Quotes About Systems

relationships are the real, evolving, living systems of human culture.

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

It [Iranian Islamic Revolution] is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.

I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival.

Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives—and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism.

Human spoken language seems to be adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.

Never in all history has man had to face such terrible dangers. He is at the point where he is no longer sure of being able to control the situation. The economic, political, and military systems he has established have turned against him and imposed themselves upon him.

We all have trust in the judicial systems.

what characterizes the empirical method is its manner of exposing to falsification, in every conceivable way, the system to be tested. Its aim is not to save the lives of untenable systems but, on the contrary, to select the one which is by comparison the fittest, by exposing them all to the fiercest struggle for survival.

In the words of the systems thinker John Sterman, 'The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what's not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them'.

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows—one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report

At the heart of systems thinking lie three deceptively simple concepts: stocks and flows, feedback loops, and delay. They sound straightforward enough, but the mind-boggling business begins when they start to interact. Out of their interplay emerge many of the surprising,

If reinforcing feedbacks are what make a system move, then balancing feedbacks are what stop it from exploding or imploding. They counter and offset what is happening and, so, tend to regulate systems.

effective systems tend to have three properties—healthy hierarchy, self-organisation and resilience—and so should be stewarded to enable these characteristics to emerge.

healthy hierarchy is achieved when nested systems serve the greater whole of which they are a part. Liver cells serve the liver, which in turn serves the human body; if those cells start to multiply rapidly, they become a cancer, no longer serving but destroying the body on which they depend.

As long as I do a good job, I believe the future is going to take care of itself, but actually I like very much being in elected office and there is no consideration about doing anything different until I can be assured that we are going to have the best voting systems in the country.

The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops.

Systems thinking is "contextual," which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.

Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped.

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.

The bottom line here -- and I use the phrase with an eye to the mind-set that promotes these 'systems' -- is that I am increasingly devoting more time to the generation and recording of data and less time to the educational substance of what the data is supposed to measure. Think of it as a man who develops ever more elaborate schemes for counting his money, even as he forfeits more and more of his time for earning the money he counts.