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Magical systems thinking
Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores that systems fight back.
An MIT expert on electrical and mechanical engineering, Forrester had cut his teeth on problems like how to keep a Second World War aircraft carrier’s radar pointed steadily at the horizon amid the heavy swell of the Pacific. Across 130 pages of mathematical equations, computer graphical printout, and DYNAMO code, World Dynamics tracks the myriad relationships between natural resources, capital, population, food, and pollution: everything from the ‘capital-investment-in-agriculture-fraction adjustment time’ to the ominous ‘death-rate-from-pollution multiplier’. This creative destruction has long been celebrated in the private sector, where aging corporate giants can be disrupted by smaller, simpler startups: we don’t have to rely on IBM to make our phones or laptops or Large Language Models.
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