A more full description would be appreciated, I still have no idea what it’s about. Is this a philosophy? A field of mathematics? A physics concept?
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.
I had a lot of fun with this in college, had no idea it would pop up in “normal life” (or at least my random internet browsing for fun) under its name instead of just seeing “you know cause and effect isn’t always immediate” in a few arguments and going no deeper. Pleased to see it! Subscribed immediately.
What kind of classes did it come up in?
A Systems Thinking one
Oh yeah, that’ll do it 😂
What discipline are you in? Something stemmy, or more social science?
Social sciences are super cool and fascinating, but I ultimately went non-social-science STEM. How about you?
Biol and maths. Then climate science. Now working in climate risk, and it turns out everything at that point is basically sociology anyway, because it all comes down to belief in predictions, uncettainty, world views, subjective risk tolerance and decision making…
Did that link in the body not work on your instance?
nope.
if you just use ‘! community @ domain’ it resolves in most platforms instead of the full url ‘http : //domain /c/ community’
Ah right. I think that’s what I did, but I think the UI automatically made it a link? Anyway, thanks.
Appreciate your domain, BTW. Gross.
