tannertan36
Misplaced Lens Cap
styofa doing anything
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Kiana Khansmith
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Cosmic Funnies
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
almost home
RMH
#extradirty
Andulka
Cosimo Galluzzi
dirt enthusiast
Sade Olutola
Origami Around
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@nexial
“The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.”
— How To Be a Systems Thinker | Edge.org
“Legibility: We see a complex natural system, assume that because it *looks* messy that it must be disordered, then impose our own order on it to make it “legible”. But in removing the messiness we remove essential components of the system that we couldn’t grasp, and it fails.”
— Gurwinder Bhogal, British-Indian writer.
“Consider, for example, the chaotic effect (resulting from a sudden imposition of uniformity) of a strong wind on the innumerable grains of sand that compose a beach: amid this confusion, the action of a human foot on the surface of the beach constitutes a complex interaction of events that leads to the statistically very improbable configuration of a footprint. The organization of events that has produced this configuration, this form, is only temporary: the footprint will soon be swept away by the wind. In other words, a deviation from the general entropy curve (consisting of a decrease in entropy and the establishment of improbable order) will generally tend to be reabsorbed into the universal curve of increasing entropy. And yet, for a moment, the elemental chaos of this system has made room for the appearance of an order, based on the relationship of cause and effect: the cause being the series of events interacting with the grains of sand (in this case, the human foot), and the effect being the organization resulting from it (in this case, the footprint).”
— Umberto Eco
“…complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality. For every event that occurs, there are a multitude of possible causes, and the extent to which each contributes to the event is not clear, not even after the fact! One might say that there is a web of causation.”
— Because, by Nigel Oldenfeld — an essay in This Will Make You Smarter
“The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it. Hence even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
“I hope you will abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience—to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
— M. Scott Peck
“There are complicated problems, and there are complex problems. Complicated problems are technical in nature. They are linear, orderly, and predictable. Complex problems are adaptive challenges. They are messy, unstable, and unpredictable.”
— Michael, McKinney, Owner, Leadership Now.
“The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.”
— George E. P. Box, statistician
““Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.””
—
Leonardo da Vinci
Photo: Steven Godfrey
“Trees cannot be cut and “the forest” preserved unless there is agreement on what a forest is and whom it is it for. Is it everyday habitat or sacred symbol, mental image or material resource? Is it for plants, animals, or people? And which ones—for native oaks or Norway maples; for spotted owls or English sparrows; for hikers or hunters, naturalists or lumbermen; for local residents or distant populations? There are many kinds of forests, and the answers depend upon the context of a particular place. Since an old-growth forest and an urban forest of trees in city parks and streets are not the same, different priorities should inform their management.”
— Anne Whiston Spirn, Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted (via probablyasocialecologist)
“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes”
- Conrad McCarthy, The Crossing
Q Design Pack: Systems Thinking
design: Lisa Maione
Broken toaster vs broken kitchen
If you’ve got a broken toaster, everyone agrees with the problem. If you say your kitchen is broken, either you’ll get a blank stare or as many different versions of the problem as people you ask.
This is a version of a wicked problem. The starting point to working on them is acknowledging and looking for the varying ways stakeholders view the problem - based on what’s compelling and gives them a stake in the problem.
Using the below 10 principles (taken from Peter Jones’ article on Social Systems Design), is a helpful way to identify exercises with which you an engage stakeholders - and understand their various perspectives.
There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
Wicked problems have no stopping rules (How do we know when design is enough?)
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-false, but better or worse.
There is no immediate or ultimate test of a solution.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a one-shot trial. Every attempt counts significantly.
You cannot identify a finite set of potential solutions.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Each can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
The discrepancies (and causes themselves) can be explained in numerous ways.
The planner has no right to be wrong.
Bad reductionism is when you bake a cake then pull a crumb off it and say ‘the first word of the recipe is responsible for this crumb’.
Philosophy of Science professor (via philosophyprofessorquotes)
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.
Philip Warren Andersen (via inthenoosphere)
Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.
Humberto Maturana (via inthenoosphere)
