🪸On Systems Thinking: On Small Scale

"[...] the task of the theory consists in constructing a picture of the external world that exists purely internally and must be our guiding star in all thought and experiment; that is in completing, as it were, the thinking process and carrying out globally what on a small scale occurs within us whenever we form an idea.” (Ludwig E Boltzmann, “On the Significance of Theories”, 1890)

"If the organism carries a ‘small-scale model’ of external reality and of its possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future simulations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)

"Thus there are instances of symbolisation in nature; we use such instances as an aid to thinking; there is evidence of similar mechanisms at work in our own sensory and central nervous systems; and the function of such symbolisation is plain. If the organism carries a ’small-scale model’ of external reality and of its own possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise […]" (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)

"[…] the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions." (Claude Levi- Strauss,"The Savage Mind", 1962

"The word model is used as a noun, adjective, and verb, and in each instance it has a slightly different connotation. As a noun 'model' is a representation in the sense in which an architect constructs a small-scale model of a building or a physicist a large-scale model of an atom. As an adjective 'model' implies a degree or perfection or idealization, as in reference to a model home, a model student, or a model husband. As a verb 'to model' means to demonstrate, to reveal, to show what a thing is like." (Russell L Ackoff, "Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions", 1962) 

"In general a small-scale test or experiment will not detect a small effect, or small differences among various products." (Robert Hooke, "How to Tell the Liars from the Statisticians", 1983)

"The evident power of simple heuristics […] teaches us the important lesson that global behavior patterns, and social organization, can emerge out of local interactions. Organisms do not necessarily need to have an over-riding plan nor do they require awareness of the large-scale. Grand patterns and processes can emerge as the nett effect of small-scale, local behavior."(David G Green, 2000) 

"The self-similarity on different scales arises because growth often involves iteration of simple, discrete processes (e.g. branching). These repetitive processes can often be summarized as sets of simple rules." (David G Green, 2000)

"According to mental model theory, human reasoning relies on the construction of integrated mental representations of the information that is given in the reasoning problem's premises. These integrated representations are the mental models. A mental model is a mental representation that captures what is common to all the different ways in which the premises can be interpreted. It represents in 'small scale' how "reality" could be— according to what is stated in the premises of a reasoning problem. Mental models, though, must not be confused with images. A mental model often forms the basis of one or more visual images, but some of them represent situations that cannot be visualized. Instead, mental models are often likened to diagrams since, as with diagrams, their structure is analogous to the structure of the states of affairs they represent." (Carsten Held et al, "Mental Models and the Mind", 2006)

"Physics deals with both the large and the small. Its domain of study includes the interior of the nucleus of an atom as well as the exterior of a galaxy. It is, therefore, natural for the scope of physical theories to switch between global, or large-scale, and local, or small-scale regimes. Such an interplay between the local and the global has existed ever since Newton and others discovered the mathematical translation of this interplay: Derivatives are defined as local objects while integrals encompass global properties." (Sadri Hassani, "Mathematical Methods: For Students of Physics and Related Fields", 2009)

"[…] there’s atomic physics - electrons and protons and neutrons, all the stuff of which atoms are made. At these very, very, very small scales, the laws of physics are much the same, but there is also a force you ignore, which is the gravitational force. Gravity is present everywhere because it comes from the entire mass of the universe. It doesn’t cancel itself out, it doesn’t have positive or negative value, it all adds up." (Michael F Atiyah, [interview] 2013)

📓On Literature: On Reason (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them." (Blaise Pascal, "Pensées", 1670)

"We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light." (Henry D Thoreau, "Letters to Various Persons", 1865)

"Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate." (Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain", 1924)

"If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." (Louis Brandeis, [dissenting opinion in Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan], 1924)

"I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers." (Joyce Cary, The Paris Review, 1954)

"Her dance spoke of nothing more and nothing less than the tragedy of being alive, and being human. It spoke, most eloquently, of pain. It spoke, most knowingly, of despair. It spoke of the cruel humor of limitless ambition yoked to limited ability, of eternal hope invested in an ephemeral lifetime, of the driving need to try and create an inexorably predetermined future. It spoke of fear, and of hunger, and, most clearly, of the basic loneliness and alienation of the human animal. It described the universe through the eyes of man: a hostile environment, the embodiment of entropy, into which we are all thrown alone, forbidden by our nature to touch another mind save secondhand, by proxy. It spoke of the blind perversity which forces man to strive hugely for a peace which, once attained, becomes boredom. And it spoke of folly, of the terrible paradox by which man is simultaneously capable of reason and unreason, forever unable to cooperate even with himself." (Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson, "Stardance", 1977)

"How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." (Isaac Asimov, "The Roving Mind", 1983)

"The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense." (Ursula K Le Guin," "A Man of the People", 1995)

More quotes on Reasoning, Reasons

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Function (1970-1979)

"A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization," (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past." (Humberto Maturana, "Biology of Cognition", 1970)

"The definition of a problem and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the problem have of the system to which it refers. A problem may thus find itself defined as a badly interpreted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty output device, or as a faulty output due to a malfunction in an otherwise faultless system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultless and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problem to anyone opposed to change." (Herbert Brün, "Technology and the Composer", 1971)

"In an isolated system, which cannot exchange energy and matter with the surroundings, this tendency is expressed in terms of a function of the macroscopic state of the system: the entropy." (Ilya Prigogine, "Thermodynamics of Evolution", 1972)

"The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy." (Ilya Prigogine, "Thermodynamics of Evolution", 1972)

"Systems at each level of integration function as wholes with respect to their parts and parts with respect to higher level wholes." (Ervin László, "Introduction to Systems Philosophy", 1972)

"The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy." (Ilya Prigogine, "Thermodynamics of Evolution", 1972)

"[A] system is represented by a mathematical model which may take many forms, such as algebraic equations, finite state machines, difference equations, ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, and functional equations. The system model may be uncertain, as the mathematical model may not be known completely." (Fred C Scweppe, "Uncertain dynamic systems", 1973)

"A system may be specified in either of two ways. In the first, which we shall call a state description, sets of abstract inputs, outputs and states are given, together with the action of the inputs on the states and the assignments of outputs to states. In the second, which we shall call a coordinate description, certain input, output and state variables are given, together with a system of dynamical equations describing the relations among the variables as functions of time. Modern mathematical system theory is formulated in terms of state descriptions, whereas the classical formulation is typically a coordinate description, for example a system of differential equations." (E S Bainbridge, "The Fundamental Duality of System Theory", 1975)

"Loose systems last longer and function better." (John Gall, "General Systemantics: How systems work, and especially how they fail", 1975)

"Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person." (John Gall, "General Systemantics: How systems work, and especially how they fail", 1975)

"Programming systems can, of course, be built without plan and without knowledge, let alone understanding, of the deep structural issues involved, just as houses, cities, systems of dams, and national economic policies can be similarly hacked together. As a system so constructed begins to get large, however, it also becomes increasingly unstable. When one of its subfunctions fails in an unanticipated way, it may be patched until the manifest trouble disappears. But since there is no general theory of the whole system, the system itself can be only a more or less chaotic aggregate of subsystems whose influence on one another's behavior is discoverable only piecemeal and by experiment. The hacker spends part of his time at the console piling new subsystems onto the structure he has already built - he calls them 'new features' - and the rest of his time in attempts to account for the way in which substructures already in place misbehave. That is what he and the computer converse about." (Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation" , 1976)

"In set theory, perhaps more than in any other branch of mathematics, it is vital to set up a collection of symbolic abbreviations for various logical concepts. Because the basic assumptions of set theory are absolutely minimal, all but the most trivial assertions about sets tend to be logically complex, and a good system of abbreviations helps to make otherwise complex statements. " (Keith Devlin, "Sets, Functions, and Logic: An Introduction to Abstract Mathematics", 1979)

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Large Scale

"Almost everyone now acknowledges that theory and experiment, model making, theory construction and linguistics all go together, and that the successful development of a science of behavior depends upon a ‘total approach’ in which, given that the computer ‘is the only large-scale universal model’ that we possess, ‘we may expect to follow the prescription of Simon and construct our models - or most of them - in the form of computer programs’." (Frank H George,"Cognition", 1962) [attributed to Alan M Turing] 

“As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be ‘true’. A complete satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be precise, we can, of course, think of it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but more so than a ‘winged lion’.” (Erwin Schrödinger, “Science and Humanism”, 1952)

"The word model is used as a noun, adjective, and verb, and in each instance it has a slightly different connotation. As a noun 'model' is a representation in the sense in which an architect constructs a small-scale model of a building or a physicist a large-scale model of an atom. As an adjective 'model' implies a degree or perfection or idealization, as in reference to a model home, a model student, or a model husband. As a verb 'to model' means to demonstrate, to reveal, to show what a thing is like." (Russell L Ackoff, "Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions", 1962)

"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are." (William Poundstone, "The Recursive Universe", 1985)

"The large-scale computer models of systems ecology do not fit under the heading of holism at all. Rather they are forms of large-scale reductionism: the objects of study are the naively given 'parts' -abundances or biomasses of populations. No new objects of study arise at the community level. The research is usually conducted on a single system - a lake, forest, or prairie - and the results are measurements of and projections for that lake, forest, or prairie, with no attempts to find the properties of lakes, forests, or prairies in general. Such modeling requires vast amounts of data for its simulations, and much of the scientific effort goes into problems of estimation." (Richard Levins & Richard C Lewontin, "The Dialectical Biologist", 1985)

"The evident power of simple heuristics […] teaches us the important lesson that global behavior patterns, and social organization, can emerge out of local interactions. Organisms do not necessarily need to have an over-riding plan nor do they require awareness of the large-scale. Grand patterns and processes can emerge as the nett effect of small-scale, local behavior."(David G Green, 2000) 

"The really crucial question in multi-object systems is whether local interactions do grow into large-scale patterns." (David G Green, 2000)

"Statistical mechanics is the science of predicting the observable properties of a many-body system by studying the statistics of the behaviour of its individual constituents, be they atoms, molecules, photons etc. It provides the link between macroscopic and microscopic states. […] classical thermodynamics. This is a subject dealing with the very large. It describes the world that we all see in our daily lives, knows nothing about atoms and molecules and other very small particles, but instead treats the universe as if it were made up of large-scale continua. […] quantum mechanics. This is the other end of the spectrum from thermodynamics; it deals with the very small. It recognises that the universe is made up of particles: atoms, electrons, protons and so on. One of the key features of quantum mechanics, however, is that particle behaviour is not precisely determined (if it were, it would be possible to compute, at least in principle, all past and future behaviour of particles, such as might be expected in a classical view). Instead, the behaviour is described through the language of probabilities." (A Mike Glazer & Justin S Wark, "Statistical Mechanics: A survival guide", 2001)

"Physics deals with both the large and the small. Its domain of study includes the interior of the nucleus of an atom as well as the exterior of a galaxy. It is, therefore, natural for the scope of physical theories to switch between global, or large-scale, and local, or small-scale regimes. Such an interplay between the local and the global has existed ever since Newton and others discovered the mathematical translation of this interplay: Derivatives are defined as local objects while integrals encompass global properties." (Sadri Hassani, "Mathematical Methods: For Students of Physics and Related Fields", 2009)

"Black Swans (capitalized) are large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence - unpredicted by a certain observer, and such un - predictor is generally called the 'turkey' when he is both surprised and harmed by these events. [...] Black Swans hijack our brains, making us feel we 'sort of' or 'almost' predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realize the role of these Swans in life because of this illusion of predictability. […] An annoying aspect of the Black Swan problem - in fact the central, and largely missed, point - is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable." (Nassim N Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder", 2012)

"The sensitivity of chaotic systems to initial conditions is particularly well known under the moniker of the 'butterfly effect', which is a metaphorical illustration of the chaotic nature of the weather system in which 'a flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas'. The meaning of this expression is that, in a chaotic system, a small perturbation could eventually cause very large-scale difference in the long run." (Hiroki Sayama, "Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems", 2015)

📓On Literature: On Authority (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"It is no bad thing to be a king - to see one's house enriched and one's authority enhanced." (Homer, "The Odyssey", cca. 750-700 BC)

"Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual." (Aristotle, "Politics", cca. 335-323 BC)

"An evil nature wielding great authority brings misfortune upon the community." (Aeschines, "Ctesiphontem", 330 BC) 

"Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth." (Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Cato Maior de Senectute" ["On Old Age"], 44 BC) 

"Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit." (Michel de Montaigne, "De la phisionomie" ["Of Physiognomy"], 1588)

"For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority." (Francis Bacon, "Novum Organum", 1620)

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." (Anne Bradstreet, "Meditations Divine and Moral", 1666)

"Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed." (Samuel Johnson, The Rambler no. 50, 1750)

"Authority - the fact, namely, that something has already happened or been said or decided, is of great value; but it is only a pedant who demands authority for everything." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1833)

"Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority." (Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", 1895)

"Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more." (Mark Twain, "More Maxims of Mark", 1927)

"Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world." (Albert Camus,"Helen's Exile", 1948)

"I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless." (Isaac Asimov, "I, Robot", 1950)

"Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959) 

"Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. [...] Every historical event in the world is believed on authority." (Clive S Lewis, "Mere Christianity", 1961)

"Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism." (Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilization", 1961)

"The robots are not technologically minded. They were not built to be. They were built to bolster human vanity and pride, to meet a strange longing that seems to be built into the human ego - the need to have other humans (or a reasonable facsimile of other humans) to minister to our wants and needs, human slaves to be dominated, human beings over which a man or woman (or a child) can assert authority, thus building up a false feeling of superiority." (Clifford D Simak, "A Choice of Gods", 1972)

"It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet." (Iain M Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

📓On Literature: On Edges (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void." (Epicurus," Letters", [Letter to Herodotus] cca. 305 BC)

"It is the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures." (Michel de Montaigne, "Essais", 1580)

"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." (Anne Bradstreet, "Meditations Divine and Moral", 1666)

"A great Empire, like a great Cake, is most easily diminished at the Edges." (Benjamin Franklin, "Rules By Which A Great Empire May Be Reduced To A Small One", The Public Advertiser, 1773)

"Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings." (Oliver W Holmes Jr, "The Professor at the Breakfast Table", 1860)

"[...] only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything." (Henry Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907)

"We have come to the edge of a world of which we have no experience, and where all our preconceptions must be recast." (D'Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form" Vol. 1, 1917)

"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken." (David H Lawrence, "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays", 1988) 

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge." (Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon", 19325

"We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge-the last thing we know before things become too swift for us." (Clive S Lewis, "Out of the Silent Planet", 1938)

"War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice." (Clive S Lewis, "Learning in War-Time", 1939)

"Sooner or later we will come to the edge of the Solar System and will be looking out across the ultimate abyss. Then we must choose whether we reach the stars — or whether we wait until the stars reach us." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Challenge of the Spaceship". 1959)

"When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite." (James Gunn, "The Listeners", 1968)

"Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodeka-spherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again. Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness. be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receded over the light-speed edges. Waterfalls, of a finer water, that bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders." (Raphael A Lafferty, "Sky", 1971)

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." (Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune", 1976)

"The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom." (Philip K Dick,"VALIS", 1981)

"Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse. Michael Crichton, "Jurassic Park", 1990)

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." (Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune", 1976)

"Mechs built, that was inevitable. They sought to make of the world a place of straight lines and sharp edges, geometry made real. Eternal, rigid certainties. Men were of a different order. They sought the curved, the flexible, the liveand unenduring. They lived and died." (Gregory Benford, "At the Double Solstice", 1988)

"At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe." (Michael Crichton, "Jurassic World", 1997) 

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Ecology (2000-2009)

"Ecological rationality uses reason – rational reconstruction – to examine the behavior of individuals based on their experience and folk knowledge, who are ‘naïve’ in their ability to apply constructivist tools to the decisions they make; to understand the emergent order in human cultures; to discover the possible intelligence embodied in the rules, norms and institutions of our cultural and biological heritage that are created from human interactions but not by deliberate human design. People follow rules without being able to articulate them, but they can be discovered." (Vernon L Smith, "Constructivist and ecological rationality in economics",  2002)

"Organizations need to undergo fundamental changes, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable." (Fritjof Capra, "The Hidden Connections", 2002)

"Ecology, on the other hand, is messy. We cannot find anything deserving of the term law, not because ecology is less developed than physics, but simply because the underlying phenomena are more chaotic and hence less amenable to description via generalization." (Lev Ginzburg & Mark Colyvan," Ecological Orbits: How Planets Move and Populations Grow", 2004)

"Limiting factors in population dynamics play the role in ecology that friction does in physics. They stop exponential growth, not unlike the way in which friction stops uniform motion. Whether or not ecology is more like physics in a viscous liquid, when the growth-rate-based traditional view is sufficient, is an open question. We argue that this limit is an oversimplification, that populations do exhibit inertial properties that are noticeable. Note that the inclusion of inertia is a generalization - it does not exclude the regular rate-based, first-order theories. They may still be widely applicable under a strong immediate density dependence, acting like friction in physics." (Lev Ginzburg & Mark Colyvan, "Ecological Orbits: How Planets Move and Populations Grow", 2004)

"It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems." (Jamie Goode," The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass", 2005)

"An ecology provides the special formations needed by organizations. Ecologies are: loose, free, dynamic, adaptable, messy, and chaotic. Innovation does not arise through hierarchies. As a function of creativity, innovation requires trust, openness, and a spirit of experimentation - where random ideas and thoughts can collide for re-creation." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"Knowledge flow can be likened to a river that meanders through the ecology of an organization. In certain areas, the river pools and in other areas it ebbs. The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of flow." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"[ecology:] the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and the interactions that determine distribution and abundance." (Michael Begon et al, "Ecology: From individuals to ecosystems", 2006)

"Nodes and connectors comprise the structure of a network. In contrast, an ecology is a living organism. It influences the formation of the network itself." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006)

"The living world can be viewed as a biological hierarchy that starts with subcellular particles, and continues up through cells, tissues and organs. Ecology deals with the next three levels: the individual organism, the population (consisting of individuals of the same species) and the community (consisting of a greater or lesser number of species populations). At the level of the organism, ecology deals with how individuals are affected by (and how they affect) their environment. At the level of the population, ecology is concerned with the presence or absence of particular species, their abundance or rarity, and with the trends and fluctuations in their numbers. Community ecology then deals with the composition and organization of ecological communities." (Michael Begon et al, "Ecology: From individuals to ecosystems", 2006)

"We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others - both human and animal." (Gregory Colbert, "Peace and Harmony: The Message of Our Discovery", [Photo No. 427] 2006)

"When we focus on designing ecologies in which people can forage for knowledge, we are less concerned about communicating the minutiae of changing knowledge. Instead, we are creating the conduit through which knowledge will flow." (George Siemens, "Knowing Knowledge", 2006

"Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made." (Al Gore,"The Assault on Reason", 2007)

"Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today - apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes." (Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology and Communalism", 2007)

"This new model of development would be based clearly on the goal of sustainable human well-being. It would use measures of progress that clearly acknowledge this goal. It would acknowledge the importance of ecological sustainability, social fairness, and real economic efficiency. Ecological sustainability implies recognizing that natural and social capital are not infinitely substitutable for built and human capital, and that real biophysical limits exist to the expansion of the market economy." (Robert Costanza, "Toward a New Sustainable Economy", 2008)

"In ecology, we are often interested in exploring the behavior of whole systems of species or ecosystem composed of individual components which interact through biological processes. We are interested not simply in the dynamics of each species or component in isolation, but the dynamics of each species or component in the context of all the others and how those coupled dynamics account for properties of the system as a whole, such as its persistence. This is what people seem to mean when they say that ecology is ‘holistic’, an otherwise rather vague term." (John Pastor, "Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems", 2008)

"Much of what we deal with in ecology are rates of change of biological objects: growth of an organism, decay of a dead leaf, fluctuations in populations, accumulation or erosion of soil, increases or decreases in lake levels, etc. But rates of change are some of the hardest things to measure. What we measure are static properties such as the sizes of objects at different times and then infer that change has taken place between those two measurements." (John Pastor, "Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems", 2008)

"Therefore, mathematical ecology does not deal directly with natural objects. Instead, it deals with the mathematical objects and operations we offer as analogs of nature and natural processes. These mathematical models do not contain all information about nature that we may know, but only what we think are the most pertinent for the problem at hand. In mathematical modeling, we have abstracted nature into simpler form so that we have some chance of understanding it. Mathematical ecology helps us understand the logic of our thinking about nature to help us avoid making plausible arguments that may not be true or only true under certain restrictions. It helps us avoid wishful thinking about how we would like nature to be in favor of rigorous thinking about how nature might actually work." (John Pastor, "Mathematical Ecology of Populations and Ecosystems", 2008)

"What literally defines social ecology as ‘social’ is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society." (Murray Bookchin, "What is Social Ecology", 2009)

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Ecology (1990-1999)

"Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static 'snapshots'. It is a set of general principles- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management. [...] During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem." (Douglas P Wheeler, EPA Journal, 1990)

"The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence: the use of mathematical logic to understand the operation of the nervous system; the invention of information processing machines (as digital computers), thus laying the basis for artificial intelligence; the establishment of the metadiscipline of system theory, which has had an imprint in many branches of science, such as engineering (systems analysis, control theory), biology (regulatory physiology, ecology), social sciences (family therapy, structural anthropology, management, urban studies), and economics (game theory); information theory as a statistical theory of signal and communication channels; the first examples of self-organizing systems. This list is impressive: we tend to consider many of these notions and tools an integrative part of our life […]" (Francisco Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)

"Ecological Economics studies the ecology of humans and the economy of nature, the web of interconnections uniting the economic subsystem to the global ecosystem of which it is a part." (Robert Costanza, "Ecological Economics: the science and management of sustainability", 1992)

"When the study of the household (ecology) and the management of the household (economics) can be merged, and when ethics can be extended to include environmental as well as human values, then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. Accordingly, bringing together these three 'E's' is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future." (Eugene Odum," Ecology and our endangered life-support systems", 1993)

"Progressively higher levels of organization are attained as catalytic cycles on one level interlock and form hypercycles: these are systems on a higher level of organization. Thus molecules emerge from a combination of chemically active atoms; protocells emerge from sequences of complex molecules; eukaryotic cells emerge among the prokaryotes; metazoa make their appearance among the protozoa and converge in still higher-level ecological and social systems." (Ervin László, "Vision 2020: Reordering Chaos for Global Survival" , 1994)

"If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)

"In the past several years, social work has increasingly focused on an ecological model. This model integrates both treatment and reform by conceptualizing and emphasizing the dysfunctional transactions between people and their physical and social environments. Human beings are viewed as developing and adapting through transactions with all elements of their environments. An ecological model gives attention to both internal and external factors. It does not view people as passive reactors to their environments but, rather, as being involved in dynamic and reciprocal interactions with them." (Charles Zastrow, "The practice of social work", 1995)

"The new paradigm may be called a holistic world view, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term 'ecological' is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical process of nature." (Fritjof Capra & Gunter A. Pauli," Steering business toward sustainability", 1995

"A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste […]" (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Economics emphasizes competition, expansion, and domination; ecology emphasizes cooperation, conservation, and partnership." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Statistical hypothesis testing is commonly used inappropriately to analyze data, determine causality, and make decisions about significance in ecological risk assessment,[...] It discourages good toxicity testing and field studies, it provides less protection to ecosystems or their components that are difficult to sample or replicate, and it provides less protection when more treatments or responses are used. It provides a poor basis for decision-making because it does not generate a conclusion of no effect, it does not indicate the nature or magnitude of effects, it does address effects at untested exposure levels, and it confounds effects and uncertainty[...]. Risk assessors should focus on analyzing the relationship between exposure and effects[...]."  (Glenn W Suter, "Abuse of hypothesis testing statistics in ecological risk assessment", Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 2, 1996)

"These, then, are some of the basic principles of ecology - interdependence, recycling, partnership, flexibility, diversity, and, as a consequence of all those, sustainability... the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy, on our ability to understand these principles of ecology and live accordingly." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking - from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. [...] Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Economics emphasizes competition, expansion, and domination; ecology emphasizes cooperation, conservation, and partnership." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996) 

"Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems, but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems."(Robert Costanza & Janis King, "The first decade of ecological economics", Ecological Economics 28 (1), 1999)

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Social Networks

"Structure always affects function. The structure of social networks affects the spread of information and disease; the structure of the power grid affects the stability of power transmission. The same must be true for species in an ecosystem, companies in the global marketplace, cascades of enzyme reactions in living cells. The layout of the web must profoundly shape its dynamics." (Steven Strogatz, "Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order", 2003)

"Connectivity harbors other risks too. As we create more links among the nodes of our technological and social networks, these networks sometimes developed unexpected patterns of connections that make breakdown more likely. They can, for instance, develop harmful feedback loops - what people commonly call vicious circles - that reinforce instabilities and even lead to collapse." (Thomas Homer-Dixon, "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization", 2006)

"Social network analysis has been important for the further development of graph theory, for example with respect to introducing metrics for identifying importance of people or groups. For example, a person having many connections to other people may be considered relatively important. Likewise, a person at the center of a network would seem to be more influential than someone at the edge. What graph theory provides us are the tools to formally describe what we mean by relatively important, or having more influence. Moreover, using graph theory we can easily come up with alternatives for describing importance and such. Having such tools has also facilitated being more precise in statements regarding the position or role that person has within a community." (Maarten van Steen, "Graph Theory and Complex Networks: An Introduction", 2010)

"[...] the contexts in which a social network is embedded will generally have significant effects on its structure. Each individual in a social network has a distinctive set of personal characteristics, and similarities and compatibilities between two people’s characteristics can strongly influence whether a link forms between them. Each individual also engages in a set of behaviors and activities that can shape the formation of links within the network. These considerations suggest what we mean by a network’s surrounding contexts: factors that exist outside the nodes and edges of a networks, but which nonetheless affect how the network’s structure evolves." (David Easley & Jon Kleinberg, "Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World", 2010)

"Social network analysis conceptualises individuals or groups as ‘points’ and their relations to each other as ‘lines’. It is concerned with the patterns formed by the points and lines and involves exploring these patterns, mathematically or visually, in order to assess their effects on the individuals and organisations that are the members of the ‘networks’ formed by the intersecting lines that connect them. It therefore takes the metaphorical idea of interaction as forming a network of connections and gives this idea a more formal representation in order to model structures of social relations. Treating a social structure as a network is the cornerstone of social network analysis." (John Scott," What is Social Network Analysis?", 2012)

"A system which is usually composed of large number of possibly heterogeneous interacting agents, which are seen to exhibit emergent behavior. Emergence implies that system level behavior (macro level) cannot be inferred from observation of individual level behavior of its constituents (micro level). This absence of explicit links between the micro and macro levels makes complex systems especially difficult to analyze using traditional statistical and analytical techniques to study the dynamics of behavior. One typically requires the use of bottom up simulation based methods to study such systems. Complex systems are ubiquitous - markets, societies, social networks, the Internet, weather, ecosystems, are just a few examples." (Stephen E Glavin & Abhijit Sengupta, "Modelling of Consumer Goods Markets: An Agent-Based Computational Approach", Handbook of Research on Managing and Influencing Consumer Behavior, 2015)

"With the birth of Internet-based social networks, information on personal interaction on a large-scale became available and the interest in developing mathematical models that are able to capture and explain certain stylized features of large and complex real-world networks has grown significantly. Among the most central phenomena observed in large-scale real-world networks is the so-called small-world phenomenon, which refers to the fact that despite the large network size most of the nodes have a surprisingly small graph (hop count) distance in between them, and the so-called scale-free nature of networks, meaning that the degree sequence has polynomial decay." (Francesca Biagini et al (Eds), "Network Science: An Aerial View", 2019)

"A small-world network is characterized by a high clustering coefficient and a short average path length, meaning that most nodes can be reached from any other node through a small number of intermediate connections. This structure often mirrors real-world social networks, where individuals are typically connected through a few mutual acquaintances, allowing for rapid information dissemination." (Aldo Marzullo et al, "Graph Machine Learning" 2nd Ed., 2025)

"The concept of temporal graphs is useful in all the real-world problems that can be represented as a graph, where the nodes and edges of the graph may change over time. For example, temporal graphs are extensively applied in modeling social networks. By capturing the evolving relationships between individuals, temporal graphs enable a more accurate representation of social dynamics. This is particularly useful for predicting changes in friendships, community structures, and the information diffusion over time." (Aldo Marzullo et al, "Graph Machine Learning" 2nd Ed., 2025) 

🪸On Systems Thinking: On Function (1960-1969)

 

"The last, and most important, characteristic of systems is that they are automatic. Although the degree of automaticity may vary over a wide spectrum, there are no systems in which human beings perform all control functions; conversely, there will probably never be systems in which no human beings are involved." (Charles D Flagle et al, "Operations Research and Systems Engineering", 1960)

"To say a system is 'self-organizing' leaves open two quite different meanings. There is a first meaning that is simple and unobjectionable. This refers to the system that starts with its parts separate" (so that the behavior of each is independent of the others' states) and whose parts then act so that they change towards forming connections of some type. Such a system is 'self-organizing' in the sense that it changes from 'parts separated' to 'parts joined'. […] In general such systems can be more simply characterized as 'self-connecting', for the change from independence between the parts to conditionality can always be seen as some form of 'connection', even if it is as purely functional […] 'Organizing' […] may also mean 'changing from a bad organization to a good one' […] The system would be 'self-organizing' if a change were automatically made to the feedback, changing it from positive to negative; then the whole would have changed from a bad organization to a good." (W Ross Ashby, "Principles of the self-organizing system", 1962)

"A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"From a pessimistic viewpoint, it can be stated that there is no good general way of structuring a system. However, from an optimistic point of view one can say that a number of good ways of structuring systems exist and that some are better than others for any particular system. In this and the following sections, there will be a presentation of a number of structuring approaches that have merit and have been employed successfully, including functional structuring, equipment structuring, and use of various coordinate systems." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)

"The process of formulating and structuring a system are important and creative, since they provide and organize the information, which each system. establishes the number of objectives and the balance between them which will be optimized". Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts. Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts which make up its 'diverse, specialized structures and subfunctions'." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)

"The Systems engineering method recognizes each system is an integrated whole even though composed of diverse, specialized structures and sub-functions. It further recognizes that any system has a number of objectives and that the balance between them may differ widely from system to system. The methods seek to optimize the overall system functions according to the weighted objectives and to achieve maximum compatibility of its parts." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)

"The homeostatic principle does not apply literally to the functioning of all complex living systems, in that in counteracting entropy they move toward growth and expansion." (Daniel Katz, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)

"Traditional organizational theories have tended to view the human organization as a closed system. This tendency has led to a disregard of differing organizational environments and the nature of organizational dependency on environment. It has led also to an over-concentration on principles of internal organizational functioning, with consequent failure to develop and understand the processes of feedback which are essential to survival." (Daniel Katz, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)

"Despite two centuries of study, the integrals of general dynamical systems remain covered with darkness. To save the classical thermostatics, the practical success of which is shown by the wide use to which it has been put, we must find a way out. That is, we must find some mathematical connection between time averages of the functions of physical interest and the corresponding simple canonical averages." (Clifford Truesdell, "Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy", 1966)

"Traditional organizational theories have tended to view the human organization as a closed system. This tendency has led to a disregard of differing organizational environments and the nature of organizational dependency on environment. It has led also to an over-concentration on principles of internal organizational functioning, with consequent failure to develop and understand the processes of feedback which are essential to survival." (Daniel Katz, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966)

"The mathematical models for many physical systems have manifolds as the basic objects of study, upon which further structure may be defined to obtain whatever system is in question. The concept generalizes and includes the special cases of the cartesian line, plane, space, and the surfaces which are studied in advanced calculus. The theory of these spaces which generalizes to manifolds includes the ideas of differentiable functions, smooth curves, tangent vectors, and vector fields. However, the notions of distance between points and straight lines (or shortest paths) are not part of the idea of a manifold but arise as consequences of additional structure, which may or may not be assumed and in any case is not unique." (Richard L Bishop & Samuel I Goldberg, "Tensor Analysis on Manifolds", 1968)

"Perhaps the most important single characteristic of modern organizational cybernetics is this: That in addition to concern with the deleterious impacts of rigidly-imposed notions of what constitutes the application of good 'principles of organization and management' the organization is viewed as a subsystem of a larger system(s), and as comprised itself of functionally interdependent subsystems." (Richard F Ericson, "Organizational cybernetics and human values", 1969)