What books or articles have you read recently that fundamentally shifted the way you think about the world, and how you interact with it (work, social, play, whatever)?

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    61·
    3 days ago

    The opening of the wikipedia article on feedback systems:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback

    The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled carefully when applied to feedback systems:

    Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole.

    Almost all real world systems are feedback systems, from biology, to politics and government, to interpersonal relations. Yet people’s instinct is almost always to try and reason through things using cause and effect when that’s often not helpful. When people realize this, they often say 'oh it’s a chicken and egg thing’s or ‘oh it’s impossible to say who did what’ and throw up their hands and give up. But it’s not impossible to analyze feedback systems, nor to figure out relative contributions to them, nor to figure out ways to break out of cycles. But you need to impartially examine the system as a whole, you can’t just try and play the blame game.