From: James Martin [mailto:mart...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2016 8:33 AM
To: Lenard Troncale <lrtro...@cpp.edu>
Cc: Hybertson, Duane W. <dhyb...@mitre.org>; Janet Singer <jsi...@soe.ucsc.edu>; Michael Singer (mjsi...@soe.ucsc.edu) <mjsi...@soe.ucsc.edu>; david.r...@systemsphilosophy.org Rousseau <david.r...@systemsphilosophy.org>
Subject: Re: Pathologies of our political system
Len,
There is an overarching "pathology" with many instances of using a systems approach that is hardly ever mentioned. That is, the tendency to believe that something must be done to alleviate a bad situation. The alternative "fixes" are arrayed and examined to determine the best one to implement. However, given the unreliable predictions of any future outcomes for each alternative (given the complex nature of things), it is hardly wise to evaluate options when the eventual, actual outcomes will unlikely match the predicted outcomes.
Often the real outcome ends up being worse than the current situation! In other words, often the best thing to do is to do nothing. However, this goes against people's very strong desire just to "do something". I have hardly seen anything in the SS or ST literature that addresses this basic flaw in many instances of applying a systems approach. However, there are some things written on this phenomenon, such as Systemantics by John Gall. One book that addresses this psycho-social phenomena directly is The Fatal Conceit by Friedrich Hayek.
James
On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 12:18 AM, Lenard Troncale <lrtro...@cpp.edu> wrote:
Duane,
No I had not seen it. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. It is uncanny and impressive that this author uses an approach that sounds so much like SPT systems pathology and so systems oriented (altho' he really is mostly explaining a broad metaphor of human politics compared to the individual human health system).
I agree that one of the futures of a broader systems engineering AND systems science should be giving prescriptive designs that help "cure" systemic diseases and better design social systems in the first place. But notice the lack of real detail on just how to do this in the article. It is more a plaintive cry in the desert or dark than prescriptive. He leaves solutions to the last couple of paragraphs and they seem rather shallow to me. But that is the challenge of SPT and other systems theories or approaches. Giving real data that shows how better systems work and don't work.
To me the advantage of systems thinking is that it directly addresses social systems, that is human systems problems and gives systems naive participants the tools to conceive of and map their problems as systemic. HOWEVER systems thinking has a problem compared to systems science because it stops there. The problem with every one of those systems thinking tools is that they do not have a database that tells them in some definite and practical terms how systems work and don't work linking the problems of function with how systems have solved that problem in the past. No one seems to want to go to that level of detail just as the populist demagogues address major problems by touting simplistic solutions that would never work. The fault is in our inability to see that "systemness" addresses the same systems problems and challenges whether they be physical, biological, social, or conceptual systems. We are stuck in our humanity, in our being able to ONLY see manifest systems rather than the minimizations and maximizations accomplished no matter what the type of system is by system patterns that are universal.
It would be good if you submitted this to the google SSWG group for reactions.
Len
On Jul 4, 2016, at 7:19 AM, Hybertson, Duane W. wrote:
Hi all – Did you see the article by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic called “”? It is at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/. A good discussion of an example of human system patterns and pathologies, and a good problem for system science and the expanded scope of systems engineering.
Thanks,
Duane
--
James
In a system with a social aspect, or a human learning aspect, the action to make an intervention changes the situation and it is not possible to revert to a state where no-one in the system has experienced the change, and so the system will be tainted by the effect of the original action performed. Thus, there is no ‘undo’ option that will return things to the ‘before intervention’ state.
This would also be true for physical systems which have memory, through a mechanism such as hysteresis, and possibly other mechanisms of memory.
Dr Tim Ferris
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I’ll accept that.
The biggest problem with this is that there is some kind of inhibition (losing face?) associated with reversion to what it was before we did something. To ‘undo’ in a socio-XXX situation is associated with needing to admit that the proposal one put in place was not adequate, and that, perhaps, how it was before was rather better.
Undo in the looser sense of reverting to substantially what it was before, perhaps with tweaks, is possible. Inhibition and admission of inadequacy works against it actually happening.
Duane,
‘doing nothing’ as a viable option response to harm arising from a complex system behavior seem to me untenable, unless of course the complex system is static, which they never are, or we lack the capacity to effect the appropriate remediation action, which is too often the situation. While true we may not comprehend all of the consequences of a particular remedial action, such failing indicates our lack of understanding concerning the complexity of that system’s response to our intervention.
I was struck by the article’s chronicling of the demise of the political middleware that functions to buffer the binding of the electorate to those charged with its governance. In contrast, and about the same time as the demise of political middleware, we experience the rise of middleware as the linchpin of technological progress and that rise as a powerful contributor to the demise of the former.
More speculatively, will the demise of technological middleware, the means by which we now manage and control outcomes of technology use, result in the populist uprising of machines? Where will the next wave of middleware arise?
Cheers,
Richard