Tag Archives: system thinking

MIT invents thermodynamics

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A professor at MIT has just discovered the second law of thermodynamics! Wait, maybe a few people knew about that before. But he also has discovered that various systems, including organisms and ecosystems, evolve to find ways of taking in energy, using some of it to do useful work, then dissipating the rest as heat! Wait, I just remembered that a guy named Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida thought of that before. Okay, I am just teasing my friends from MIT, who are very very smart, just not the only smart people in the world. All teasing aside, the MIT guy does have a novel angle – suggesting that because living systems do a better job of this than non-living systems, the formation of life was more or less inevitable. I like how this article talks about entropy in simple, understandable terms:

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

So we are selfishly concentrating energy to create orderly, useful systems  – Odum’s core concept of “embodied energy” – here on Earth at the expense of the rest of the universe. Even if Earth is not the only planet with life, there is still a lot of universe out there so I don’t think we need to feel too guilty. The real question is, just how open a system is Earth as a practical matter – as we keep using more energy to create more sophisticated systems here, can we continually improve our ability to keep exporting the consequences (heat being the most obvious)?

One of my few regrets in life is that I studied in close proximity to Odum in the late 1990s, but didn’t actually study with him or even meet him. I just didn’t know who he was at the time, because in the late 1990s I was just a dumb kid. One of my New Years Resolutions is to read more things written by him, and to do more blog posts about him.

programming boot camp

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Here’s an article about computer programming boot camps. Marketable job skills are an important thing. Being an educated person who can understand systems, solve problems, and make ethical choices is also a good thing. These two types of education are complementary, but one does not guarantee the other. Corporations are interested in skills because they are trying to exploit some microscopic niche in the economy to make a profit. And that is where most skills apply – in those microscopic niches. When you are exploiting a microscopic niche, you are not thinking about consequences outside your niche. So if that is the only thing we do, it will eventually be possible for highly skilled, highly intelligent, well intentioned people to collectively manage to run our civilization into the ground.

the power of the playbook

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Here’s some engineer bashing from Strong Towns, this time accusing us of being serial killers of children:

  • The engineering profession is so worried about liability if they vary from any highway design guideline, regardless of how ridiculous they are. Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time.
  • Professional engineers here and elsewhere use “forgiving design” principles in urban areas where they do not apply. They systematically forgive the mistakes of drivers who stray from their lane or go off the roadway by designing systems where these common mistakes are anticipated and compensated for. They systematically show indifference to the easily anticipated mistakes of non-drivers. A kid playing in their yard chases a stray ball out into the street and gets run down. To the engineer, this is a non-foreseeable, non-preventable accident. For everyone else, we understand that cities are more than cars – they include people doing all kinds of complex things – and forgiving the common mistakes of ALL people is what a humane, decent professional does.
  • Professional engineers claim that they cannot alter human behavior with their street designs. A highway lane width is 13 feet just the same as your local street lane width. There is often no appreciable difference in the cross section of a highway and a local street except for the posted speed limit, which is up to the police to enforce. (I wrote about this years ago.) Despite this, the engineers in this situation – knowing there was an obvious problem – as well as many others in similar situations, put their brains to work to come up with all kinds of ways to attempt to alter human behavior, but only for those humans outside of their automobiles.

This language is a little dramatic but the argument is justified. The field of engineering, and the education of engineers, is not supposed to be just about following design guidelines unquestioningly. It is supposed to be about understanding systems well enough to modify them and solve problems. But civil engineers are under a lot of economic pressure – we tend to be paid either by cash-strapped public agencies or by private land development interests engaged in ruthless competition. Under these conditions, following an established playbook is often the lowest stress, lowest risk, and most efficient way to get a job done.

There is a flip side to this though – the keepers of those playbooks have enormous power. Curating a collection of standard details and technical specifications doesn’t sound like a very glamorous job, but actually it is a very important one. If people are blindly following your playbook, you have a lot of responsibility – to use overly dramatic terms, you can either be the savior or the mass murderer of the children. You have the power to mainstream best practices and innovations from elsewhere. Then if there are some engineers downstream who choose not to think or are simply under too much pressure to think, they will blindly implement the right practices. So these are very important jobs, and they need to be filled with people who are very well educated in system thinking, are ethical, and are intellectually curious about what is going on outside their little corner of the world. A certain amount of experimentation needs to be done outside the playbook, and the playbook itself needs to be constantly challenged and revised as new and better approaches become available.

Geoff Lawton

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Here’s a Youtube play list of 200 videos with Geoff Lawton the Permaculture guy. I’ve embedded just one below.

Permaculture is great – it’s about sustainable agriculture and sustainable living in the dictionary sense of sustainability – entwined ecosystems and human settlements that can work together and persist for the long term. On a more practical level, it’s about farms and gardens that function as self-sustaining ecosystems, feeding people with very low inputs of energy and effort. The only possible criticism of it might be that perhaps its scientific core could be shored up a bit. But it really is a system-based ecological design philosophy that could be incorporated into a lot of mainstream programs, from small-scale farming to large-scale agribusiness to urban parks and trees.

“management flight simulators”

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MIT has posted some free “management flight simulators” (aka games) online. It didn’t sound that interesting to me until I noticed that one of them is the “fish banks” game originally developed by Dennis Meadows who, I now recall, was from MIT. Other games simulate a clean energy startup and climate change negotiations.

“help consumers become more irrational”

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This Tedx Talk says the idea of “leading with green” in marketing is dying. If we want to scale up green consumer behavior, it says, we have to appeal to people’s irrational interests, like desire for wealth, status, novelty, and sense of altruism.

I instinctively recoil from the marketing-driven view of human beings as brainless consumer robots. And yet, there is no denying that marketing must exist because it works. It bothers me for few reasons. First is the idea that it is necessarily “irrational” to consider emotions in decision making. What is so irrational about trying to experience more pleasure and less pain? Does the fact that it is mental pleasure or pain make it irrational? I don’t think so – trying to improve status because you think it will lead to pleasurable social ties or avoid shame seems perfectly rational to me, as does helping someone so you can avoid feelings of guilt later on.

Another thing that bothers me is the idea that marketers are appealing to people to make choices based on their sense of right and wrong, while not making choices based on their own sense of right and wrong. Sure, it’s true that corporations are amoral piles of paper, but the people inside them do not have to be. We shouldn’t let a pile of paper trying to make a profit remake us flesh and blood humans in its own image.

Clearly a certain segment of the population will make decisions based on their sense of right and wrong. But in order to make the correct choices about right and wrong, they need to correctly predict the consequences of their actions. And to do that, they need to understand the social, economic, and environmental systems we find ourselves embedded in, and we need to look at these systems not just under a microscope and in the short term, but at a larger scale and over long time frames.

So what we need is an education system that teaches ethics and system thinking effectively. Our education system does not do either right now, so we have a situation where even formally educated people have not been given the mental tools to understand the consequences of their choices. A certain segment of the population is willing the make ethical choices, but their sense of right and wrong is easily manipulated by other segments of the population, who themselves have no sense of right and wrong.

If more children were challenged more often to think about right and wrong, as they were also being educated in system thinking, perhaps we could begin to inoculate the population against this madness that is otherwise going to destroy us. I don’t know what fraction of the population has to be ethical system thinkers before our civilization is successful. I think it is much less than 10% now, and it is not working. I don’t think it has to be 100% though. Maybe we should aim for a majority and go from there.