🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
I’ve been interested in the definition of the system, since the first workshop about Atomic Habits, where participants worked with their identity. Now it’s another two three-hour meetings, and ready for presentation.
🎨 Impressions
- Great, actually. Obviously, there are some “captain” thoughts, but they are nice to be reminded of.
How I Discovered It
- Someone in the community offered it for book club reading. You can find the post on the forum.
Who Should Read It?
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
📒 Ideas
The system is what we believe in
- We are surrounded by the system, some of them simple, others are complex.
- No matter how trivial the things is, be sure, it’s a system.
- Our motivation, as some experts call our wish to achieve the goal, is no more than the system in the mundane mean of the word.
- Where we sleep, what we eat, with whom we speak, and what we read.
- These are all the parts of the system.
- Even what we believe in works for the system, support or disrupt.
What is the system?
A system is an entity that maintains its existence and functions as a whole through the interaction of its parts.
The size of the system matters
- All system must reach the balance between their functions and their size.
- A big and bulky system won’t be able to function without middle elements in the structure.
- As my professor once provided an example: imagine you are on the speedboat, and riding on the waves full speed ahead, when the obstacle arises, you can steer your wheel and avoid collision. Imagined? Good, now change the cruise ship instead. The Titanic is a good example, which didn’t have proper middle men.
- Sometimes middle men can and should be substituted with the equipment or technology. Such as AI. ИИ это инструмент для заполнения пространства между заметками
- For a system to function effectively, it needs to be the optimum size, the right balance.
Emergence’s influence on the system
- The world is emergent according to many scientists, David Deutsch, Анатолий Левенчук.
- And as a result, we take systems that penetrate all the layers of existence for granted. Which is not, they emerge according to a specific purpose.
- Like habits or a wish to be motivated to do something, for example: a pet project, a book club meeting, writing a book.
- The result of everything is impossible to predict, but the fact that you will not be able even to begin, if the existing system doesn’t provide means for it, is a sure thing.
- And the emerging system depends on many factors, but the key element is the space, physical and digital.
- Even the understanding of the environment you exist in, on the deepest possible level, doesn’t guarantee knowledge of the system.
Emergent properties of the system
Systems have emergent properties that are not found in their parts. You cannot predict the properties of a complex system by taking it to pieces and analysing its parts.
Knowledge and understanding
- I have a lot about knowledge and understanding in various context, but what I haven’t had before is the idea that we gain knowledge through profound analysis.
- But there is a catch, it’s impossible to attain knowledge by breaking the object we are keen to learn about into small pieces.
- Like a game of GO, it’s impossible to accumulate knowledge of the game by analyzing separate stones. Only the whole board, and only the whole system with the flow on the stones on the board.
- The second topic in the topic of understanding the system, and this is an interesting and insightful discovery.
- Understanding comes after synthesis of the knowledge and moving it into another context or observing of emergent properties of the system.
- To understand something, means to synthesize the wisdom, to move ideas into another context and apply somewhere.
- The thing is, that rare system is static, usually they are dynamic, which the problem of complexity, where elements are interdependent. They relate to each other in many ways, since elements of the system have multiple states.
- And this leads to myriads of combinations.
- Like ideas on paper, in one context they represent one thing, in another they become something different. Like I’ve said in the post about a demanding reader.
- The dynamism brings forward and interesting property of added value.
- I once toyed with an idea of a true polymath, a person for every new, learned concept gets not a single idea but many. The size of a proportion depends on the previous knowledge.
- For every new piece of knowledge or element of the system, though if we are talking about notes, it is an atomic idea such as this, we get the number of possible connection, which is not one to one.
- The number of possible links usually grows exponentially. For every new idea, you get a bigger increase than you got from adding the one before.
Cause and effect are not so obvious
- Of course, in our classes with Max we emphasize the importance of the link between cause and effect, but as Dettmer points, the arrow from If … to then… is less important than the reason the arrow exists.
- Usually, we tend to generalize causes of the events, even the root causes.
- Why is school not effective? Because the syllabus is boring, let’s make it more exciting.
- The teacher delivers lessons boringly. Let’s reteach them, on how to perform in the classroom.
- Books are boring, let’s change for new ones.
- All examples above are laundry reasons, that we use to justify our opinion.
- Each example and reason behind it are definitely true. So, what of it?
- Reasons have fixed relative importance, and they interconnected.
- Boring syllabus, not interested teachers, obsolete books, work in tandem to make schools and universities boring.
- They change overtime and a person who works inside the system has to pay close attention to the state of the system, and monitor the changes that happen there, to prevent undesired outcomes from occurring. ^8a4155
- For this, feedback loops are necessary. Causes are dynamic, not static.
- To successfully implement the change in the system, we have to think about how to influence the reasons, behind causes.
- It is the relationship between the elements that turns them into a cause and effect. And the relationship depends on the structure of the system and emerges over time.
- Usually, we tend to generalize causes of the events, even the root causes.
The biggest caveat the change of the system brings
- It doesn’t provide the feedback immediately.
- The responses of the system are spread over time, some are faster, others slow to emerge.
- Expect time delay. Observe the feedback.
The laundry list thinking
- The difficult questions tend to prompt the easy answers, that usually lie on the surface.
- What’s wrong with education? And we start generating unrelated or the least important causes. Such as “poor funding”, “weak teachers’ training programs”, “technological change”, “lack of discipline”, anyone can name a few more and even more, but these kind of answers miss the bigger picture.
- People who give them assume one-way passage of influence from cause to effect, where each of the aforementioned factors has fixed relative importance. Which is not the case, obviously.
- Karl Popper said in his book Poverty of Historicism, that when we make any prediction, we influence the object we predict over, thus render any prediction. We disrupt it because we miss the whole system and the interplay the different elements have on each other.
- Causes are dynamic, not static. Imagine that each factor is a circle which overlays one another. The change in one must create the change in another, and the cycle of change in this case long.
- The change provides balancing or reinforcing feedback. And factors, do change over time, no matter what.
- If we continue this line of meditation, then we eventually come to the conclusion that what we must think over the influencing factors and not causes. It is the relationship between the elements that makes them into a cause and effect, and ultimately the relationship depends on the structure of the system. In our course with Max, it is “because” operator.
The problem of the formal logic
- Hides in the strictness of it. Usually in formal logic, if A follows B, it is. But the real world too unstructured.
- Of course, we can use “yes” and “no” when dealing with different situations, but the more complex it is, the more we incline into “maybe” and “perhaps”. Why so?
- Formal logic losses to the fuzzy logic of a real life, which applies better to any complex system, which has many elements that interdependent.
- Formal logic is linear, mostly, and systems are mostly non-linear, where the whole is qualitatively different and greater than the sum of its parts.
- So, the idea behind the fuzzy logic, is that we have to change a bit structure of the statements to satisfy the needs of the system. Here come onto the stage, the bully logic we’ve created.
- If something occurs, then something happens, but not necessary, and something else, usually unplanned may happen too.
- So in a sense it’s plan B, on plan B, on plan B in the infinite loop.
Look outside the frame
There is three misstakes in this sentence
- Usually people find two almost without an effort, whereas the third requires some time, why so?
- “are” and “mistake”, the usual suspects.
- But the third mistake lies outside the frame of the sentence, and is made in the initial premise.
- There are only two mistakes.
- That happens because we confuse the frame of reference with items in that frame.
- Humans interact like this all the time. Our conversations are full of ambiguity and not clear enough to the participants.
- This somehow leads to misunderstanding of the system and misinterpretation of the events.
- Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
- Humans interact like this all the time. Our conversations are full of ambiguity and not clear enough to the participants.
Correct questioning
- Don’t start with a direct question, instead paraphrase it into what if form.
- What would happen if I didn’t write the last chapter of the book until July?
You are the ultimate judge of what is wrong and what is right
- In the system thinking doesn’t matter if you are a subject of an object.
- It’s you who define the boundaries of the system.
- In time included. If you look only into the present without looking into the past of with disregard of the future, your evaluation might be wrong.
- Or even further, don’t stop at your actions, take into consideration the actions of others, observe them through time and infer the meaning from what is done, not what is said.
- Divide subjective and objective.
- Your perspective inside out. How does the world look like through your beliefs, filters, interests, mind, and body.
- Someone else’s perspective. The leap of imagination, and attempt to get the taste of other thoughts. Do it as if you are him.
- In the same manner, we have to consider providing the feedback.
Note-taking is also a system
- A system is a process, as in TRIZ we’ve recently discussed, if there is two or more interacting elements it could be called the system.
- In note-taking, there are at least 4 interdependent elements: reading, highlighting, deconstructing, reconstructing.
- I could add some others: linking, expressing, arguing, building the structural network.
- Maybe there are more, but I don’t recognize them at the moment.
- As with any system, all elements depend on each other, so it doesn’t matter where you start, eventually you’ll get to the supersystem. There is no wrong place.
- Though, I would start with the basics: reading.
- One of the elements that is omitted from the list at the top is imagination, not taking not only requires it, it demands, that’s why note-taking hit the brick wall as soon as a person starts the process. He lack imagination, and this trait is trainable. Just needs some time and energy.
Guidelines for drawing the system
- You are the central character. The system starts from your perspective and viewpoint.
- You have to design the system with the goal in mind, perhaps ideal end result.
- Design starts at any point inside the system. What does it mean?
- Include into the design what you hear, feel and observe. Those things that repeat or you think form a pattern that might be significant.
- Define boundaries, but remember it is you who can define them.
- Include time span, subsystems, and supersystem.
- Use elements that change when influenced by another element. If you have a desire to use something that is fixed, the question, “What does this get for me?” is appropriate.