[1] Theory of Society, Volume 1+2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann

Quite the opposite. You are now trying to reframe your accusations as help.

1. I surely didn’t ask for accusations nor for help with this. If I need any, I will let you know.

2. Your assessment of my situation is incorrect and as such I'm removing myself from this conversation now. But I want you to have the last word, so, go ahead.

“I don't think you really get either Design Thinking or Systems Thinking”

1. In the strict sense of science, Design Thinking is not a methodology, whether you like it or not. Look it up.

2. If you have no more arguments to offer besides falling back to accusations again and again, then I'm afraid I can't take you seriously.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220231906_The_Origi...

It leans a bit more on the cybernetic side but gives an overview and has what is possibly equally important as the text itself: some 7 pages of references. I started with openly accessible academic papers instead of books. If you find something interest there, you will surely have the direct reference to proceed further into that direction right at hand. Papers are shorter, you can switch the direction more easily. The price to pay is to miss the bigger picture a couple of times (which a book may convey) until some loose ends come together and create an aha moment.

(given what you said I would stay clear of all reinterpretations/popular science books. I would read something straight from the source, the people in the field, in whatever form it may show up.)

It’s its approach to Systems. Take the 5 stages. Why 5, not 10 or 3? Why stages at all? Who’s to say? Why not enable people to create stages themselves and run from there? Or whatever fits their business.

Why not teach methodology instead of method?

>I'm not sure why you think it's relevant here.

I can only repeat myself: The value is in the process of inquiry itself. Systems Theory is not a set of methods. It is an epistemological based theory and requires a shift in how a person perceives reality, the often cited worldview. How do you know what you know? By assuming 5 stages? Is that objectively induced? What happens to that if looking through the lens of radical constructivism? The theory requires to incorporate multiple worldviews and with that, negates the assumption of an objective truth.

>we have no idea if the purchaser or the seller gets more utility out of each dollar.

Assumption: the seller opened the auction with his actual hard lower limit, he should be happy with what he gets as soon as that limit gets hit.

The original poster said that he essentially altered the bid in favour of the seller. However, the exchange of subjective equal values is based on the balance between the two parties and now gets distorted in favour of the seller and in detriment of the buyer. This should result in win/lose if I am not mistaken.

So, maybe I get you wrong, I am not sure right now.

No, not against. One is a subset of the other. but you are free to prove me wrong.

> likely doesn't offer any advantage over the standard tool?

The process in itself has value. Are you sure about the meaning of epistemological?

At that time, I decomposed problems too, maybe a bit differently than a developer, I can’t really know. I still decompose, except that the difference to the past is that analysis only makes up one part of the larger whole. I knew many designers which never did either.

I agree with you that there are some areas which do not need theory. That depends on where you define the system boundaries. In the example of a carpenter: Yes, 30 years, the person indeed knows that stuff. One of first question of Systems Thinking, however, would be: What’s the reference system, is his company viable in the future? I very much believe that if you apply this to complex projects, to ‘communication and control’ of an enterprise, that one should know the backstory.

The reductionist approach got us to the problems, applying reductionism to a theory trying to solve reductionism is courageous. In my opinion, the method which is used to teach must incorporate the principle which it is trying to convey. An alternative worldview needs to have a starting point somewhere, and I like to think it starts with the education, which is not to say that I do not understand the urge to speed up absorption of the theory.

That may possibly explain your motivation but even ten years do not make it right, nor the speed of teaching.

You are saying it yourself: internalising the very abstract system for decomposing and adapting it has a value of its own you cannot replicate by pre-solving it. The spinning-off of Design Thinking only accomplished further segmentation of a space which was already too fractured and was a disservice to the field.

I don’t think we will approach a consensus here, and that’s fine.

Taking a theory (Systems Thinking), a mental model which has the primary goal of holistically identifying, describing, and understanding wholes and reducing it down to a set of methods/framework out of ease of use (the pragmatism) is exactly the wrong approach in my opinion.

Systems Thinking and all of its applications scenarios are based on epistemology. To turn it into a recipe is a wrongdoing. The whole notion is that one size does not fit all.

The operationalization of Systems Theory for a given case at hand is the responsibility and the transfer function of the operator whose approach this is. The process itself yields understanding and should not be abbreviated.

Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories.

Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics).

I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI

This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour.

(Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking)

My 2c. I'll show myself out.

Globally, wealth gets created, which leads to a positive-sum game, not a zero sum game.

On the other hand, if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money available in that said system except 100 currency units, the remaining 100 humans are in possession of exactly 1 currency unit. The suffering for the 100 humans is significantly higher for the 100 than for the one, even though it fulfils your premise of a balanced global suffering index.

Before the trade, the value for the seller and the buyer was zero. Whatever the trade involved, the moment the minimum of the seller gets hit, it becomes a positive-sum game.

If this would not be the case long-term rise of stocks would be impossible. That would mean a stock rise is a redistribution and you take it away from someone else . So, if the stock market were truly zero-sum, every currency unit earned would require someone else to have lost one.

Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?

I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I couldn’t keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate a full lock down on everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two.

If it has to be Windows, just remove all the shit of Win11 yourself, set it to unattended installation with a local account, remove the hardware requirements barrier while you are at it, remove the games, controller add-ons, virus scanner and whatever else you would like to (the windows store?) and create your own LTSC.

This isn’t a solution to the problem and missing the point of the whole argument. But if it has to be Windows, I would recommend to try it.

1] ntlite.com

Question: How do you manage the security on such a box? Is there any simplification I missed?

I couldn’t keep up with it. So many patches, unrelated to mail, broke something in the stack, bringing the server into a critical state. Often, I had to lock down everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two. These were two days without mail.

“We are building a machine that will be proud of us” was their corporate motto. And that was in 1983.

One of those Machines is on view at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Back then, they could be ordered in “Darth Vader Black”, no kidding here. You can also see a couple of them (the CM-5) as the stereotypical supercomputer in the original Jurassic Park.

More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...