internal model principle in control theory (engineering) and Ashby principle of requisite variety, both state basically that.
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sciencedirect.com/science/articl
and
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(
(there are a few other formalizations)
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The reason information rather than “better math” is key is that “better math” can be applied to both sides of your distinction.
Spoiler: the latter blow the former out of the water for actual performance.
Was going to invoke Ashby while reading. Happy to see that even as a learner that is just at the beginning of the journey, just waking up in the morning, i seem to have caught some stuff "right".
By latter outperform former, you mean, better info outperform better math at controlling a system?
Thanks for the education everyone. I’m still learning. All this is pretty new to me



