[flagged]

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

▲

DonHopkins 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So what does that make you, for "feeling" and "trolling" by projecting your ignorant political ideology onto something you know nothing about, instead of "thinking" and "experimenting" and "publishing" and "collaborating"? Exactly what profession are you role playing yourself?

▲

voidhorse 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You clearly haven't read much in the field of systems thinking, then. Many of the practitioners and most of its pioneers are in fact actual mathematicians, biologists, or computer scientists (Wiener, von Foerster, Banathy, etc)

▲

wvlia5 3 days ago | parent [-]

Could you quote a non-trivial "systems thinking" theorem or tool such that, by knowing it, I will be able to solve a problem I couldn't solve before?

▲

voidhorse 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is totally orthogonal to your original claim that systems thinkers are "liberal" philosophers but OK.

McCulloch and Pitts, early cyberneticians literally invented neural networks. See the wikipedia page on neural nets.

Another really simple one: Law of Requisite Variety. If that's too simple, I'd encourage you to bear in mind that Norbert Wiener, beyond his direct contributions to mathematics in the form of signal processing filters, is also responsible for the view of control as communication, which motivates much of the approach to control and stability in digital systems.

▲

whatever1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The entire field of process design & automatic process control. This literally is the O.G. job description of a chemical engineer. The field of grid design and balancing. Again job description of an electrical engineer.

▲

wvlia5 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, but in all your examples it's the same: you learn the specific subject and you are implicitly learning "systems thinking"; it's not like you learn "systems thinking" first as the hard part, and then you learn electronic components as an implementation detail to become a electrical engineer.

	▲	whatever1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I see your point. Indeed we do learn it bottoms up. But why do you think the opposite is impossible? It seems like a transferable skill across domains.

▲

DonHopkins 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Here's one: reading the most basic Wikipedia page about a subject before you make up your mind based on your political ideology instead of any actual knowledge.