4 ms·
I've read a lot of "system analysis" / "system dynamics" literature in grad school, and did workshops with practitioners, and my impression is that they suffer
by greenshackle2 6y ago
I've read a lot of "system analysis" / "system dynamics" literature in grad school, and did workshops with practitioners, and my impression is that they suffer a lot from "if you have a hammer".
Business people and ecologists discovered modeling with ordinary differential equations, created their own jargon and tools around it, and decided it is the key to understand everything.
ODEs are a great tool to have in your modelling toolbox, but they're not, like, revolutionary.
To give credit where it's due, they manage to explain simple differential equation systems in accessible terms, and they manage to get people who would otherwise not build, test and think about explicit models at all, to do it to some degree.
But if you're already someone used to thinking with models, this is 101 stuff. My gripe with the discipline is that they barely go beyond the 101 stuff and hype their methodology to high heaven. The field is also permeated by relativist philosophy, or at least, it was 5 years ago when I was keeping up with the System Dynamics Society.
It leaves you in an awkward spot as a discipline if your bread and butter is building models, but you don't think there's an objective truth to test your models against, since truth is just group consensus.
- jacques_chester 6y agoI think it's fair to say that System Dynamics has two major strands of thinking. One grows out of the original Forrester style -- managerialist, looking for hard numbers, wanting to solve hard problems. I count Sterman in this strand; he has himself lamented that SD as a field has not kept up with developments in other fields it could adopt[1]. The second strand is more woo-ey. Meadows falls into that category. It's fun, but I don't use SD as a thinking harness because I want to be one with anything or achieve Satori. I use it because I am too stupid to solve systems of differential and integral equations merely by squinting at things. I quite like DES as a style too. It's tremendously more efficient and easier to debug. I sorta-kinda smooshed them together in a simulator I built[0]. [0] https://github.com/pivotal/skenario https://github.com/pivotal/skenario [1] "System Dynamics at Sixty" in System Dynamics Review Jan-June 2018. There are some PDFs around: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15699150741004493229&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15699150741004493...
- greenshackle2 6y agoI think that is a fair assessment. I was studying ecology so more on the Meadows side of things. There are definitely useful tools there, I think it's great to make use of this stuff, as long as you don't drink the kool-aid.
- jacques_chester 6y agoI've found it very powerful but I still like to poke my head into everyone's tents for ideas.