Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.

Silo series by Hugh Howey

I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?

> Thinking In Systems... gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily

I liked the observations like:

'long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why'*

'Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.'

'Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.'

* 'Structure generates behavior' as stated in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8

This book made me start focusing on flows vs stocks, a distinction humans tend to get backwards and the make several related mistakes. The book gets some valid criticism, but it's a primer and a good one at that.

> Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".

I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.

The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.

If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.

In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.

If it bothers you, you could work around the semantics and talk about its empirical purpose or observed purpose, vs intended purpose, rather than using purpose and expecting it to be interpreted in a particular way.

I think the jarring alternative definition of "purpose" is an intentional mental hack: to break people out of orienting themselves around design intent, when processes often go out of alignment with that. It's easy for humans to fool themselves. Taking a dispassionate, empirical view when considering what a process is doing, or analyzing what its range of behaviors is, can illuminate many problems.

They do not need to be lies, but they may be. They may also just be a mismatch between the level a statement is generated at and the level it is consumed at, the “level” here being something we could call a system’s functional context.

Additionally, a statement is generated by a system and reflects itself a separate purpose in its generation. A system can exist without statement of purpose, so why was it made? The statement has an intent and an audience. It is therefore necessarily more constrained than the system itself, and for the systems we are referring to, it is markedly less complex than the system itself. It cannot hope to capture the full function, which is what can serve (or not) a purpose.

I’ve always interpreted this saying to point in the direction you’re actually going. That a machine does not have a “purpose”. Its creator might have had a purpose in mind, but when talking about the machine one should focus on what it actually does. This avoids needing to fend off attacks about how noble the creator’s intention for their machine may or may not have been, which could otherwise consume the rhetorical oxygen better spent.

> or those stated goals are lies.

Yes, that's part of the point. If the stated purpose of a system is to "improve vehicle fuel efficiency" but the observed behaviour is to give car companies a way to avoid doing much of anything about fuel efficiency, or if the stated purpose is to "encourage EV adoption" but the observed behaviour is "funnel money to certain rich people" then you are better off assuming that the behaviour you observe is the intent, and the publicly stated purpose is marketing spin.

On the other hand, things change over time. Google started out organizing the world's information, and gradually turned into surveillance advertising. They got rid of "don't be evil" so there are no explicit lies. They aren't a dysfunctional search company, they are a functional surveillance-advertising company, that thing they do - update your expectations so you believe that's their purpose and don't believe that they are "trying to be good but misguided".

The quote you replied to is used to educate a reader how to understand an existing system. For example, it helps one understand why a system is in a state when as you say 'there's not necessarily anyone who wants' it that way. Rivers are polluted because there are some factors in the system which enable it.

Also, as the video I linked in the previous comment says: 'our first instinct is to blame people in the system and that is a low leverage response...actions people take are possible, feasible, and rational because of the universe in which they exist.'

I am not sure if you've read the book. But even though you've not used terms like feedback loops, etc. I think what you are saying is not much different from what the book says.

If interested, a chapter wise summary of Thinking In Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL6RiAl2WHXEU04zFYyWr...

> The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.

I think you might like this song then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBBNjkAlXM

as it takes normal every day systems that we think we can depend on (banks, the army, phones) and sarcastically highlights some of the worst things those systems do vs what we're told they do. The chorus is that slogan.

Chiang's stuff is fantastic. I'd love to live in a timeline where he writes novels instead of just short stories, but I'll take what I can get. (Big fan of Arrival, too -- even hit the GitHub repo of all the glyphs and got one tattooed.)

Can you please point me towards the repo? Quick search didn't yield any results on my end. Thanks.

Here you go: https://github.com/WolframResearch/Arrival-Movie-Live-Coding...

Can you tell me more about reading to your wife? Is she listening intently, or like falling asleep? or is she doing something and listening in the background? (knitting / on her phone)

Not the OP, but my partner and his wife have done this for years.

I was inspired, and I did a variation of it with a partner at one point. It was really nice. Feels kinda like a synthetic version of an engaging conversation with someone you care about, but perhaps with words you can't muster yourselves at that time of the day. If you've chosen the book together, it's guaranteed to be the right thing between you. It's nice to feel like you're hearing or learning something interesting from the person you care about, even when one of you perhaps don't have the conversation or the story in you. (I have a high appetite for connecting over ideas, but sometimes people I care about can run out of capacity before me, so it feels like a hack for my relationships.)

I imagine swapping reader-listener roles is another variation.

A bit of intent listening and a bit of passing out, depending on the mood and day. I have reread many pages due to her passing out without me noticing.

I also read to my youngest perhaps 5 days per week, and used to read to his two older brothers for many years. I’m realizing I spend a lot of time reading to people. They definitely fall asleep quite often.

If you loved Thinking In Systems: A Primer, you may want to read Business Dynamics by John Sterman [1], one of the proponents and pioneers (after Jay Forrester) of systems dynamics. It's a textbook, but even so it is readable and engaging.

Systems thinking changes the way people think about solutions, often for the better (but not always). There's a tendency to think: "uh... it's the system, nothing's gonna change unless we change the _system_ per se". And that's correct. But individual actions also change systemic outputs. So. Case in point: climate change and all that...

[fun fact, I took a class with Sterman at MIT. He's fantastic, very engaging!]

[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman

To me, Systems Thinking material always reads as if written by philosophers who wish they were engineers.

Did you start the silo book? Loved the show as well.

I haven’t properly started yet; my friend just lent them to me recently and I’ve intermittently read a few pages and thumbed through out of curiosity. I’m excited to actually dig into it and focus less on other reading.

> Silo series by Hugh Howey

totally deserved and worth it IMO

Two of Vernor Vinge's books in particular (science fiction): A Fire Upon The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky.

They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.

I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the...

Great series! Give Children of Time a go next if you haven’t already.

I second that. The 3 body problem is also great!

I sometimes wonder if we are living through something that looks a bit like the prologue of A Fire Upon the Deep...

I just finished my umpteenth reread of AFUtD. It’s one of those books I can pull off the shelf every few years and enjoy from beginning to end.

The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.

If you haven't read about his (technical) system for writing, do so. Very geeky. He described it (including notes) in my ebook copy of Fire Upon The Deep

They have a special place in my heart.

I recently described finishing Fire Upon the Deep as saying goodbye to a very dear friend. A great book.

Oooh those are really good! (I'd say more but I don't want to spoil anything)

Don't miss out on his "The blabber", a novella in that universe with an adorable character.

Just finished: "Lonesome Dove", by Larry McMurtry. From the name, I'd somehow assumed it was a romance novel. No, it's absolutely not. If it were released today, I think I'd describe it as "horsepunk": instead of cyberpunk's high tech low-lifes, it's basically horseback low-lifes. That's not entirely fair because there's a lot of moral strength in some of the characters, but they're all living on the brutal edges of a society where any random event might bring death, or worse.

Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.

[0]https://nebulaofbooks.com/books/null-cat-dev-null_/

Good lord, I nearly died at “horsepunk.” It’s a western, yo. I agree that it’s a great read.

Well, sure! But most westerns don’t give you that much insight into each person’s motivations and inner lives. And others tend to be more optimistic, with a common theme that truth and justice are destined to win out. Lonesome Dove’s freaking grim. The world seems out to get them, but it’s worse: the world just doesn’t care.

People who haven’t read it: Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer for a reason. It’s very good.

I'm not sure I'd call it grim, per se. Blood Meridian takes that label for me, almost at the exclusion of all else in what could loosely be called the "western" genre. Lonesome Dove is more just very... gritty. And packs a serious emotional heft. Great book either way.

Gonna grab myself a copy. I love neo western films, so this sounds right up my alley.

i read it last year. its a bit slow in the beginning but by the halfway point i was reading it voraciously. I think I finished the final third in one sitting. Followed it up with the sequel and now on the first in the series.