🍃🌿🌱🐞 Stacy's Idea Garden 🐞🌱🌿🍃

This book starts off very slow. If you’d ever had taken a course in systems theory (as I had during my ECE degree), it’s almost infuriatingly slow. Once you make it through the first couple chapters, though, it starts to pay off.

Thinking in Systems is an introductory text in systems theory, where Donella aims less to explain the finer details of systems theory and more to describe when it might be necessary to use a new style of thinking. She’s certainly right in that there exist multiple ways to interpret a problem, although this is an idea that many people who deal in more deterministic sciences have been taught to resist. By the end of the book I was no longer irritated with Donella for glossing over so many details, though - there was a great deal of new information in this book, and the level of abstraction she’d chosen was probably correct given the scope of the system theory’s supposed applicability.

There are still portions of the later half of the book that I wish I understood more about, one being the relevance of self-organization to the “leverage points” she discusses in the final chapters.

If I were to say something negative about this work, it would be that Donella never acknowledges that in each systems model presented in the book, there exists a value judgement as to what is important (what constitutes desirable system behaviour). It is only after making this value judgement that you choose which parameters are relevant to consider in the model. Given that Donella herself is interested in the dynamics of the depletion of natural resources, many examples focus on just that. It goes without saying that the this is only one interpretation about what is worth modeling about a system, and how we might go about evaluating a system’s behaviour.

I will likely read the book for which she is most famous, The Limits to Growth, by the end of the year.

Review: 3.75?/5 stars