Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

Wow, there’s a name I didn’t expect to run across on HN!<p>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AD: Systems Thinking is getting out of date, but in the spirit of knowledge sharing, another fantastic systems thinker is Donella Meadows, heres her most linked piece on leverage points in systems: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donellameadows.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donellameadows.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;leverage-points-places-t...</a>. Her book &#x27;Thinking In Systems&#x27; is a fantastic read to open your mind to continuous systems and modelling them, as well as the counter intuitiveness of larger systems.<p>To expand on &#x27;out of date&#x27; - systems thinking is centred around command and control, IIRC it came out of Cybernetics ala Norbert Weiner, Ashby and others.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&#x2F;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.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cynefin.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cynefin.io&#x2F;</a> is great resource, Dave Snowden is a big name in naturalising sense-making and these broader views of complexity.

One relevant past thread:<p><i>How to Be a Systems Thinker</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16835741" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16835741</a> - April 2018 (82 comments)

&gt; 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&#x27;s more multi-dimensional — are going to be lacking.