@jannesalovaara In your category of 10 blog posts, there are 5 that I don’t remember commenting on before, so I’ll focus on those.
Your writing on vision of a failing system refers (unattributed) to the ideas from Timothy F. H. Allen and from Buzz Holling, since you’re dealing a lot with scale. You make a good point that diagnosis is a key challenge — in my day job, my colleagues and I agree that problem determination skills are often weak — and that if we’re looking at the wrong scale, that we may misperceive core issues. Mapping out (in the sense of the Witte Kerwin and Witte ignorance map), or having an unmappable situation (in the postnormal science of Jerry Ravetz) may or may be possible to helpful.
On holistic life, I appreciate that you’ve “learned to love maybe”. Applying Jamshid Gharajedaghi’s writing towards psychology may not have been the way that he saw his work going, so you may be picking up on definitions that have greater generality than the domain on which he is focused, thereby demonstrating the generalizability potentially associated with systems thinking. I’m not familiar with Helene Shulman’s work, although a quick scan of the references brings up some familiar names in systems, e.g. Humberto Maturana and Gregory Bateson, and some other deeper thinkers (e.g. Carl Jung, Bruno Latour, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Foucault — that would take considerable depth in psychology to appreciate.
On your wide open discussion of reductionism and holism, I’m reminded of presentations by Len Troncale who reminds us that analysis isn’t bad in itself, as a systems approach includes both synthesis and analysis. One criticism of some systems thinkers is that they’ve always got their heads in the clouds, so being down to earth and real isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Your writing on simply complex takes on the anticipatory systems of Robert Rosen. We would have to a conversation to determine if you’ve really got the spirit of Rosen’s modeling relation — the distinction between the real world, and a representation of it in an anticipatory system — which is really much deeper than we should be tackling in an introductory course!
I followed through on your pointer to Bill Hicks “What is the the point to life”, with the amusement of those who want us to perceive the ride as one way or another.
On sparkling shoes, we’re on a fine line when we study systems. I’ve heard that science is a search for better answers whereas philosophy is a search for better questions. We may have to adopt a systems philosophy to improve the science in systems.
@katrilii and @astaffan , This student has completed the requirements for this course.
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