4 ms·

Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

97 points by the-mitr 5y ago

dang 5y ago
One relevant past thread: How to Be a Systems Thinker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 - April 2018 (82 comments)
Arubis 5y ago
Wow, there’s a name I didn’t expect to run across on HN! For what it’s worth, Bateson just passed away this year. She’d had a fascinating life, living and working in many vastly different cultures and countries since childhood. As a literary work, “Peripheral Visions” is a little discombobulated, but it’s a fun read just to see all the perspectives and lenses she’d adopted over the years.
endiangroup 5y ago
AD: Systems Thinking is getting out of date, but in the spirit of knowledge sharing, another fantastic systems thinker is Donella Meadows, heres her most linked piece on leverage points in systems: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t.... Her book 'Thinking In Systems' is a fantastic read to open your mind to continuous systems and modelling them, as well as the counter intuitiveness of larger systems. To expand on 'out of date' - systems thinking is centred around command and control, IIRC it came out of Cybernetics ala Norbert Weiner, Ashby and others. The command and control angle is based on the assumption that with enough information any system can be mapped, predicted and controlled. Whilst not wrong, it excludes another type of system which is truly complex and precludes mapping and prediction by the fact there are either/all too many variables to model or the very act of measuring or acting changes the system or the agents of the system can change the rules of the system. These systems are deemed by the sense-making community to be Complex Adaptive Systems or Anthro-Complex (specifically for human systems). To approach these systems you have to become comfortable with uncertainty and re-arrange your thoughts on cause-and-effect, which is a whole new world view for many of us in software. https://cynefin.io/ https://cynefin.io/ is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of complexity.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  While systems thinking did grow out of cybernetics (also Bertalanffy's general systems theory), both fields have diverged from control - cybernetics to epistemology, and systems thinking to influencing complex systems through leverage points (see https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ and https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...). Cybernetics originated in engineering and mathematics so it makes sense that it would be concerned with control as we tend to explicitly limit and constrain complexity in order to control and predict our systems - ML being the first notable counter-example. Systems theory started out in biology and ecosystems so AFAIK it never held that complex systems could be either fully known (total knowledge of the state), or truly controlled. Daniel Schmachtenberger is also working in the field of sensemaking so his talks and writing may be of interest to you - https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ (& lots of talks on YouTube).
  - endiangroup 5y ago
    I linked to the same article! Isn't a leverage point an attempt to control a system? Thanks for the additional info! Interesting to hear. I will check out Daniel Schmachtenberger.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Sorry, so you did! I'm on mobile so links are truncated, my bad. I think there's a subtle distinction between control and influence - control is trying to get to a specific end goal, and influence is trying to improve on the current state incrementally. Giving up control is accepting that no matter how much you want it to, you can't make a river flow uphill; not all system states are stable and viable, you need to find an attractor state (and an incremental path to get there) that is desirable. This inherently involves experimentation and iteration - creating a hypothetical model of the system, attempting an intervention, seeing if your hypothesis held up and the new state is what you expected. It's an interactive approach to change rather than one you can declare by authority alone.
svieira 5y ago
> It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom — I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional — are going to be lacking.

97 points by the-mitr 5y ago

dang 5y ago

One relevant past thread: How to Be a Systems Thinker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 - April 2018 (82 comments)

Arubis 5y ago

Wow, there’s a name I didn’t expect to run across on HN! For what it’s worth, Bateson just passed away this year. She’d had a fascinating life, living and working in many vastly different cultures and countries since childhood. As a literary work, “Peripheral Visions” is a little discombobulated, but it’s a fun read just to see all the perspectives and lenses she’d adopted over the years.

endiangroup 5y ago

AD: Systems Thinking is getting out of date, but in the spirit of knowledge sharing, another fantastic systems thinker is Donella Meadows, heres her most linked piece on leverage points in systems: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t.... Her book 'Thinking In Systems' is a fantastic read to open your mind to continuous systems and modelling them, as well as the counter intuitiveness of larger systems. To expand on 'out of date' - systems thinking is centred around command and control, IIRC it came out of Cybernetics ala Norbert Weiner, Ashby and others. The command and control angle is based on the assumption that with enough information any system can be mapped, predicted and controlled. Whilst not wrong, it excludes another type of system which is truly complex and precludes mapping and prediction by the fact there are either/all too many variables to model or the very act of measuring or acting changes the system or the agents of the system can change the rules of the system. These systems are deemed by the sense-making community to be Complex Adaptive Systems or Anthro-Complex (specifically for human systems). To approach these systems you have to become comfortable with uncertainty and re-arrange your thoughts on cause-and-effect, which is a whole new world view for many of us in software. https://cynefin.io/ https://cynefin.io/ is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of complexity.

beaconstudios 5y ago
While systems thinking did grow out of cybernetics (also Bertalanffy's general systems theory), both fields have diverged from control - cybernetics to epistemology, and systems thinking to influencing complex systems through leverage points (see https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ and https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...). Cybernetics originated in engineering and mathematics so it makes sense that it would be concerned with control as we tend to explicitly limit and constrain complexity in order to control and predict our systems - ML being the first notable counter-example. Systems theory started out in biology and ecosystems so AFAIK it never held that complex systems could be either fully known (total knowledge of the state), or truly controlled. Daniel Schmachtenberger is also working in the field of sensemaking so his talks and writing may be of interest to you - https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ (& lots of talks on YouTube).
- endiangroup 5y ago
  I linked to the same article! Isn't a leverage point an attempt to control a system? Thanks for the additional info! Interesting to hear. I will check out Daniel Schmachtenberger.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Sorry, so you did! I'm on mobile so links are truncated, my bad. I think there's a subtle distinction between control and influence - control is trying to get to a specific end goal, and influence is trying to improve on the current state incrementally. Giving up control is accepting that no matter how much you want it to, you can't make a river flow uphill; not all system states are stable and viable, you need to find an attractor state (and an incremental path to get there) that is desirable. This inherently involves experimentation and iteration - creating a hypothetical model of the system, attempting an intervention, seeing if your hypothesis held up and the new state is what you expected. It's an interactive approach to change rather than one you can declare by authority alone.

svieira 5y ago

> It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom — I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional — are going to be lacking.