another attempt to explain to myself why the worldview of so many of the #systemsdynamics people started to collide with reality since COVID or so, and many lost their marbles in sad and creative ways:
THIS is just not what most of us expected. these people are seeing everything through an #energy lense, for a justified reason, but also bc this group came out of the #peakoil crowd.
1/
on #X and #bluesky i wrote very lengthy threads about #systemsdynamics, i am not gonna do that anymore.
if you want to get a clue on the lowest, most basic level of this stuff, no matter if you are just a recreational systems thinker or an whole ass applied #systemsengineer (maybe especially then), you should read meadows primer on how this stuff _actually_ works.
delays are time gaps between an action and its observed effect within the system. they occur bc information, material or energy takes time to move through stocks and feedback loops. delays are not separate components to a system. the are properties of stocks and feedbacks. in a hydraulic system a delay might be the time it takes for a tank to fill before it overflows or triggers some other sort of response like opening a valve.
delays are also the reason why systems oscillate or get caught in endless loops of event & reaction. which is why they are sort of a headache to every system.
feedbacks are the circular connections within a system, changes in stocks or flows that influence each other and ultimately themselves. feedbacks occur when an output of the system is routed back as an input, shaping future behavior. they do not add or remove any material and instead adjust flows. feedbacks are the reason why systems stabilize, oscillate, or escalate out of control.
flows are processes that increase or decrease these stocks. they describe how fast a quantity moves into or out of a stock over time. in a hydraulic system, flows are pipes, faucets, drains, leaks that determine how fluid enters or leaves a container.
stocks are any components of the system that can hold a certain measurable quantity. in a hydraulic system stocks are any containers of fluid, like your bathtub or kitchen sink, or like a decapitator in an electrical circuit. stocks can increase and decline, they can overflow and they always represent a delay in a stock-and-flow system. when you plot the content of each stock of interest over time you get a graph of the system's behavior over time.
#systemsthinking 101
#systemsdynamics proposed that every possible issue can best be understood by envisioning it as an interconnected whole consisting of
- stocks
- flows
- feedbacks
and delays.
trying to come up with a "#systemsdynamics of #trump" literally breaks my brain. systems dynamics assumes some degree of coherence, stable goals, consistent response. trump breaks all of that, constantly. he is basically a walking, talking stress test, even to his own base.
SCALE. Is it micro or macro? Recurring patterns at radically different scales, courtesy of NASA. https://chandra.si.edu/micro/
(It strikes me that a bigger study of multiscale pattern equivalence would turn up some important principles of system interaction dynamics.)
kali
Peter Stoyko
Majd Al-Shihabi 🏴مجد الشهابي