Tag Archives: system thinking

September 2015 in Review

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What did I learn in September? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-11):

  • The Environmental Kuznets Curve is the idea that a developing country will go through a period of environmental degradation caused by economic growth, but then the environment will improve in the long run. Sounds okay but the evidence for it is weak. (-1)
  • The Inca are an example of a very advanced civilization that was wiped out. (-1)
  • Consumerism and the pursuit of wealth are not sufficient cultural glue to hold a nation together. (-1)
  • Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this. (-1)
  • North and South America would have enormous herds of large mammals if humans had never come along.  (-1)
  • The U.S. clearly has lower average life expectancy than other advanced countries. Developing countries in Asia and Latin America are catching up, but life expectancy in Africa is still tragically low. (-1)
  • People get away with criminally violent behavior behind the wheel because police do not see it as on par with other types of crime. (-2)
  • People are still suggesting a false choice between critical and creative thinking. This is not how the problems are tomorrow will be solved. (-2)
  • This just in – an extreme form of central planning does not work. (-1)

Positive stories (+9):

    • Pneumatic chutes for garbage collection have been used successfully on an island in New York City for decades. This technology has some potential to move us closer to a closed loop world where resources are recovered rather than wasted. (+1)
    • Scientists and engineers could learn some lessons from marketing on how to communicate better with the rest of humanity. (+1)
    • There is new evidence from New Zealand on economic benefits of cycling and cycling infrastructure. (+1)
    • There has been some progress on New York City’s “lowline“, which is what a park in space might look like. The only problem is, it looks to me like a mall. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the exciting science fiction future may look a lot like malls in space. (+0)
    • The U.S. Surgeon General thinks walkable communities may be a good idea. The End of Traffic may actually be a possibility. (+3)
    • Peter Singer advocates “effective altruism”. A version of his Princeton ethics course is available for free online. (+1)
    • Edward Tufte does not like Infographics. (+0)
    • The unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes he has found the key to happiness. (+1)
    • The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning. (+1)

critical vs. creative thinking?

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This article suggests we need less critical thinking and more creative thinking. This may be true if we are interpreting the word “critical” the way it is often used in everyday speech, to mean oppositional, argumentative, closed minded, cynical. But I don’t think that is the intended meaning of critical thinking at all. Critical thinking is about using the powerful analytical tools of reason, logic, induction, provided by fields such as science, engineering, economics, even philosophy. You need analytical tools to decide which options are better than others for solving a given problem or achieving a given goal. But before you can apply the analytical tools, you need creativity to come up with a wide range of possible ways to achieve the desired outcome, ranging from dumb to brilliant. Then you use the analytical tools to separate the dumb from the brilliant. Without creativity, that needle-in-a-haystack brilliant idea will never be in the mix.

To solve tomorrow’s complex problems, we can’t be forcing today’s kids to make a false choice between creative and critical thinking. They have to learn how to combine both, every day. Einstein didn’t make that choice, he was an avid violinist and even credited music as inspiration for his theories. Sherlock Holmes was also an avid violinist. Only he wasn’t real, he was a fictional character, the product of a creative mind, who engaged in highly logical inductive reasoning, in lateral, non-traditional, and very creative ways. It takes some creativity to wrap your head around that one.

ignorance and confidence

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I always suspected that ignorance and arrogance were closely related, and that the truly competent know their limits and are appropriately uncomfortable when beyond them. But now here is proof!

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

Holmes’s Brain

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Sherlock Holmes knew that science and problem solving are about logic and reason, supported by facts. Creativity is the opposite of all that, right? Not so fast, according to an article and book by Maria Konnikova. Facts play a role, and Holmes had a large but carefully organized “attic” of the ones that he felt were most useful. To solve problems, you need a lot of information in your head, and access to a lot more, because you never know in advance which facts are going to combine in which way to produce an answer. The process of putting those facts together is not always cold, organized, and logical. In fact, you can’t force it. Holmes was willing to sit and contemplate as long as it took, distract his mind with music and recreational drugs, and let his mind access the facts in the background and bring him the solutions.

 

April 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

meta-analysis on designing active cities

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This is a great example of meta-analysis in Active Living Research. There are a few things I like about it. First, it combines academic literature, other literature, and expert opinion in a very transparent and defensible way, by giving each a score. It takes a very wide array of urban design and planning choices and relates them to a number of outcomes (physical health, mental health, environmental sustainability, health and safety, and economic growth), and draws quantitative conclusions about the importance of each. Some outcomes challenge my pre-conceived notions, for example that street connectivity is bad for safety, but the methodology is very transparent, so I can dig in if I want and try to figure out whether I disagree with a particular rating, or whether I really should rethink my preconceived notion. Those of us dealing with complex planning and engineering programs (and many other complex systems) can’t realistically expect to optimize a handful of objectives any more. Instead, we can play the odds by making sure all our small, daily decisions have a better than even chance of nudging the system in a desired direction, based on the complete body of evidence out there, even with all its contradictions and confusions.

Donella Meadows

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Here is Donella Meadows explaining how your bathtub is like your bank account.

If you’re about to take a bath, you have a desired water level in mind. You plug the drain, turn on the faucet and watch until the water rises to your chosen level (until the discrepancy between the desired and the actual state of the system is zero). Then you turn the water off.

If you start to get in the bath and discover that you’ve underestimated your volume and are about to produce an overflow, you can open the drain for awhile, until the water goes down to your desired level.

Those are two negative feedback loops, or correcting loops, one controlling the inflow, one controlling the outflow, either or both of which you can use to bring the water level to your goal. Notice that the goal and the feedback connections are not visible in the system. If you were an extraterrestrial trying to figure out why the tub fills and empties, it would take awhile to figure out that there’s an invisible goal and a discrepancy-measuring process going on in the head of the creature manipulating the faucets. But if you watched long enough, you could figure that out.

Very simple so far. Now let’s take into account that you have two taps, a hot and a cold, and that you’re also adjusting for another system state — temperature. Suppose the hot inflow is connected to a boiler way down in the basement, four floors below, so it doesn’t respond quickly. And you’re making faces at yourself in the mirror and not paying close attention to the water level. And, of course, the inflow pipe is connected to a reservoir somewhere, which is connected to the whole planetary hydrological cycle. The system begins to get complex, and realistic, and interesting.

Mentally change the bathtub into your checking account. Write checks, make deposits, add a faucet that keeps dribbling in a little interest and a special drain that sucks your balance even drier if it ever goes dry. Attach your account to a thousand others and let the bank create loans as a function of your combined and fluctuating deposits, link a thousand of those banks into a federal reserve system — and you begin to see how simple stocks and flows, plumbed together, make up systems way too complex to figure out.

homework

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Surprisingly, serious studies of homework can almost never prove that it has any benefit at all.

And the result of this fine-tuned investigation?  There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”

This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard.  Frankly, it surprised me, too.  When you measure “achievement” in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result — not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework.  Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades?

And yet it wasn’t.  Again.  Even in high school.  Even in math.  The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.  (That’s not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field.  We got a hint of that from Timothy Keith’s reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect.[5])

This is hard to swallow. Obviously, from our adult life experience, most of us know there is such a thing as learning by doing. To really master a concept or come up with a new idea, you have to struggle with it on your own over a period of time. Homework seems like it could prepare children to do that as adults, so if it is not, either the kind of homework given is the wrong kind, or it’s given at the wrong age where kids are not yet ready to benefit from it.

January 2015 in Review

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I’m dropping my “Hope for the Future Index” this year. If anyone out there is particularly attached to it, you can let me know.

Negative trends and predictions:

  • According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily.”
  • Exxon predicts the rate of greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing…by 2030…at a level that will still cause atmospheric concentrations to continue rising. They try to present this as good news, but it is clearly a pathway to collapse if you think about it just a little bit.
  • Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
  • By several measures, 2014 was the hottest year on record.
  • The Doomsday Clock has moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes from midnight due to “climate change and efforts to modernize nuclear weapons stockpiles”.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them. I put this in the positive column because I think the new services are better and this is a good example of creative destruction.
  • Remote controlled, robot-assisted surgery is here.
  • The ongoing tumble in oil prices was of course a big story throughout the month. We won’t really be able to say until we look back years from now whether this was just a short-term fluctuation or the reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher energy prices. My guess is the former.
  • It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.
  • Robots can learn to perform physical tasks by watching videos.
  • Howard T. Odum was a genius who invented a “system language” that, if widely understood and applied, might give humanity the tools to solve its problems. Unfortunately, so far it is not widely understood or applied.
  • There may be a realistic chance for a de-escalation of the Middle East nuclear arms race.

H.T. Odum

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I promised some posts about H.T. Odum this year, so here goes.

First, because I’m cheap, I bought a used copy of his 1983 book Systems Ecology: An Introduction, that a library was getting rid of. This book was reissued in 1994 as Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology. My 1983 copy has some typos and endearingly quaint references like this:

The amount of memory within the computer useful for storing programs is usually between 8000 and 64,000 bytes.

He probably updated that in the 1994 version, but whatever it was updated to probably still sounds endearingly quaint today. It reminds us how far we have come.

The 1983 book has a chapter on “analog computers”. Digital computers have come so far and are so powerful that I guess we have forgotten that this sort of thing used to be useful. An analog computer is basically a circuit, and you can simulate almost any kind of system with a circuit – in a hydraulic system, water flow is analogous to electric flow and friction is analogous to electric resistance, for example. Essentially, he took the idea that energy flows through any kind of system and drew beautiful circuit diagrams of how those systems work. Almost any kind of system between the sub-atomic scale and the astronomical scale – mechanical systems, cells, organisms, ecosystems, cities, farms, economies, etc. Although the systems can get pretty complex, in both structure and behavior, they are all based on a set of surprisingly simple core building blocks, and the same set of core building blocks can describe any of these seemingly very different systems.

All the systems are concerned in some way with controlling the flow of energy and using it to do useful work. This concept is fairly obvious in electrical and mechanical systems, but it is also present in my body right now, where electrons are being passed through a series of complex chemical bonds that allow my body to operate its various organs, maintain my temperature, and repair tissues as they break down and build new tissues (hopefully not too much more, at this point.) A rainforest, a coral reef, a city, and the global economy are similarly engaged in controlling the flow of energy and using it to perform useful work. One of his key concepts was that systems try to maximize “power”, or find the right flow rate of energy that can be converted into the most useful work. Extracting the most work always involves controlling or limiting the flow in some way, which always results in some dissipation as heat. (I should mention, he doesn’t use the word “work” in exactly the same sense that I am, but I find it useful to think of work as the amount of energy that was converted into something useful.)

Another core concept was “embodied energy”, which I think of as the sum of all the useful work it took to get to a certain point in a system. For example, a fish has more embodied energy than the plants it ate, and an eagle more than the fish it ate, and a city more than the farms and mines that produced the raw materials to sustain its people and its economy.