Monday, 25 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. We've reached the final chapter of the book, chapter seven, where we learn of fifteen practices for systems thinking. They're useful for practical life too. The first is "get the beat of the system". Observe the system's behavior before theorizing. Use data to formulate the problem of the system, not by which formulation of the problem fits your favorite solution. I find this one interesting as I find it common that we start with a solution we like, and then we use it to diagnose the problem. The second is "expose your mental models to the light of day". This is the same as putting your ideas on paper. By formalizing structural diagrams and equations, it forces your models to be concrete, add up, and be consistent. It's easy to hide in fluffy clouds. The second practice is in the same spirit of why I started to write down my thoughts. It helps me spot the gaps in my thinking. Supplementing this process with books has accelerated my thinking. The book about constructions of emotions helped me to clear confusions I had in my early writings. I don't think it would have had the same effect if I'd casually read the book without engaging myself in its contents. My intention was to understand and the process of writing gave me a practical and efficient method to accomplish that. I took it a step further by publishing it online. That helped me spot unuseful driving forces, that were causing confusion and conflict. Why do I feel less comfortable to write that I am a virgin, or I don't have friends when it's written publicly? This lead to a sense of liberation I've never experienced before. The third is "honor, respect, and distribute information". This is to understand information is power, recognizing the influence it has on a system. Systems often run into issues due to delay, bias or missing information. The fourth is "use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts". Our ability to understand and explain reality starts with our language. It comes before strategy, structure, and culture. The book has the quote "we only see what we can talk about". That's fascinating to think about and relates to the concept of emotional granularity that we talked about in the previous book. We talk more about productivity than resilience. What effect does this have on society? The book also talks about tyrannical language. Language that is not concrete, meaningful, or truthful. This is also interesting, and something I find myself to have been guilty of back when I managed Minecraft servers. I think it's sort of the same thing as when we call something a political answer. The fifth is "pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable". We love numbers. So much that we'll pretend things don't exist if they aren't quantifiable. That's all the qualitative concepts like quality of life, freedom, and love. What happens when quantity is valued over quality? The sixth is "make feedback policies for feedback systems". This is about making the policies dynamic to the system's state. We more easily understand static policies, but they don't work with systems that are changing. It's like meta feedback or self-organizing feedback I guess? The seventh is "go for the good of the whole". This is to understand maximizing one part of the system will undermine the whole system. As said before, hierarchies work by serving the bottom layers. The eighth is "listen to the wisdom of the system". This is similar to the first practice. Instead of barraging in with your beliefs of how to solve the system, observe what already works and utilize that. The ninth is "locate responsibility in the system". I think this is my favorite one. This is about understanding what triggers what. To design a system with intrinsic responsibility. A pilot in a plane has direct feedback/consequences of their actions. Before in time, leaders participated on the battlefield. One can argue war has become more irresponsible as leaders are more far away from feedback/consequences. In society, on all levels, I think obscurity between actions and consequences cause a lot of irresponsible behavior. It's like the tragedy of the commons archetype we read about earlier. The tenth is "stay humble, stay a learner". This is to understand experimentation is necessary with trial and error. Unable to accept this and hide vulnerabilities is ineffective in terms of improving a system. The eleventh is "celebrate complexity". This is to recognize the inherent complexity of reality. To not fight it with homogeneity and linearity, to not fear uncertainty and not having control. This is definitely something I have to be more aware of and learn to accept. To appreciate the beauty of it. It seems like a general trend in society, looking at art and architecture too. Makes me think of the trend of the soulless, minimalist corporate art style, haha. The twelfth is "expand time horizons". This is to understand you have to have short term and long term in mind to see the whole system. The book makes the claim that interest rate is one of the worst inventions of humanity. I found that interesting, but I didn't fully grasp their reasoning to the extent I'd like. I think I have to look more into it to understand. I know that taking interest is forbidden in Islam, so there's definitely a rich history on this. The thirteenth "defy the disciplines". This is to not get stuck in a specific discipline or view a system from one perspective. To dare to stray away from absolute academic correctness in practice. Understanding our models are limited and not easily implemented in practice. The fourteenth is "expand the boundary of caring". This is similar to the seventh practice but on a more compassionate level I think. The understanding that we all make up one system in the end. I guess it could also be called to expand the boundary of rationality. The fifteenth is "don't erode the goal of goodness". This relates to the drift to lower performance archetype. From my experience, it does seem like we're going down a path of lower standards for goodness and morality. Acts of goodness is seen as something saintly, as if it's infeasible to expect everyone to behave like that. The difficulty is to fill the gap between understanding and implementation. It's easy to understand this but hard to implement a solution. I have found loving kindness to be a great tool to help one implement this on a personal level. It's an interesting issue to think about. It makes me think of stuff like virtue signaling, cancel culture, parasocial relationships, and identity politics. It seems to be a complex, systemic issue.