Site preserving the work of systems thinker Donella Meadows, including her essays on leverage points and the Limits to Growth.
HN commenters point to her 1999 leverage points essay as the original source worth reading and recommend her work on systems.
At the time of original release (1972), the Limits to Growth model (a set of coupled differential equations that purported to adequately describe environmental, demographic and economic trends over a 50+ year horizon) hit the Zeitgeist right on the nose. Catastrophism coupled with the all-knowing infallible digital computer, with MIT branding to boot. Mass media jumped all over the results.
https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-available-to-read-online/
Engineering professors at the time pointed to its many failings, chief of which were the lack of validation of the underlying model structure and a lack of adequate parametric/uncertainty analysis on its many, many dubious simplifying assumptions. The study severely underestimated the uncertainty intervals/ranges with the point forecasts, to the extent they were presented at all.
Underestimating model uncertainties is a common problem with forecasting models, especially “life, the Universe, and everything” models. Consider the epidemiology models early in the pandemic, for example. Groupthink abounds and the modeler is tempted to make too strong a case, rather than provide the accurate, objective assessment of what is known/knowable and what isn’t. Even more tempting when the time horizon extends past the expected lifetime of the modelers. They aren’t going to be around to pick up the pieces, but they will get their kids college education paid for.
The study lost its luster in the 1980s and 1990s. I…
RIP Donella Meadows, a great thinker.
The interested reader may also like this slideshare overview of Thinking in Systems ch. 1-3: http://www.slideshare.net/sandhyajohnson/thinking-in-systems-donella-meadows-chapters-1-to-3
Another of her well-known works is Leverage Points, which is also great and goes into more detail on some of that which is summarized in OP's linked article. http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points
Having worked in automated systems analysis and optimization across several fields, I think Meadows' thinking is very instructive. Some of her notions which stand out in particular to me:
* The importance of the effect of feedback loops in complex system. When unexpected or counterintuitive behavior occurs, a hidden or misunderstood reinforcement feedback loop is often at root.
* The requirement that systems that seek to automate or optimize complex interactive systems be constantly-adaptive because the system itself will interact with the observation/analysis/optimization acts. This can seem like crazy voodoo at first, but it is undeniable when you start to experience it in action.
* Understanding of cost externalities vs benefit rewards for system actors and how they relate to system sources/sinks (or "stocks and flows"). This drives so much of our economy, as well as the subsystems which feed it and she has some illuminating thoughts and analyses on…
> the book that featured this world model was a bestseller in the 70s
Was "the book" she mentions the now debunked book "The Population Bomb"? The 70s had lots of catesrophic thinking because they had an economic crisis. Overpopulation concerns have been around for literally centuries, and crop up regularly from time to time. Thomas Malthus talked about it in the 1800s too, while at the same time not realizing that farming methods and enclosure acts were massively increasing the amount of food that could be produced - even tho he could literally see it happening from his doorstep.
The article does a particularly bad job at summarising the premise of the paper. It doesn't say a single thing about why the paper thinks growth will reverse rather than simply slow (as one would expect if the premises of nearing limitations were true). It makes me wonder if the author even bothered to read the report. It is long, and who has time for that? (Hint, maybe someone who's getting paid to write about it could find the time).
Here's a link to the actual report btw: https://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf
It seems silly to me to sing the praises of a model that basically extrapolates historical data. Have trends continued? Yes. Was that surprising? Nobody has been surprised by this.
The report claims that:
"Technological solutions... may have some short term effect in relieving pressures caused by growth, but in the long run they do…
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/. 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/ is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of complexity.
On sources: I'm highly partial to the work of William Ophuls who's been writing on this topic for a half century. His PhD thesis was published in 1977 as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (with an update in the early 1990s). That largely lays out the problematique, both in terms of resources and political dynamics. The book's old enough that many of its own projections can be tested, and I think these hold out exceptionally well, particularly in highlighting the (then future) rise of China as a global economic, political, and military force. Ophuls has gone on to suggest at least the framework of solutions, most especially in Plato's Revenge (2009), though that remains fairly high level. What really makes Ophuls's works tremendously valuable is his bibliographic notes which are comprehensive and, to use a favourite word of his, synoptic. The note for Ecology in particular covers much of the previous several decades' literature on growth and perspectives from both optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints, and Ophuls is exceedingly fair in considering both. I've gone back to many of those sources myself (Maddox, Kahn, Simon) to compare notes. I've actually typed out the note from Plato's Revenge, which captures a sense of his practice, though that focuses more on recent and political topics: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230607050023/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6fgq8g/william_ophuls_bibliographic_note_sources_on/>. In that sense, Ophuls is an…
The answer below assumes the following:
- You are talking about the application of general systems theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
- You would like to learn to apply 'systems thinking' principals and analysis in many domains or to new problems
- You would like to learn to model systems
- It is also important to note in many domains there are specific branches of systems theory that may be more applicable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_types_of_systems_theory
- You could spend an entire lifetime learning in this field as many have done.
Types of systems:
Systems can be broken down by multiple dimensions:
- Complex
- simple
- unitary
- pluralist
- coercive
Systems thinking approaches:
- Hard systems thinking
- Systems dynamics
- Cybernetics
- Complexity Theory
- Soft Systems
- Emancipatory systems thinking
- Postmodern systems thinking
Learning More about Systems Thinking:
- A great website is the systems thinker, that covers quite a bit of topics. The articles are actually archives of a newsletter called "The systems thinker" https://thesystemsthinker.com/
- To get an overview of various approaches to systems thinking from an organizational perspective:
Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers by Michael C. Jackson. https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Thinking-Creative-Holism-Managers/dp/0470845228
- For general systems theory: An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M.…