Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker | Hacker News Reader

Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

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97 pointsthe-mitr18 comments

Wow, there’s a name I didn’t expect to run across on HN!

For what it’s worth, Bateson just passed away this year. She’d had a fascinating life, living and working in many vastly different cultures and countries since childhood. As a literary work, “Peripheral Visions” is a little discombobulated, but it’s a fun read just to see all the perspectives and lenses she’d adopted over the years.

AD: Systems Thinking is getting out of date, but in the spirit of knowledge sharing, another fantastic systems thinker is Donella Meadows, heres her most linked piece on leverage points in systems: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t.... Her book 'Thinking In Systems' is a fantastic read to open your mind to continuous systems and modelling them, as well as the counter intuitiveness of larger systems.

To expand on 'out of date' - systems thinking is centred around command and control, IIRC it came out of Cybernetics ala Norbert Weiner, Ashby and others. The command and control angle is based on the assumption that with enough information any system can be mapped, predicted and controlled. Whilst not wrong, it excludes another type of system which is truly complex and precludes mapping and prediction by the fact there are either/all too many variables to model or the very act of measuring or acting changes the system or the agents of the system can change the rules of the system.

These systems are deemed by the sense-making community to be Complex Adaptive Systems or Anthro-Complex (specifically for human systems). To approach these systems you have to become comfortable with uncertainty and re-arrange your thoughts on cause-and-effect, which is a whole new world view for many of us in software.

https://cynefin.io/ is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of complexity.

While systems thinking did grow out of cybernetics (also Bertalanffy's general systems theory), both fields have diverged from control - cybernetics to epistemology, and systems thinking to influencing complex systems through leverage points (see https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ and https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...).

Cybernetics originated in engineering and mathematics so it makes sense that it would be concerned with control as we tend to explicitly limit and constrain complexity in order to control and predict our systems - ML being the first notable counter-example. Systems theory started out in biology and ecosystems so AFAIK it never held that complex systems could be either fully known (total knowledge of the state), or truly controlled.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is also working in the field of sensemaking so his talks and writing may be of interest to you - https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ (& lots of talks on YouTube).

I linked to the same article! Isn't a leverage point an attempt to control a system?

Thanks for the additional info! Interesting to hear. I will check out Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Sorry, so you did! I'm on mobile so links are truncated, my bad.

I think there's a subtle distinction between control and influence - control is trying to get to a specific end goal, and influence is trying to improve on the current state incrementally. Giving up control is accepting that no matter how much you want it to, you can't make a river flow uphill; not all system states are stable and viable, you need to find an attractor state (and an incremental path to get there) that is desirable. This inherently involves experimentation and iteration - creating a hypothetical model of the system, attempting an intervention, seeing if your hypothesis held up and the new state is what you expected. It's an interactive approach to change rather than one you can declare by authority alone.

In my work in systems change, we look for leverage points and other systems features in order to design strategies for change. (e.g., https://designdialogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Syste...)

You can't control complex systems—heck, you can barely dance with them!—but still, we must find ways of working with them as effectively as possible. This is the only way we'll make real progress on the wicked problems of our time.

Absolutely - the reason to confront systems problems is precisely because reductive approaches don't work; the alternative is to do nothing, or be surprised by unintended consequences when you try to apply a reductive approach.

I didn’t like Meadow‘s book that much: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/thinking_in_systems.html

It is too superficial for me to be useful. I have books from Gerald Weinberg and John Sterman on my to-read list.

Think of systems thinking as an alternative to the analytic approach (break the problem apart and solve the pieces) for scenarios where that doesn't work - DM's book is meant to teach the basics of that approach. It's not designed to give you all the tools needed to solve these problems - for that, you'll need to pick up a couple of books on nonlinear dynamics if you're wanting formal modelling, or just wade in and try to think in systems terms if you're working in a more intuitive environment.

I think your intro about covers it, it's a great intro book, not an exhaustive compendium. I certainly found it useful for my mental modelling and world views. YMMV!

I really like Sterman's book. I think the top comment really nailed the challenge with this approach - it's very difficult to identify the components of a system.

I used this modeling approach quite a bit for a few years - my struggle was trying to quantify casual relationships. This is non-trivial (in so many different fields), which makes it really hard to have a reliable System Dynamics model.

I met Donella Meadows in California once long ago, at an event called Hackers in the Santa Cruz mountains (along with a lot of other interesting people). I had no clue but she was obviously holding a combination of respect and a playful affection among a lot of the attendees. It was fun; recently I read the wikipedia page and found out about her tenure and whatnot on the East coast.

Been reading about Systems Thinking lately. I think the command and control assumption comes from the influence of System Dynamics (Forrester, Meadows, Senge), which attempts to simulate the system. This seems to be a North American view of systems thinking due to the popularity of Systems Dynamics. But the European views have a focus on emergent behaviour and critically looking at hierarchies and power structures. Although Meadows emphasises 'dancing with systems' in contrast with controlling systems.

I would not called Systems thinking out of date [0]. I would rather say some approaches to systems thinking are now out of date. There have been multiple generations of systems thinking approaches.

Let us take cybernetics as an example, we began with 1st order cybernetics (command and control), then moved on to 2nd order cybernetics, and now we are moving towards 3rd order and 4th order cybernetics.

Similarly for systems thinking, we had the "hard approaches" to systems thinking which viewed the system as "out there" (i.e Cybernetics) then it evolved into 'soft systems' approaches.

We have seen a shift from functionalist approaches, to interpretive then emancipating and now post-modern approaches. We are moving towards ethics, aesthetics, perception, eco-systems etc.

Complex Adaptive systems that Snowden writes about is a subset of these systemtic approaches. Put another way, yes there are some approaches to systems thinking which may be 'dated' (i.e Hard systems), there is quite a bit that is very relevant today.

[0] Here is some of my writing on this subject:

https://www.notion.so/zyelabs/Systemic-Approaches-HN-0d22752...

Edit: Quote from the paper attached in the link above.

"The VSM & Cybernetics was heavily influenced by Claude Shannon's discovery of information theory. The 10th theorem of Shannon is the basis for the law of requisite variety. Further the lines drawn within the VSM could be regarded as the communication channels."

Thanks for the insight!

The cybernetics community was very aware of the limitations of command and control. If anything, ahead of its time on that philosophically as well as having the maths to prove it. Read some Stafford Beer (the father of Viable System Model).

One relevant past thread:

How to Be a Systems Thinker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16835741 - April 2018 (82 comments)

> It’s important to be aware of it, to realize that there are limits to what we can do with AI. It’s great for computation and arithmetic, and it saves huge amounts of labor. It seems to me that it lacks humility, lacks imagination, and lacks humor. It doesn’t mean you can’t bring those things into your interactions with your devices, particularly, in communicating with other human beings. But it does mean that elements of intelligence and wisdom — I like the word wisdom, because it's more multi-dimensional — are going to be lacking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com