Why is humanity heading for self-destruction and planetary devastation? Why are so many problems –climate crisis, hunger, migrations, organized crime, inequality, desertification, pollution, etc.– out of control and getting worse? These high-complexity problems involve large numbers of actors, conflicts, issues, interpretations and cultures, and require pulling together knowledge from widely different sources to be possibly governed. Yet the master paradigm that has ruled humanity over the last four centuries –i.e., Cartesian, analytical or simplifying thinking– makes this practically impossible because of its principles of separation, reduction and abstraction that are embodied in today’s scientific disciplines. The Participatory Innovation (PI) Praxis offers a viable alternative, within the emerging post-Cartesian paradigm of systems thinking or complex thinking. PI’s theory comes from key systems thinkers: Ackoff, Ashby, Beer, Ozbekhan, Morin and Schein; its empirical grounds, from experiences in many fields and places, including hundreds of innovations. PI makes high-complexity challenges understandable and governable through methodical design and implementation of consensus social-cultural transformations, by using the astounding capacities of human minds and natural language to process complex meanings. This article illustrates the method with 25-year impacts of two cases in Chile. It closes by discussing implications for policy and for cultural and civilizational matters.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:49 am on July 24, 2023

Gordon Brander twitter comment

You: this one untested [solution i just came up with based on my monocausal framework] will restore balance to [the complex system]:

The complex system: https://t.co/sVZO4wrUfU
— Gordon (@gordonbrander) July 22, 2023

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:43 pm on July 23, 2023

Freakonomics Radio episode 546 – Are E.S.G. Investors Actually Helping the Environment?

Probably not. The economist Kelly Shue argues that E.S.G. investing just gives more money to firms that are already green while depriving polluting firms of the financing they need to get greener. But she has a solution.

Are E.S.G. Investors Actually Helping the Environment?

Keep in mind this is from Stephen J Dubner, the man who published Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (in multiple parts) on the same channel – https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-hate-the-koch-brothers-part-1/

However, this is worthy of consideration as an example of system thinking, I believe…

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:23 pm on July 22, 2023

The Santiago Boys nine-episode podcast season – Yevgeny Morozov on Project Cybersyn

https://the-santiago-boys.com/episodes

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:09 pm on July 22, 2023

How an eccentric English tech guru helped guide Allende’s socialist Chile

Stafford Beer pioneered ‘cybernetic management principles’ but Pinochet’s coup saw technology turned to nefarious ends

John Bartlett

Sat 22 Jul 2023 11.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/stafford-beer-chile-allende-technology-cybernetics

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:00 pm on July 19, 2023

A closed loop – the DNA helix gave 20th-century biology its symbol. But the more we learn, the more life circles back to an older image – Davies (2014), Aeon

A murmuration of starlings in southern Israel. Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters

Jamie Daviesis professor of experimental anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself (2014).

Edited byEd Lake

https://aeon.co/essays/the-feedback-loop-is-a-better-symbol-of-life-than-the-helix

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:25 am on July 17, 2023

Three jobs: Systems Researcher/Practitioner – Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Apply before 11:55 pm on Monday 17th July 2023

Salary

£37,295 – £44,724

National: £37,295 – £41,425, London: £40,262 – £44,724. For details of our pay on appointment policy, please see below under the heading ‘Salary’.

A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Job grade

Senior Executive Officer

Contract type

Permanent

Business area

DEFRA – CSA – Chief Scientific Adviser – Government Science & Engineering

Type of role

Analytical

Working pattern

Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time

Number of jobs available

Location

Bristol, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York

https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi?SID=cGFnZWNsYXNzPUpvYnMmc2VhcmNocGFnZT0xJnBhZ2VhY3Rpb249dmlld3ZhY2J5am9ibGlzdCZzZWFyY2hzb3J0PW9wZW5pbmcmdXNlcnNlYXJjaGNvbnRleHQ9Mzk5NjU5NTgmam9ibGlzdF92aWV3X3ZhYz0xODYzMTQ3Jm93bmVyPTUwNzAwMDAmb3duZXJ0eXBlPWZhaXImcmVxc2lnPTE2ODczNTcyMTAtNTlmZTQzNmQ1NzYwNjY0OTY3ZmJiNWRiMjI4ZTVhMTEyN2I3YmM1MA==

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 8:20 am on July 17, 2023

Congestion in highways when tolls and railroads matter: Evidence from European cities – Garcia-López et al, 2020

Authors :

Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López(Department of Applied Economics, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain)
Ilias Pasidis(Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB), Universidad de Barcelona 08034, Barcelona, Spain)
Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal(Department of Economics, Universidad de Barcelona 08034, Barcelona, Spain)

https://ideas.repec.org/p/uab/wprdea/wpdea2011.html

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:06 am on July 17, 2023

Influential Thinkers: Donella Meadows – Geoff Marlow

A pioneer whose insights help inform the creation of future-fit cultures

GEOFF MARLOW

16 JUL 2023

https://geoffmarlow.substack.com/p/influential-thinkers-donella-meadows

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:36 am on July 17, 2023

The Jim Rutt Show EP 191 Alicia Juarrero on Context, Constraints, and Coherence

https://www.jimruttshow.com/alicia-juarrero/

Jim talks with Alicia Juarrero about her new book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. They discuss Aristotle’s four causes, applying them to complex dynamical systems, the overfocus on efficient cause, naive Newtonianism, nothing-but-ism, reconceptualizing causality in terms of constraints, mereology, constraint regimes, ascribing causal powers to emergent properties, the roots of panpsychism, Searle’s comparison of consciousness with digestion, kinds of constraints, the Dysons’ notion of analog control, why analog is more efficient, identity as a set of interdependent constraints, surface vs deep dyslexia & early neural nets, the work of Geoffrey Hinton, the species competitive exclusion principle, cardinality vs ordinality, the social evolution of cassava, Rayleigh-Benard convection, dissipative systems, Alicia’s disagreement with Michael Polanyi, the architecture of the circulatory system, scaffolding, top-down causality, many-to-one transitions, degeneracy, pluripotentiality, the ship of Theseus, 4E cognitive science, and much more.

Alicia Juarrero, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (MD), is the author of Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999) and co-editor of Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South (ISCE Publishing, 2007), and Emergence, Self-Organization and Complexity: Precursors and Prototypes (ISCE Publishing, 2008).

My comment:

A very good episode, once again underlining the continuity across systems | cybernetics | complexity – but/and also sometimes lacunae of referencing.
No references to Maturana and Varela‽ I was kinda shouting 'structural coupling! structural coupling!' in my head at times!
— Benjamin Taylor (cis) @antlerboy@mastodon.social (@antlerboy) July 17, 2023

A very good episode, once again underlining the continuity across systems | cybernetics | complexity – but/and also sometimes lacunae of referencing. No references to Maturana and Varela‽ I was kinda shouting ‘structural coupling! structural coupling!’ in my head at times!

And you literally talked about ‘circular causality’ without a reference to cybernetics at all? It strikes me as really odd – a loss of connection across the field. In any case, it’s clear that Juarrero is a great systems thinker and cybernetician ‘as well as’ complexity thinker.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:18 pm on July 16, 2023

Systems Thinking – a different way of looking at the work – Lightning Talk 2021 version – Sally Bean

Uploaded Oct. 9, 2022

Science

A talk that attempts to explain the essence of systems thinking using a bicycle.

sallybean https://www.slideshare.net/sallybean/systems-thinking-lightning-talk-2021-versionpdf?from_action=follow

Systems Thinking Lightning Talk 2021 version.pdf from sallybean

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 6:59 pm on July 10, 2023

Nonrelativistic pragmatism and systems thinking

July 9, 2023 david ing

http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/nonrelativistic-pragmatism-and-systems-thinking/

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:24 am on July 6, 2023

The Jim Rutt Show – Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object

I see they’ve been on various big podcasts etc. Whatever your reaction to the headline(s), I encourage you to have a listen to this podcast as it’s very interesting and at times amusing stuff – Cronin is certainly willing to be acerbic and bold – and their thinking is explained very well with multiple connections.

https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-sara-walker-lee-cronin/