Viimatised otsingud
Otsimisvalikud
#systemsthinking
Your friendly reminder that nobody is free until everybody is free.
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-would-a-rational-criminal-justice-system-look-like
It's been over 2 years since Sheryl Cababa released Closing The Loop. Her book about systems thinking for designers.
In this follow-up chat with Sheryl, we hear her reflections and insights from those 2 years since release, which leads us into a fascinating discussion about the challenges of actually making use of systems thinking in your work.
https://uxpodcast.com/332-more-systems-thinking-sheryl-cababa/
"they said: 'when will it #collapse?' and i’d answer: 'it’s collapsing every day. but it’s also being fixed every day."
~smil
It feels to me like "build more housing" can't be the answer. You almost might as well say "make more land". It's not a durable solution. And it doesn't address the many other aspects of society that need to be addressed. Jobs food commerce in general, schools, the nature and flow of community itself.
A favorite quote comes to mind.
"Better implies different."
--Amar Bose, at an MIT Enterprise Forum event
(He was trying to explain to sales people at stores that would sell Bose speakers why they had to make changes in how they set them up. "Couldn't they just do what they'd always done?" The people would ask. They were used to that and did not want to change. He was trying to explain succinctly why you can't just radically improve something and leave it the same at the same time. So he, explained, that slogan had emerged.)
Surely higher population density at some point means using existing resources differently. I'm not pushing an agenda here, but I am observing that higher density feels less compatible within every person for themselves and traditional-ownership / rent-taking-for-profit model. Surely that brings a 2-tiered citizenship and breeds discontent/danger as inequality simmers.
In computer science, we talk about building systems that scale, planning for higher traffic. This could really be done in a system that did not plan for scale without the architecting the system entirely, and I've even seen some of pine that every factor of 10 in scale requires a redesign.
Sometimes the architectural plan is indeed to just add servers, but that has to be planned in, and there has to be a source of servers, and the system architecture has to be structured such that in the new model, all the necessary flows will happen correctly and resources won't be cut off from each other or too hard to access or too expensive.
"Build more housing." does not sound like the kind of answer I could give in a job interview and expect to be hired, with the hiring manager saying "this person has clearly demonstrated their understanding of operating at scale". The answer is not of a shape that seems right to me, nor does it offer sufficient detail.
A lot of capitalism seems to operate on a theory that you just twist some knobs and everything will just happen right without coordination. I think this is less and less true as either populations grow larger or resources grow smaller or resources become more stressed.
I did not write the accompanying article specifically to address this issue, and yet I feel like it says some important additional things I might say here if I were to ramble on. It is not a complete discussion of scale, but more discussion of why I don't think the traditional ways of thinking about just turning a few knobs is likely to keep working.
Losing Ground in the Environment
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
It also just not addressed the issue of urgency, and the way in which urgency materially changes the set of usable solutions. I did try to address that issue here:
The Politics of Delay
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-politics-of-delay.html
K-selected species have slower reproduction & longer generation times, their responses to changes in population size are delayed, which creates lower-amplitude, slower oscillations in their populations.
they are selected for by evolution regarding resource use, hence K-selected.
humans like other big mammals once were a K-selected species, even when elon musk is flying around with his jet having 3 million kids - we still are.
#overshoot
#systemsthinking
#systemsdynamics
@systemsthinking
#systemsdynamics-wise there are 2 different types of species:
r-selected species like small mammals have rapid reproduction & short generation times, so they respond quickly to environmental changes. they produce many offspring, so they face overshooting K often, leading to high-amplitude, rapid oscillations in their population stocks, especially when delayed responses are present.
they are selected for by reproduction rates, hence r-selected.
for the sake of simplicity here is some jargon from biology that is used in the population dynamics context all the time:
the amount of possible individuals available resources of a certain environment can sustain is called carrying capacity or K.
the, temporary or not, uptick in population in the fluctuation caused by delayed balancing feedbacks is called #overshoot.
however, there can be a delay between the time when the population reaches a relatively high density & the time when resources become limiting enough to significantly affect birth and death rates. this delay in the feedback mechanism can cause the population stock to temporarily "#overshoot" the amount of possible individuals available resources can sustain. that results in a temporary die-off and starts a boom-and-bust cycle of oscillations.
so the population density begins to influence births: more crowded = fewer births, and deaths: more crowded = more deaths, due to competition for resources. there is a shift in dominance of the systems dynamics, the balancing feedback becomes dominant and the specie's stock begins declining. it does so until the environment finally can provide for an increase in births and decrease in deaths again.
consider a species in an environment where resources are limited and population growth is initially exponential as the self-reinforcing feedback, which is based on said resource availability, dominates the system. what happens when the species uses up these limited resources? it will at some point if it continues growing.
delays, system oscillation & #overshoot
(this is where the tea begins)
in population dynamics, negative feedbacks are responsible for regulating population's stock in response to resources availability. delays in that response can lead to oscillations in population stock over time. system oscillations are a characteristic of balancing feedbacks in which the information regulating the goal-seeking action is delayed.
and because the economy has the same feedback structures as populations of living beings they behave the same way. in general it can be said that systems with the same or similar structures also behave similarly. so we can now look at a systems behavior over time, the measurements it's stocks, from that draw conclusions to it's internal structure and explore the dynamics of known systems to understand things about unknown systems.
so here is the things with these systems and dominance of feedbacks: they change in between their states all the time. these changes happen when the dominance of their feedbacks changes. with the population example it could be that food becomes more available which causes a spike in population and the reinforcing loop becoming dominant or a disease decimating a population leading to a decline when the balancing loop becomes dominant.
we have a self-reinforcing feedback on the one side, more individuals being born, flowing into the population stock again leading to more births.
we have a balancing feedback on the other hand side, individuals dying.
another important type of system is two flows/feedbacks working on one stock, but one of the feedbacks is balancing and the other one is reinforcing the flow. every species that lives in a environment obeys these dynamics, humans, animals, plants, plants bacteria and even our economy behave like that.
but that's not what actually happens, right, because both of these feedbacks run at the same time pushing and pulling on the stock, making things a bit more complicated. heat is leaking to the out side while heating. the temperature outside changes and with it the temperature difference between the room and the outside, which is the thermodynamic feedback the drives the cooling of the room. that is what we mean when we say "more than the sum of its parts."
if you measured the stock of room temperature for both of these feedbacks separately, the first picture shows what that looks like.
what we have with this is a common scheme of systems, 2 flows governed by 2 feedbacks going in & out of one stock.
1. the flow of heat into the room governed by the goal seeking feedback of the thermostat trying to make the room temperature meet the setpoint.
2. the flow of heat out of the room governed by thermodynamics, trying to make the room temperature equal to the outside temperature.
as i have said before the 
in stock & flow diagrams stand for all the part of the system that are currently not part of the observation. the thermostat is a good example for that. you can look at a cold room being heated by a furnace or you can look at a room being heated by a furnace and cooled by the outside.
