1/ Developing a basic understanding and intuition around how complex systems work may be the most important thing I've learned in the last five years.
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Major problem is that she things an elegant insight into how the system works is enough to fix it?
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Not her in particular. The whole system dynamics field starting with Jay Forrester is based on a very fragile port of a modeling paradigm (control theory from physical systems --> social systems).
It's bad simulation porn.
SimCity is more fun and theoretically sounder.
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The resulting problem being that the models are completely wrong or that they don't have the same predictive power as they do in physical systems and should be seen in a more "loose guideline" way?
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In fact, the cleanest critique is in the Obliquity book you pointed me to. The "muddling through" paper gets to the heart of it.
Successive limited comparisons is both more insightful and more effective than trying to model/understand the whole thing.
There's also a legibility/authoritarian high modernism thing lurking under the surface of system dynamics that's not obvious until you try to actually use it.
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