Tag Archives: system thinking

what, exactly, is momentum?

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This is a physics topic – maybe not of interest to many, but of interest to me as I happen to be taking (suffering through?) a hydraulics course at the moment. Like energy, we kind of intuitively know what momentum is, but we have a hard time describing it satisfactorily in words. Apparently, there are philosophers of science that spend entire careers examining words used by others (like Isaac Newton) to try to describe it. Once upon a time, a philosopher and a scientist were the same thing, in fact.

Momentum is about force. It is a thing that does not change unless “external forces” are imposed on a system. In fluid mechanics, there is an imaginary thing called a “control volume” which obeys this law. You can do calculations on this, and then you can go into a laboratory where you have a pump and a glass channel (picture a long aquarium) with very low friction, and show that your math matches what happens in the real world. There can be “internal forces” in the fluid which allow energy to change (well, change from energy embodied in pressure – potential energy – and/or velocity – kinetic energy – to heat, which then just drifts off into the air. But the momentum does not change because there are no external forces (ignoring the friction of that slippery, slippery glass.

Momentum is a function of mass and velocity, we learn in high school. Force, we learn in high school, is the product of mass and acceleration, and acceleration is a change in velocity over time. So there – did I explain it to myself? Not quite, but that at least helped me to think it through.

Even if ChatGPT could produce a more coherent version of what I wrote above (which is possible), that would not have helped me think this through and incorporate more of the real world into my mental model of how the real world works. Because thinking and writing go together. So I am not going to give up writing any time soon. Even if nobody read my writing here (and if you did, I apologize), it helped me to write this down. I will skim over this later at some point using some rough version of “spaced repetition”, and that will also help my feeble human brain to incorporate this knowledge into my mental model.

Talking can also sometimes help upgrade our mental models, although most talking is useless. For example, I was discussing momentum with my professor recently in the mens room. So ladies, if you were wondering what men talk about in the mens room, now you know, or at least now you know what two random men were discussing in one random mens room on one random day. And yes, we know you complain about us in the ladies’ room, and that complaining about men is an important part of female bonding that really doesn’t have much to do with us. And this is okay.

August 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

are “western elites” “irrational”?

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This long article on Naked Capitalism claims the leadership of western countries is not effective in a crisis, and I think there may be something to this. The Covid non-response and some recent bungled natural disaster responses from New Orleans to Puerto Rico to Hawaii come to mind. This article focuses more on Ukraine, and while that situation is certainly unsatisfactory, it is hard to see what the good options would have been. The U.S. choices (NATO expansion, Balkan War, CIA interference with foreign elections) you can point to as questionable were all made years or decades ago, when this author presumably thinks leadership was better.

I certainly share the sense that our political leadership today is not particularly confidence-inspiring. So why is this? The author gives a few possibilities [my thoughts in brackets]:

  • the rich and powerful are out of touch with ordinary people [nothing new here]
  • stormtrooper syndrome – assuming you are the good guys, your opponents or competitors are the bad guys, and the bad guys can’t win [but this was certainly the case during the Cold War and the public loved it!]
  • a “conspiracy of degenerates” – this would have to be hidden from public view
  • right-wing demagogues promoting conspiracy theories and offering a simple message as an alternative that appeals to the public [certainly happening, and this is the good old Hitler playbook we have to watch out for]
  • Iron Law of Oligarchies – any organization is controlled by a small number of powerful individuals whose top priority is increasing their own power, rather than the success of the organization
  • crabs in a bucket – one crab can escape a bucket, but supposedly two or more crabs will stop each other from escaping, the implication being that relative rank is important to us animals – if I can’t succeed at everyone else’s expense, I will make sure nobody can succeed
  • the “Mowshowitz theory” – a variation on the above where power seeking behavior is rewarded within organizations rather than alignment with the stated goals of the organization, and in fact furthering the goals of the organization without seeking power can be punished
  • “intra-elite signaling dynamics” – the power of ritual to signal acceptance of a particular belief system, and the more bizarre the better [exactly what these rituals are I had trouble following]

I have had my own theories for awhile, and they have to do with education. I do not think children are being educated well in basic logic and being able to spot logical fallacies. This makes us susceptible to propaganda. They are not being educated well in the behavior of complex, dynamic systems. They are learning plenty of math and science, but it results in short-term and literal thinking rather than longer-term and abstract thinking. And finally, I don’t think children are being challenged to think morally. I’m just talking about the habit of asking yourself before you make a small daily decision whether you think on balance the consequences are on the side of right or wrong, justice or injustice.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Edward de Bono and creativity

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Edward de Bono is a popular author on the subject of creative and original thinking. This long article is highly critical of him, suggesting that his ideas on creativity and originality are not all that creative or original. It never actually says his ideas are bad, just that he derived bits and pieces of them from the scientific literature without giving credit to the people who actually thought them up.

In the course of criticizing him, the article does a good job of summarizing his ideas.

The Use of Lateral Thinking is a short book with a long reach. Providing no more than a few slight examples of how lateral thinking might work in practice – largely on the perception of shape and function in geometric forms – it proposed four vague principles for problem-solving and creativity: the recognition of dominant polarising ideas; the search for different ways of looking at things; a relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking; and the use of chance.

Aeon

It sounds like decent advice to me. First, you need to learn the rules (i.e., traditional way of thinking about or doing something) before you earn the right to break them. Otherwise you run the risk of reinventing the wheel or coming up with something at odds with indisputable evidence or logic you just weren’t familiar with. Now, you have earned the right to look at the issue from a variety of angles and talk to people across disciplines that might not usually talk to each other. Finally, exposing yourself to a wide variety of information and experiences, and taking time to reflect on them alone and with others, will open your mind to new connections and possibilities.

The article goes on to survey the literature on the subject of creative thinking, which de Bono may have partially drawn on. This includes:

  • a variety of eccentric and famous figures who seem to have been good at letting their minds wander and coming up with interesting things
  • Henri Poncare’s idea of training the mind on a problem, then lettin insights slowly build while we are doing unrelated mindless tasks
  • the Einstellung effect, where people fail to solve a problem because it resembles another problem they know how to solve, but that solution doesn’t work (maybe this contradicts my idea of “learn the rules before you break them”? but I don’t know, maybe it just means that breaking out of the mold takes conscious effort)
  • Gestalt psychology’s idea of “productive thinking”, which emphasized looking at a problem from different angles
  • J.P. Guilford’s idea of “divergent thinking”, characterized by people with “the ability to produce a great number of ideas or problem solutions in a short period of time; to simultaneously propose a variety of approaches to a specific problem; to produce original ideas; and to organise the details of an idea in one’s head and carry it out.” (this sounds like brainstorming to me, other than organizing the ideas at the end, which is the logical next step after any productive brainstorming session)
  • and what do you know, brainstorming. The term was coined by Alex Osborn, who favored groups of 5-10 people thinking together on the same problem, sometimes aided by randomly selected words.
  • More recent research emphasizing the value of individuals brainstorming independently, then combining and organizing ideas through “the productive spark of debate, friction and constructive conflict”. You have to keep it friendly to be productive, in my personal experience.
  • Arthur Koestler, who apparently surveyed many of the topics above in the 1960s and also emphasized the creative role of humor.

So, I’ll attempt to synthesize all this and combine it unscientifically with my personal experiences.

  1. Define the problem you are trying to solve or the question you are trying to answer. Writing it down helps me. Then, “give yourself permission” to think about it gradually over a period of time. Also give yourself permission not to think about it – don’t force it.
  2. Do lots of reading, listening, and thinking, both related and unrelated, fiction and non-fiction. Garden, take walks in nature, listen to or make music, exercise, meditate, and even consider responsible, moderate use of recreational substances. (But consider the cautionary tale of Sherlock Holmes, who could only turn his creative brain off with music and cocaine – Arthur Conan Doyle must have been like that or known somebody like that.)
  3. Keep a notebook (or the electronic equivalent) handy to write down anything related that pops in your head. Review these notes occasionally.
  4. Keep going until you have lots and lots of ideas, then slowly let them gel in your mind. Then start organizing them in writing (or drawing, or whatever makes sense).
  5. Then consider discussing your ideas with other people who have ideas and like to discuss them peacefully. I find it hard to find people like this.

Now you might arrive at a creative idea or solution to a problem or two. It’s hard work and there are no guarantees which means it is not always a good match for billable hours, which could be why you don’t see more of it in the professional ranks. Put another way, your creativity idea will not necessarily make you rich, and it might even make somebody else rich, in which case you may have a case of the sour grapes. Good luck!

coronavirus stats by metro area and normalized for population

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I like this City Observatory approach to coronavirus stats. They are reporting numbers by metropolitan statistical area and normalizing them per 100,000 population. They are also reporting the rate at which cases are growing in each metropolitan area. They are using static tables and graphs but I think these provide much better information than the fancy maps and dashboards I have seen. The fancy maps and dashboards are updated more often – the ideal approach would blend all this together. As long as I am making a wish list, it would be nice to see the number of people hospitalized in each metro over time. That is the number we are looking for – the stock of available beds to first reappear as a positive number, then start to grow. When that happens I think we will start to see more public and political pressure to get people back to work. I expect high risk people to have to hide in their homes for quite some time after that, which is sad but I think that is the balance our society is likely to strike. If there comes a point later in the year where that stock of available hospital capacity starts to shrink or disappear in a given metro, that is when we might see shorter, more geographically targeted social distancing orders come and go.

more epidemic simulations

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Okay, the current pandemic is not a game and not fun, people are suffering and I certainly don’t want to make light of it. But maybe we can at least learn something about systems, such as positive and negative feedback loops, S-shaped curves, and time delays. Netlogo has a few agent-based virus simulations to play with. The MIT system dynamics people put together a whole lesson on simulation of an epidemic as a teaching tool. (This is part of their “road maps” series, which you can find here. Just be warned that many of the hyperlinks don’t work, but if you cut and paste the names of the documents into a search engine, you can usually find them.)

And of course, there is the old flash game Pandemic 2, which is kind of fun in ordinary times but seems a little crass to play now, or at least to admit that you’re playing it. (Your goal is to kill everybody in the world, for example by making them vomit blood from their eyes…) On the other hand, Flash seems like it is on the way out so if you want to try this game it may be best to try it soon. And those of you stuck at home without multiple small children to entertain (not a category that includes me!) might have the time right now.

September 2019 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story:
  • I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.

youcubed

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This site is all about fresh ideas for teaching high school math. Apparently a lot of people agree that the traditional U.S. approach of algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, and calculus is not working. A lot of people seem to think data science is the answer. It sounds okay to me to start with interesting data and then work backward to math theory and systems concepts. I do use geometry pretty much daily in my work, at least concepts like areas and volumes. Are those geometry? I think I originally learned them in high school chemistry class. I almost never use calculus symbols, but I use calculus concepts like rate of change and accumulating and depleting stocks daily. I solve those numerically rather than symbolically. So maybe this is what we should be teaching in high school, then working our way to the symbols for people who really need it, for example the ones who are going to be programming the computers that the rest of us use to solve various problems. A little statistics and probability is a good idea, but even that can be more experiment based and less symbolic at first.

special operations culture

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This article by a Marine special operator says special operations have a culture problem. That doesn’t surprise me too much. Anyway, here is the prescription the author gives for addressing an organization’s culture problem:

  • Acknowledge the problem. It’s hard to spot a slow change from within an organization. One solution is to have a peer organization do a review.
  • Employ trusted agents. These are sort of the blue collar leaders.
  • Harness and rein in the cultural power brokers. These are more like the middle management.
  • Win the population. This is an idea for counter-insurgency where you try to peel the bulk of the population away from a few bad actors within their ranks.

The article mentions “core values”. My own observation about core values is that strong, well-functioning organizations tend to already have them implicitly, and when you have to make a big deal about training people in them explicitly your culture is already lost. I’m not sure you can change individuals’ core values all that much. You can try to weed out people with bad ones and bring in people with good ones.

2018 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!