droqen's forum-shaped notebook

I neglected to keep good notes for this book, so I'll have to go back and find the things that leapt out at me. There have been several. Compared to my recent reading I am finding this book dry and obvious.. but great

EDIT: So many connections! I created a whole forum in order to better take the type of notes that were arising from its reading.

~ Discernible macrobehaviours of a system. (Avoiding teleological thinking.) (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=447.0) ". . . a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose"
~ Self sufficient subsystems, and evolution. (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=448.0) "Why the Universe Is Organized into Hierarchies--a Fable"

Quote from: page 116

THE TRAP: POLICY RESISTANCE

When various actors try to pull a system stock toward various goals, the result can be policy resistance. Any new policy, especially if it's effective, . . . produces additional resistance, with results no one likes, but that everyone expends considerable effort in maintaining.

THE WAY OUT

Let go. Bring in all the actors and use the energy formerly expended on resistance to seek out mutually satisfactory ways for all goals to be realized--or redefinitions of larger and more important goals that everyone can pull toward together.

The compatibility:

"Do without doing." In Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of Tao Te Ching (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=435.0), this phrase or something like it repeats itself a few times. Actually many times. "Act without acting." There is something about "Shape without sawing" or "Shape without cutting"? Something like that.

In The Nature of Order, or actually more in The Timeless Way of Building, there is talk about resolving forces. The idea behind patterns is that a conflict is at play.

Thinking in Systems presents a language for more precisely describing the nature of certain conflicts. I think the language is very intuitive to me, it's no big surprise, it's like filling in the cracks with a slightly more precise shape of what was already there all along, given to me by Nicky Case's "LOOPY (https://ncase.me/loopy/)" and perhaps some of Dan Cook's design diagrams [todo: find/add link].

The One-Straw Revolution (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=267.0) describes systems too -- the boundlessness of systems, the damage of assuming one is understood...

Quote from: page 12[One example of a non-system is] a conglomeration without any particular interconnections or function. Sand scattered on a road by happenstance is not, itself, a system. . . .

Quote from: page 12When a living creature dies, it loses its "system-ness." The multiple interactions that held it together no longer function, and it dissipates, although its material remains part of a larger food-web system.

So early in this book! Defining what a system is in a way that I was not a hundred percent on board with.

Meadows says that a system has a "function" or "purpose", which rubs up against my discomfort with the way these sorts of terms lead into a teleological viewpoint, as if a system exists to do something, rather than... merely doing it... I would prefer less intention- or design-coded words like "result" or "outcome" or something of that nature.

(It reminds me of Apocalypse World's impulse, i.e. "spawning pool (impulse: to generate badness)" So it is clearly a useful, intuitive, human way of looking at things.)

~ Dark and Darker - its gambling-like take on effort (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=440)

Wow, these are some excellent descriptions of 'traps' and 'ways out' of them... This is incredible. I also skipped ahead and saw - this is the book that coined all those 'intervention points in a system' that I've read about so long ago! Holy shit! This is that book! What a damn book

Quote from: p137

THE TRAP: RULE BEATING

Rules to govern a system can lead to rule beating--perverse behavior that [obeys the rules, but] distorts the system

THE WAY OUT

Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules

I've written up a quote but I think I'll just summarize all of them at the end, and maybe re-summarize where I think they can be lumped together.

Quote from: p140If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equality, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

POLICY RESISTANCE
A system is kept stable by existing forces that respond to discrepancy.
THE TRAP: Trying to change a self-stabilizing system by application of a new force will cause those existing forces to increase. (Actually, this trap is probably what causes such a system to arise in the first place.)
THE WAY OUT:
- Don't add new forces; bring in all existing forces and acknowledge their individual needs.
- Reframe all actors' goals in a unifying way; find a new common goal.

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
If an action is available which directly benefits the actor and indirectly harms everyone (e.g. via the titular 'commons'), everyone will suffer as a result of taking individually intuitive actions.
THE WAY OUT:
- Increase everyone's perspective, teach them to inherently value the health of the commons.
- Also "restore or strengthen the missing feedback link" perhaps via "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon": Create a form of feedback which translates the indirect cost to everyone into a direct cost to the actor.

DRIFT TO LOW PERFORMANCE
When the goal is to maintain the current state, and the current state slips negatively, standards and performance will perpetually drop.
THE WAY OUT:
- Set goals/standards that do not respond to recent performance (make them 'absolute')
- OR, set goals/standards based on the best recent performance rather than the average or the worst.

ESCALATION
This one seems like the sibling of the above... When everyone's goal is to surpass everyone else, a "reinforcing feedback loop" causes efforts to perpetually increase.
THE WAY OUT, ONCE CAUGHT (but try to avoid this!):
- Refuse to compete
- Negotiate a new system with balancing loops to control the escalation [see also THE WAY OUT for POLICY RESISTANCE, above]

SUCCESS TO THE SUCCESSFUL
"If the winners of a competition are systematically rewarded with the means to win again, a reinforcing feedback loop is created"
THE WAY OUT:
- If losers can create a new field for competition, this diversification can help them escape
- Limit the rewards any one actor can win [or, a negative feedback loop to compete against the reinforcing one]
- Offer rewards that do not help their actors win more

SHIFTING THE BURDEN TO THE INTERVENOR
An outside force concerned with reducing the symptoms or appearance of a systemic ill may make things worse, especially if that outside force takes over the existing internal maintenance force. The internal system deteriorates, and the outside force has to work harder and take more control. Reinforcing feedback loop.
THE WAY OUT:
- Avoid symptom-relieving or signal-denying policies or practices.
- Again, just notice the system

RULE BEATING
Rules can be exploited, which can lead to a distortion of the goals which called for the rules in the first place. This cannot be solved by enforcing the rules better, rules can always be evaded [see this as another form of POLICY RESISTANCE]
THE WAY OUT:
- Rule beating takes effort; rule beaters are doing so because of systemic forces at play; again, see THE WAY OUT of POLICY RESISTANCE
- Because it's so relevant to game design, I will quote this explicitly. "Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules." (p.137)

Also on rule beating, "Rule beating becomes a problem only when it leads a system into large distortions, unnatural behaviors that would make no sense at all in the absence of the rules. If it gets out of hand, rule beating can cause systems to produce very damaging behaviour . . . Rule beating that distorts nature, the economy, organizations, and the human spirit can be destructive." (p.136)

". . . design the [rules] with the whole system, including its self-organizing evasive possibilities, in mind." (p.137)

SEEKING THE WRONG GOAL
If a system's goals, if "the indicators of satisfaction of the rules" "are defined inaccurately or incompletely," the system will produce the wrong results.
THE WAY OUT:
- Goals, and indicators, must relate to the actual, "real welfare of the system."

[See: SCORE in games. A part of this trap: Don't choose indicators based on ease of implementation. Choose indicators based on accuracy and completeness.]

Bad Feedback
- In Tragedy of the Commons, the actor is not receiving feedback representative of their impact on others.
- In Drift, too-weak feedback leads to worse and worse performance

Surface Goals
- In Shifting the Burden, the outside actor has the wrong goal
- Rule Beating alludes to a bad response to rule beating, which is to enforce the rules. Enforcing rules is a bad surface goal.
- This is the core of Seeking the Wrong Goal, of course

Loss of Agency
- In Success to the Successful, a lack of agency leads to further loss of agency; this is bad
- In Shifting the Burden, the one most affected - and most qualified to provide good goals, has lost (or given up) agency

How does Escalation fit in? actors are concerned with competition rather than the bigger picture? Is that Bad Feedback or Surface Goals? It must be its own thing.

Yes, I've read this list before, but having read this whole chapter: damn, the full text is good. The list itself is nice as a reminder for this chapter, the standalone list is not nearly as useful. Get that full-fat version, read the damn book

Quote from: p. 162[One] of Jay Forrester's famous systems sayings goes: It doesn't matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a "fair" distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the laws say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up against the accepted idea of "fairness."

Quote from: p. 163Paradigms [shared social agreements about the nature of reality] are the sources of [systems goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about] systems.

My notes on the places to intervene.

-Changing numbers, buffers (stock sizes relative to flow rates), the plumbing (how stocks and flows connect), and delays in the system are lower-order intervention points. They are often physical and expensive to change one by one, and besides, they don't really get at the heart of the problem. Pay attention to these mechanisms, of course. They matter.

-Balancing and reinforcing feedback loops are powerful and more can be done with them. They are atomic in nature, each one the result of a simple "If X is higher/lower, do Y more/less". If you can change one of these relationships (the right one, in the right direction) it can have a big impact.

-Information flows, rules, and self-organization-- the ability to change the rules and structure. Education and enforcement and agency over the system itself. The previous item suggests that changing numbers directly is expensive and low-impact; instead, change the flows, change the loops. The numbers will work themselves out. The idea with this item, is that you don't have to change the flows or loops if you can change the nature of change itself. How is change effected in this system? If it's in the right hands, if everyone knows what's going on and why it's going on and how to change it (which correspond respectively to information, rules, and self-organization), the system will change for the better of everyone.

-Goals, paradigms, and transcending paradigms. Again, this flows down the list. In order to change a system, we understand its goals, goals come from paradigms, and transcending paradigms allow us to play with paradigms...

Go up another level, another level, another level. Appeal to the biggest arena you have real access to. Make changes there, while considering every subsystem. I would not be as comfortable thinking like this without the backing of everything I learned about local adaptation and living systems from The Nature of Order.

This chapter is great, really lovely. I'm going to be drawing more connections. I need a better way to draw connections than these links and backlinks... The thing is it's connected but not

I guess I just have a lot of books tied together by a huge web. Maybe these are "Systems Thinking" books, but they're not all about systems thinking in the way that this book is, they're just... thinking about things, and everything is a system... Anyway, I'm going to go one by one through all the "systems wisdoms" that this final chapter tries to describe. They are all good.

Quote from: p166People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems, analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

~ The Nature of Order, "20th-century mechanistic viewpoint" (A bad specific link, because I can't quiiite find anything specific - it's crystal clear in my mind, but not here. I need some connective tissue. (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=364.msg1664#msg1664))

EDIT: So I created a new forum for this! I'm excited for it.

~ The harmful industrial mechanistic viewpoint. (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=443)

Quote from: p170We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
. . . Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity---our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

~ Inspiring Awakeness (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=492)
~ Starseed Pilgrim and The Void - Two Strange Worlds of Light and Darkness (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2420)

pages 170-175

Get the Beat of the System
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. . . . study its beat. . . . watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who've been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. . . Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others.
. . .
Listen to any discussion. . . watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in "predict, control, or impose your will" mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it's doing it.

Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day
. . . scuttle them if they are no longer supported . . .

Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information
. . .

Use Language with Care and Enrich It with Systems Concepts
. . . Honoring information means above all avoiding language pollution. . . expanding our language so we can talk about complexity.
. . .
A society that talks incessantly about "productivity" but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word "resilience" is going to become productive and not resilient. . . . A society that talks about "creating jobs" as if that's something only companies can do will not inspire the great majority of its people to create jobs, for themselves or anyone else.
. . .
. . . first . . . [keep language] as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible. . . . [Keep] information streams clear.
. . . second . . . enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.

pages 175-177

Pay Attention to What Is Important,
Not Just What Is Quantifiable
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can't measure. . . . As modelers we have exposed ourselves to the ridicule of our scientific colleagues more than once by putting variables labeled "prejudice," or "self-esteem," or "quality of life" into our models. . . . there certainly was a real connection between prejudice and performance. It was arbitrary what kind of scale to measure it by. . .but it would have been much more unscientific [inaccurate] to leave "prejudice" out . . .
. . .
Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So don't fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality. . . If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don't let it pass you. Don't be stopped by the "if you can't define it and measure it, I don't have to pay attention to it" ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value.

(Backlink: Book Four, beyond-mechanistic or ultra-mechanistic assumptions (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2954))

pages 177-180

Make Feedback Policies for Feedback Systems
. . . design policies that change depending on the state of the system. . . . policies that design learning into the management process.

Go for the Good of the Whole
Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, ability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability---whether they are easily measured or not. ~ Synapse "Measuring imprecisely but accurately by feeling." (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=445)

Listen to the Wisdom of the System (Hold on, isn't this the same as 'get the beat' of it?)

Locate Responsibility in the System (or, FEEDBACK)
"Intrinsic responsibility" means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers.

pages 180-185

Stay Humble--Stay a Learner
Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring-out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. . . .
The thing to do, when you don't know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment---or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. [Maybe 'trial and error' gameplay isn't so bad after all?]
. . . small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it's leading. . . . making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. . . . Error-embracing is the condition for learning. It means seeking and using---and sharing---information about what went wrong with what you expected or hoped would go right.

Celebrate Complexity
There's something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies. . . recognizes instinctively that nature designs . . . with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
. . .
We can. . . celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. . . . Aldo Leopold did with his land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Expand Time Horizons
Many Native American cultures actively spoke of and considered in their decisions the effects on the seventh generation to come. . . . As Kenneth Boulding wrote: "There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart . . ."
. . . You need to be watching both the short and the long term---the whole system.

Defy the Disciplines
Seeing systems whole requires more than being "interdisciplinary" . . . Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. . . . They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.
   It can be done. It's very exciting when it happens.

Expand the Boundary of Caring
If will not be possible in this integrated world
for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or
for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or
for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or . . .
for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.
   As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. ~ Synapse: Aligning seemingly disparate values. (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2117)
. . . They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know. ~ Synapse: Measuring imprecisely but accurately by feeling. (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=445.0)

Don't Erode the Goal of Goodness
The most damaging example of the systems archetype called "drift to low performance" is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality . . . Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical.
. . .
We know what to do about drift to low performance. Don't weigh the bad news more heavily than the good. And keep standards absolute.

Finished the book :) Great book. Thanks jack.