#systems theory

[cyborgized]

Drawings by English mathematical physicist, mathematician, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics, Roger Penrose

[probablyasocialecologist]

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world.

Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

[river-taxbird]

Thoughts on Cybernetics I wrote for my PhD Supervisors but thought Tumblr would like

I know people on this site love "The purpose of a system is what it does" so here's where that comes from.

Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of control and feedback in systems. In other words, how systems stay in a stable state based on the inputs and feedback they receive. It is relevant to every branch of science and is the origin of the word Cyber. It was first defined by Norbert Weiner in 1943, and adapted for a business and organisational context by his student Stafford Beer in Brain of the Firm (1972).

Important concepts in cybernetics include: -“The purpose of a system is what it does” meaning that if a system is failing to meet its stated goals then that is a result of the current state of the system and it must be changed. -The idea of the “Black Box” meaning many systems are black boxes, too complicated to fully model, and instead should be evaluated by looking at their inputs and outputs, and how external and internal feedback influences them. -The Law of Requisite Variety: The idea that to control a system, the controller must have at least as much complexity of the system it is controlling. A car changes speed and steers, so it needs pedals and a wheel. A plane moves in three dimensions, so it needs a yoke and pedals to give it three dimensions of control. Management must have information complex enough to make informed decisions but not so complex it overwhelms them, and information can be amplified or attenuated to get to the level of variety needed in given situations. Management needs feedback from both the internal and external environment in a form they can quickly understand and react to, and the ability to give feedback to internal systems in an effective manner.

In Brain of the Firm, Beer defines the Viable Systems Model. This is a sort of a “Theory of everything” of management, and nearly every other management theory I have studied neatly fits inside it. It is based on how humans process information and learn. Put simply, an an organisational system will have five elements:

Operations: The people performing the actual functions of the system.

Co-Ordination: Managing resources and dealing with crisis

Tactics: Setting targets and pushing towards them.

Intelligence: Examining external environments and and possible futures to plan ahead

Ethos: Philosophy, Norms, and Beliefs.

Each role can be held by many or multiple people, based on what they actually do and not always job role. They must have communication systems between them that amplify or attenuate information based on the needs of the people. If any of these stop functioning the system will fail. Most interestingly, the system is considered a “Fractal” meaning it is the same at every scale. It can be true for a team, a department, a company, and an industry, all at once, with each Operations element containing an entire viable system inside it. I find nearly every theory I have looked at including Resource Based View, Dynamic Capabilities Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Sociotechnical Systems Theory and most others I studied at undergrad fit nearly inside this framework, and I think it is will be a useful tool to have in my toolbox in terms of setting measurements and examining feedbacks from different stakeholders, as well as scaling down as low as teams and scaling up to the level of trade associations. I have attached a diagram of the model from Wikipedia as it helped me understand the concept.

I have been reading “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davis, which is a pop-book on the topic, that asked why companies and people in them are very often not accountable for their actions, and uses cybernetics to answer this, imagining companies as semi-autonomous cybernetic entities, made of their rules and policies and resulting in outcomes nobody in them expects. I have bought “An Introduction to Cybernetic Synergy” by Mark Rowbotham, which is an academic textbook aimed at helping managers and workers to understand cybernetics and the Viable Systems Model, as Brain of the Firm is considered dense, technical, and has a lot of mathematical models. If I end up using cybernetics as a research philosophy, I will work my way up to Brain of the Firm using these books as stepping stones.

[raffaellopalandri]

The EU AI Act and the Forgotten Competence of the Future: Why Complex Systems Require Polymathic Thinking

The EU AI Act is often perceived primarily as a regulatory challenge, as another layer of compliance requirements, documentation obligations, and control mechanisms that organisations must integrate into their existing processes. This perspective, however, remains incomplete. The deeper significance of the EU AI Act lies not only in the requirements it imposes on AI systems, but in the structural…

[ironaugur]

I love thinking about false binaries and how it creates interesting un-overlaps.

For example.

A Crawler HAS Agency BUT NO Authority

A Monsters/NPCs HAS NO Agency AND NO Authority

The System AI HAS NO Agency BUT Authority

SO

The Corporation HAS Agency AND Authority

And this is correct

At first

Until it isn’t.

Because none of it is prescriptive and says how it has to be.

Just how it is at the moment.

And you can plot the shape of the narrative as tracking these points and the narrative is the shape of the story with enough of those data points collected to see the patterns that emerge naturally.

[eelhound]

"How can the worst-designed systems [in nature] be the most durable?

The answer, rather counterintuitively, is that they are durable because they are not optimised. An optimised design is one that has been tuned precisely as possible to its current conditions. Every component fits perfectly to its present demands. Nothing is wasted, nor is anything redundant. The system performs beautifully under exactly the conditions for which it was optimised.

What happens when the conditions change?

The more precisely a system is tuned to one environment, the greater the chance that it will fail catastrophically when that environment changes. Environments change all the time, so this is not a hypothetical concern. The climate changes, competitors arrive, the pH of the environment changes, a new virus turns up, food sources disappear, your host takes an antibiotic. The one thing you can say for sure about present conditions is that they will not last.

So while the giraffe's laryngeal nerve is insane, the same basic layout works in a fish, a frog, a lizard, a mouse, an elephant, and a whale. It works across every body plan, every neck length, every thoracic arrangement that vertebrates have ever produced. An optimised routing that always took the shortest path for the specific neck length of the specific animal, would need to be re-engineered every time the body plan changed. What looks like a stupid design today is a design that hasn't broken when other things changed.

Which brings me to the giant panda, an animal that is exquisitely adapted to its niche, eating almost exclusively bamboo, employing a modified wrist bone to grip its stems, digesting them with a gut that is still essentially the gut of a carnivore, processing its food so inefficiently that it must eat for 14 hours a day. The panda, an epitome of specialisation, is also, in ecological terms, a dead animal walking. If bamboo were to disappear, thanks to deforestation, climate change, or disease, the panda ends up with nothing. Its optimisation is its obituary.

The contrast is the rat. The brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, not specialised for anything in particular, eats whatever is available, lives wherever it finds itself. It has no remarkable adaptations, no precise fit to any specific niche. It is a generalist that is mediocre at 100 different things, and not brilliant at any. The rat is everywhere and will be here long after the panda is a memory. The rat is good enough.

In 1956, the economist Herbert Simon coined the word 'satisficing,' a portmanteau of 'satisfy' and 'suffice,' to describe how real decision-makers operate. Classical economics assumes that rational agents always optimise. They survey the available options, compute the expected value of each, and select the very best one. Simon pointed out that this is quite insane. No real agent has the time, the information, or the computational power to optimise to that degree. What real agents do is set a threshold that we might call 'good enough,' and pick the first option that makes it over that threshold.

Simon won a Nobel Prize for his observation, and I’m going to suggest that he had to. The idea that 'good enough' is a legitimate strategy, and not a failure to try hard enough, not a compromise, nor is it laziness, but a defensible, mathematically sound approach to operating in a complex world was alien to the intellectual culture of the 20th century. It took a Nobel prize to make this idea respectable. Ironically, biology has been employing this principle for four and a half billion years before Herbert Simon figured out a name for it. I would assert that every organism that has ever lived is a satisficer. Few, if any, have ever optimised, because optimisation requires the kind of global knowledge that no real system, biological, economic, or personal, has ever possessed...

What lasts is not what’s best. What lasts is the thing that is most viable across the widest possible suite of conditions, for the longest period of time. 'The best', and 'the most durable' are not the same, and in fact, I would say they are in tension with one another. The more finely you tune a system to current conditions, the more fragile you make it. The more you aim for the optimal, the more dependent you become on the world being unchanged. And it never will.

Good enough is not a consolation prize, nor a medal for participation. Good enough is what all the long-lived things have in common.

The rest is palaeontology."

- James McInerney, from "Good Enough." James McInerney Substack, 9 June 2026.

[noosphe-re]

A higher level of organization offers fresh possibilities for complexification; the greater variety of components available to the suprasystem allows a larger range of structural and functional variation, with new connections imposed among the connected subsystems. Thus, by moving to a new organizational level, evolution penetrates to ever higher and more varied forms of structure and function.

Ervin László, Evolution: The Grand Synthesis

[dissipating-system]