Book Review
Thinking in Systems
1/5 stars
"If Nostradamus took up an academic job in the 21st century......"

*******

This book is trash, a bunch of floating abstractions stapled one to another and then published. (There has to be a reason that this book was not published on a reputable label. And the fact that it sold quite a few copies doesn't mean that much to me, because "50 Shades of Gray" sold quite a few.)

I do know that the word "system" is competing for the top spot of the most overused / misused word in the entirety of the English language.

("Systemic racism" /"A broken system"/"The system is stacked"/"So and so are systematically oppressed.")

I thought that this very old book by a very long dead woman would help clarify some of the concept of systems and give operational terms. (And I have to say that I had wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt because of her Harvard PhD. Although, she did have a have a heavier burden of proof, as she was never anything but a teacher of Environmental Studies)

But, no, she did not bring any clarity to the subject.

It's quite clear that:

1. She is just relexifying the same hackneyed, failed garbage that people have already wasted their *actual lives* empirically falsifying (as many academics do).

2. She doesn't appear to have much experience actually building a product from beginning to end--or much of any type of reality, for that matter (in the way that a lot of professional academics don't);

3. She has an ax to grind (in that way that only people who are professional academics can);

I have a lot of problems with the internal logic of this book.

1. Just because some things happen all at the same time, it does not mean that they are a system. Leastways, not a system that somebody designed from start to finish. (So, if you have a bunch of Gujaratis as 7-Eleven owners and Sikhs as truck drivers, it doesn't mean that they planned it that way. )

No, not everything that happens is because somebody somewhere planned it that way and it's just a matter of replanning in order to make it different. (Animistic fallacy.)

2. (p.47). How good your predictions are may have nothing to do with how good a model you have. If you have a coin, about the best that you can hope for is that it will be either heads or tails, and if you don't predict heads or tails each time.... That's just in the nature of the thing. (Stochastic processes.)

And in any case, models are not evidence and predictions are not data. So, now what?

3. Author treats all elements of some system as equal. So, in her world: if you have a city/country function just fine for several centuries (think Detroit/Zimbabwe) and then a week after it has its first black government, it collapses...... Then it's just impossible that the inputs have changed. (Because of course, that would be racism!)

If you have some people who just prefer to be drug addicted and broke, then (by this author) it can't be because that's the way they're genetically made up. There has to be a system you can blame.

A woman flits from one abusive man to another, and it's not that some women just like getting their ass beat. (And they are out there, it's quiet as it is kept.)

There just has to be some causative agent.

4. (p.29) I'm a little bit uncomfortable with her definition of "function." She talks about coffee cooling down in a room as if that is the function of coffee. It's more like this little thing called entropy.

5. Author keeps saying that such and such a system needs to be designed in such a way to get a desirable result. But, didn't they already try that before in a place called the Soviet Union? And again in China? (It only took about 32 million people starving to death before they found out that you cannot systematically decide what agricultural output should be.)

If it was just a matter of building systems to reach some desired goal, shouldn't/ doesn't it only depend on how good your engineers/ technocrats are?

And then, how do you decide what is a desirable goal? (The author assumes that species preservation is a desirable goal, even though the number of extinct species far exceeds the number of extant species. Is the goal desirable if only a tiny fraction of people share the concern? )

6. (pps 72, 108). Just because something is describable does not make it manipulable. Chess piece fallacy. Fatal conceit.

7. A lot of people have independently discovered things over several thousand years, but they didn't know that they were wrong until this author came along. For instance, interest rates are the worst invention of humanity. (p.182).

No word on why the Islamic world is not the center of prosperity, since they didn't have them for long periods of time.

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MANY things are just flat out wrong.

1. (p. 108) The poor who live at the borderline of starvation are not the ones to foment rebellions, because to be involved in a struggle for survival is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.

2. (p.146) "Growth causes poverty and hunger." (Has China become more hungry and poor over these last several decades of breakneck growth?)

3. (p.64) The total stock of oil is something that can change, and that's because people don't go out and find it until it is cost-effective to find new supplies. It is not infinite, but it certainly less predictable than one would imagine.

4. (p.125) The way out of nuclear conflict is for one side to just unilaterally disarm? (How did that work out for Gaddafi?)

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There are a couple of other questions that are not answered, likely because they are not considered.

1. Is a system long lived *because* it is logically right or effective? If people can design a logical system, does it mean that they'll get good results?

China had famines every single year from the First Emperor up until 1961, and the Chinese state is still trudging along several thousand years later.

The only time that most African countries had stable monetary policies and believable currencies was when they were colonies, but they're not colonies anymore. (Does anybody think that Zimbabwe is better off than Rhodesia?)

There's never been a Jew who could not read, but they were just never able to manage getting a sovereign state together for probably 85% of Jewish history.

2. This book seems to be one of those that talks about things that are interesting, but ultimately trivial because they just aren't useful for predicting really big and multivariable things. (Think of chaos theory / complexity Theory).

3. The author tries to treat the existence of drug addicts as something that is a result of a "broken system." And the same thing with crime.

Could it be that some people really just like to be criminals or drug addicts? (Strange but true: A lot of journalists interview people that say they prefer homelessness because they just don't want the responsibility of a job.)
*******

Of the book:

1. 184 pages of prose (takes about 4 hours to read);

2. 16 page appendix / glossary

3. A total of 67 references. Just about a single reference every three pages.

Verdict:

1. Give this book a miss;
2. If you want a very thorough book on feedback mechanisms and bounded rationality, I would much sooner recommend "Knowledge and Decisions," by Thomas Sowell