This is very true. I tell everyone who'll listen that every competent engineer should be well versed in the nuances of feedback in complex systems (https://en.w

This is very true. I tell everyone who'll listen that every competent engineer should be well versed in the nuances of feedback in complex systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback). The most successful systems rely on the property of feedback (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback): evolution, untrained learning, genetic algorithms, the diagonal arguments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_argument), artificial general intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), financial markets according to no less than George Soros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)#In_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)#In...), etc. That said, virtuous cycles can't exist without vicious cycles. I think we as a society need to do a lot more work into helping people understand and model feedback in complex systems, because at scales like Facebook's it's impossible for any one person to truly understand the hidden causal loops until it goes wrong. You only need to look at something like the Lotka-Volterra equations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...) to see how deeply counterintuitive these system dynamics can be (e.g. "increasing the food available to the prey caused the predator's population to destabilize": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_enrichment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_enrichment).