I consider control theory to be a part of systems theory and given that you give a talk on the virtues of control theory I think you value it. Apart from that my thoughts about the space:
If you look at Seth Roberts’s Shagri-La diet it’s based on systems thinking. It gives different answers than the standard nutritional paradgim which thinks that losing weight is about linear effect of eating less and exercising more.
You don’t need any math for understanding the Shangri-La diet but you do need a certain intellectual framework that considers systems to be important.
Mathematical predictions are only one aspect a theory can provide. Systems theory provides phenomenlogical primitives that can prevent you from dismissing the Shangri-La as strange and obviously crazy.
It provides you with a better ontology that allows you to consider new solutions.
Hakob Barseghyan describes in his HPS100 course very well how the notion of a life force being important for biology came after Newton changed the accepted ontology and that people basically thought that there’s matter and that matter interacts via forces with other matter. Our current mainstream ontology of physicalism doens’t consider that a place for a vital force exists.
If we go back to Seth Roberts, Seth considers it a good idea to measure the fitness of a human by measuring the reaction time to short math queries. I don’t think Seth wrote anywhere that he’s measuring a “vital force” by doing so, but if you go back in history you find that people have measured the vital force via reaction tests.
Gunnar Stollberg argues that modern systems biology has a concept like the vital force with self-organisation/autopoiesis.
A reemergence of vitalism could help explain why a student person who writes down their ideal life or writes about an emotional trauma for 4 days afterwards lead to significantly less sickness as Laura King showed in “The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals”.
Systems theory puts us in the position were we don’t have to postulate any paranormal chi for a notion like life force to exist. It doesn’t need math for that task.
I consider control theory to be a part of systems theory and given that you give a talk on the virtues of control theory I think you value it.
I certainly value the theory of control systems, and I think everyone should know its basic concepts. But the real thing looks like this (and all of the stuff that that links to). This is quite unlike what I’ve seen under the banner of “systems”, including some of the references in the OP.
To be more positive, I get from some of your examples the idea that “systems thinking” means “not being stupid.” Specifically, not being the sort of stupid that consists of thinking up a theory that is “obviously” true and failing to see whether it is. I don’t have a problem with that sort of “systems theory”.
Gunnar Stollberg argues that modern systems biology has a concept like the vital force with self-organisation/autopoiesis.
But he concludes by admitting that biologists have not taken this up (and briefly, absurdly, considers the hypothesis of a conspiracy to suppress it).
This is where it seems to me to wander off into the fog. Vitalism is an idea with no moving parts. As soon as you have moving parts to explain the phenomena that people pointed to and said “vital force!” as an explanation, the notion of vital force, goes away. Likewise autopoiesis. The observation that organisms maintain certain variables fixed despite disturbing influences is not explained by giving the phenomenon a name. The thing for a scientist to do is to discover the mechanism. For example, where does a mammal’s body sense its core temperature? How is the reference signal generated, and raised in case of fever? And so on. When the whole story is known, we know not merely that it self-regulates, but how.
To be more positive, I get from some of your examples the idea that “systems thinking” means “not being stupid.”
Not being stupid in way where the majority of our society is stupid.
But he concludes by admitting that biologists have not taken this up
Just as the majority of nutrition scientists haven’t taken up Seth Robert’s Shangri-La diet or did research in that direction.
When hearing the discussion of a topic like homeopathy I never see references to the fact that quizing a patient for two hours for the trauma of his life instead of talking with him for 5 minutes has a good chance to have benefitial health effects. It’s well replicated that writing about your trauma’s creates health benefits. That’s because of the paradigm in which our medicine is practiced.
Calling that mysterious variable that get’s raised by writing about trauma “vital force” might not be a good explanation but once you go that step you can ask new research questions. If you allow people to simple call it vital force you allow new questions. Is there a way to measure it? Can we measure the “vital force” a day after the trauma writing and see whether the writing worked at raising the vital force? Can we then use that score to predict days of illness?
The thing for a scientist to do is to discover the mechanism
If you believe that’s the only thing scientists are allowed to do then they won’t be able to do work where predictions can be made but where the underlying mechanism is illusive.
Would you forbid psychologists from talking about IQ and g because they can’t tell you the mechanism in which IQ/g works?
Currently dualism isn’t dead. Psychologists who work on the mind are allowed to use the concept of IQ without providing an mechanism but biologists are not allowed to do something similar with a life force metric.
Just be complete, no I don’t think that there’s a conspiracy that forbids biologists from doing so. It’s just that the paradigm and people being stupid. I think systems theory provides a way out.
Would you forbid psychologists from talking about IQ and g because they can’t tell you the mechanism in which IQ/g works?
It depends what they say about it. There are observable and fairly robust statistical correlations from which g can be constructed, and g can be used to make (rather weak in the individual case) predictions of various sorts. That does not make g a thing. I predict that if we ever find out how the brain works, g will not be a part of that mechanism, just a rough statistical regularity, as it is at present.
Currently dualism isn’t dead. Psychologists who work on the mind are allowed to use the concept of IQ without providing an mechanism but biologists are not allowed to do something similar with a life force metric.
If life force is going to be the same sort of thing as g, it might be useful in medicine, which to a substantial and increasing extent is based on statistical trials with little knowledge of mechanisms. But I don’t see it as useful for research into how things work.
If life force is going to be the same sort of thing as g, it might be useful in medicine, which to a substantial and increasing extent is based on statistical trials with little knowledge of mechanisms. But I don’t see it as useful for research into how things work.
I think that “finding out how things work” should not be the goal of science. The goal should be to develop models that provide reliable and useful predictions.
Newton postulate gravitation as a force without telling his audience how gravity works. The fact that Newton couldn’t explain that slowed down adoption of his model, yet accepting his model brought science a huge step forward. Even on many issues that are about research into how things work.
Theories that provide additional predictive power help science advance even if their proponents can’t explain everything from the ground up.
To get back to system theory. It allows us to say: “Emergence” when we don’t know how something come about and still work with what comes about.
When someone tells you that homeopathy doesn’t work because there are no infinitively small numbers of atoms he has a valid argument. Our ontological framework doesn’t allow the infinitively small numbers of atoms. People who have never heard of systems theory and subfield of it like control theory will have a similar reaction to the Shangri-La diet as to homeopathy. The ontology doens’t allow for it.
System theory then allows for an ontology in which it can happen. That’s valuable. When you go through a specific example you can also think about what the various words of system theory might be when you apply it to the system you study. That provides you with a structure to model the problem even if you don’t have enough data for mathematical modelling.
We have no idea how the set point for blood pressure is that in the human body, but it’s worthwhile to think of blood pressure regulation as a sytem that has a set point even if we don’t know how that is set.
From a medical standpoint we can think differently about the system through looking at it with the lense of system theory.
To get back to the life force, it’s good when we get more free and focus on increasing the predictive power of our models without worrying too much about whether we know at the moment the mechanism behind a certain value.
Sometimes it can even be useful to free our concepts from wanting to explain mechanisms. A term like Shaken Baby syndrome can be quite problematic if you find out that 1% of the cases of babies with “Shaken baby syndrome” weren’t shaken.
The thing for a scientist to do is to discover the mechanism
If you believe that’s the only thing scientists are allowed to do then they won’t be able to do work where predictions can be made but where the underlying mechanism is illusive.
“Discover”, not “have discovered”. Newton’s work was a step; Einstein finding more of a mechanism was a further step.
I think that “finding out how things work” should not be the goal of science. The goal should be to develop models that provide reliable and useful predictions.
It’s difficult to get the latter without the former, if you want to make successful way-out-of-sample predictions. Otherwise, you’re stuck in the morass of trying to find tiny signals and dismissing most of your data as noise.
It’s difficult to get the latter without the former, if you want to make successful way-out-of-sample predictions.
I think you can do a lot of successful predictions with IQ without knowing the mechanism of IQ. I don’t think you build better IQ tests by going into neuroscience but giving the tests to people and seeing how different variables correlate with each other.
Otherwise, you’re stuck in the morass of trying to find tiny signals and dismissing most of your data as noise.
I don’t think that’s true. The present approach of putting compounds through massive screening arrays based on theoretical reasoning that it’s good to hit certain biochemical pathways is very noise-laden and produces a lot of false positives. >90% of drug candidats that get put into trials don’t work out.
I consider control theory to be a part of systems theory and given that you give a talk on the virtues of control theory I think you value it. Apart from that my thoughts about the space:
If you look at Seth Roberts’s Shagri-La diet it’s based on systems thinking. It gives different answers than the standard nutritional paradgim which thinks that losing weight is about linear effect of eating less and exercising more.
You don’t need any math for understanding the Shangri-La diet but you do need a certain intellectual framework that considers systems to be important.
Mathematical predictions are only one aspect a theory can provide. Systems theory provides phenomenlogical primitives that can prevent you from dismissing the Shangri-La as strange and obviously crazy. It provides you with a better ontology that allows you to consider new solutions.
Hakob Barseghyan describes in his HPS100 course very well how the notion of a life force being important for biology came after Newton changed the accepted ontology and that people basically thought that there’s matter and that matter interacts via forces with other matter. Our current mainstream ontology of physicalism doens’t consider that a place for a vital force exists.
If we go back to Seth Roberts, Seth considers it a good idea to measure the fitness of a human by measuring the reaction time to short math queries. I don’t think Seth wrote anywhere that he’s measuring a “vital force” by doing so, but if you go back in history you find that people have measured the vital force via reaction tests.
Gunnar Stollberg argues that modern systems biology has a concept like the vital force with self-organisation/autopoiesis. A reemergence of vitalism could help explain why a student person who writes down their ideal life or writes about an emotional trauma for 4 days afterwards lead to significantly less sickness as Laura King showed in “The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals”.
Systems theory puts us in the position were we don’t have to postulate any paranormal chi for a notion like life force to exist. It doesn’t need math for that task.
I certainly value the theory of control systems, and I think everyone should know its basic concepts. But the real thing looks like this (and all of the stuff that that links to). This is quite unlike what I’ve seen under the banner of “systems”, including some of the references in the OP.
To be more positive, I get from some of your examples the idea that “systems thinking” means “not being stupid.” Specifically, not being the sort of stupid that consists of thinking up a theory that is “obviously” true and failing to see whether it is. I don’t have a problem with that sort of “systems theory”.
But he concludes by admitting that biologists have not taken this up (and briefly, absurdly, considers the hypothesis of a conspiracy to suppress it).
This is where it seems to me to wander off into the fog. Vitalism is an idea with no moving parts. As soon as you have moving parts to explain the phenomena that people pointed to and said “vital force!” as an explanation, the notion of vital force, goes away. Likewise autopoiesis. The observation that organisms maintain certain variables fixed despite disturbing influences is not explained by giving the phenomenon a name. The thing for a scientist to do is to discover the mechanism. For example, where does a mammal’s body sense its core temperature? How is the reference signal generated, and raised in case of fever? And so on. When the whole story is known, we know not merely that it self-regulates, but how.
Not being stupid in way where the majority of our society is stupid.
Just as the majority of nutrition scientists haven’t taken up Seth Robert’s Shangri-La diet or did research in that direction.
When hearing the discussion of a topic like homeopathy I never see references to the fact that quizing a patient for two hours for the trauma of his life instead of talking with him for 5 minutes has a good chance to have benefitial health effects. It’s well replicated that writing about your trauma’s creates health benefits. That’s because of the paradigm in which our medicine is practiced.
Calling that mysterious variable that get’s raised by writing about trauma “vital force” might not be a good explanation but once you go that step you can ask new research questions. If you allow people to simple call it vital force you allow new questions. Is there a way to measure it? Can we measure the “vital force” a day after the trauma writing and see whether the writing worked at raising the vital force? Can we then use that score to predict days of illness?
If you believe that’s the only thing scientists are allowed to do then they won’t be able to do work where predictions can be made but where the underlying mechanism is illusive.
Would you forbid psychologists from talking about IQ and g because they can’t tell you the mechanism in which IQ/g works?
Currently dualism isn’t dead. Psychologists who work on the mind are allowed to use the concept of IQ without providing an mechanism but biologists are not allowed to do something similar with a life force metric.
Just be complete, no I don’t think that there’s a conspiracy that forbids biologists from doing so. It’s just that the paradigm and people being stupid. I think systems theory provides a way out.
It depends what they say about it. There are observable and fairly robust statistical correlations from which g can be constructed, and g can be used to make (rather weak in the individual case) predictions of various sorts. That does not make g a thing. I predict that if we ever find out how the brain works, g will not be a part of that mechanism, just a rough statistical regularity, as it is at present.
If life force is going to be the same sort of thing as g, it might be useful in medicine, which to a substantial and increasing extent is based on statistical trials with little knowledge of mechanisms. But I don’t see it as useful for research into how things work.
I think that “finding out how things work” should not be the goal of science. The goal should be to develop models that provide reliable and useful predictions.
Newton postulate gravitation as a force without telling his audience how gravity works. The fact that Newton couldn’t explain that slowed down adoption of his model, yet accepting his model brought science a huge step forward. Even on many issues that are about research into how things work. Theories that provide additional predictive power help science advance even if their proponents can’t explain everything from the ground up.
To get back to system theory. It allows us to say: “Emergence” when we don’t know how something come about and still work with what comes about. When someone tells you that homeopathy doesn’t work because there are no infinitively small numbers of atoms he has a valid argument. Our ontological framework doesn’t allow the infinitively small numbers of atoms. People who have never heard of systems theory and subfield of it like control theory will have a similar reaction to the Shangri-La diet as to homeopathy. The ontology doens’t allow for it.
System theory then allows for an ontology in which it can happen. That’s valuable. When you go through a specific example you can also think about what the various words of system theory might be when you apply it to the system you study. That provides you with a structure to model the problem even if you don’t have enough data for mathematical modelling.
We have no idea how the set point for blood pressure is that in the human body, but it’s worthwhile to think of blood pressure regulation as a sytem that has a set point even if we don’t know how that is set. From a medical standpoint we can think differently about the system through looking at it with the lense of system theory.
To get back to the life force, it’s good when we get more free and focus on increasing the predictive power of our models without worrying too much about whether we know at the moment the mechanism behind a certain value. Sometimes it can even be useful to free our concepts from wanting to explain mechanisms. A term like Shaken Baby syndrome can be quite problematic if you find out that 1% of the cases of babies with “Shaken baby syndrome” weren’t shaken.
“Discover”, not “have discovered”. Newton’s work was a step; Einstein finding more of a mechanism was a further step.
It’s difficult to get the latter without the former, if you want to make successful way-out-of-sample predictions. Otherwise, you’re stuck in the morass of trying to find tiny signals and dismissing most of your data as noise.
I think you can do a lot of successful predictions with IQ without knowing the mechanism of IQ. I don’t think you build better IQ tests by going into neuroscience but giving the tests to people and seeing how different variables correlate with each other.
I don’t think that’s true. The present approach of putting compounds through massive screening arrays based on theoretical reasoning that it’s good to hit certain biochemical pathways is very noise-laden and produces a lot of false positives. >90% of drug candidats that get put into trials don’t work out.