A community for discussing the theory and practice of complexity and systems
thinking, in any domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking]
There’s a pretty decent broad overview of systems thinking (aka complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems) in the wikipedia page linked in the sidebar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
I’d say it’s more of a way-of-thinking than anything (so I guess philosophy?), kind of a counterpart to reductionism. In practice, it applies (and has been applied) to basically any field, definitely including physics - early work was very physics focused, but later on the field expanded to include economics and other social science questions. There are models that do use maths/computation (especially some of the earlier approaches), but there’s also a lot of qualitative work associated with it as well.
So I guess the answer to all your questions is “yes”? :)
The first two posts on the community are good deeper introductions to the field.
Yes! They are both forms of systems thinking, for sure.
I guess the intermediate discipline would be systems engineering? But one of the problems with systems thinking is that it’s extremely diverse, and there’s a lot of similarly-named fields that aren’t quite the same thing. I posted about DSRP, which is an attempt to universalise the fundamental concepts of all of those fields, from science and engineering to sociology and art.
There’s a pretty decent broad overview of systems thinking (aka complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems) in the wikipedia page linked in the sidebar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
I’d say it’s more of a way-of-thinking than anything (so I guess philosophy?), kind of a counterpart to reductionism. In practice, it applies (and has been applied) to basically any field, definitely including physics - early work was very physics focused, but later on the field expanded to include economics and other social science questions. There are models that do use maths/computation (especially some of the earlier approaches), but there’s also a lot of qualitative work associated with it as well.
So I guess the answer to all your questions is “yes”? :)
The first two posts on the community are good deeper introductions to the field.
Thanks! I guess it’s the super category of things like control theory and model based systems engineering?
Yes! They are both forms of systems thinking, for sure.
I guess the intermediate discipline would be systems engineering? But one of the problems with systems thinking is that it’s extremely diverse, and there’s a lot of similarly-named fields that aren’t quite the same thing. I posted about DSRP, which is an attempt to universalise the fundamental concepts of all of those fields, from science and engineering to sociology and art.