Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ TB872: Places to intervene in a system

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I'm going to think about this one for a bit. The post relates the story of  Donella Meadows's intervention in a meeting about the new trade regime (ca 2001) included in Ray Ison's book 'Systems Thinking'. Here Doug Belshaw lists nine (if the eventual 12) places to intervene in a system, from numbers to materials to information flows and more. I look at this and compare it to interventions in a network via weights, bias parameters and activation functions (the big difference between the two is that a system is teleological, ie., goal directed, while the network is ateleological, that is, not goal directed). How well do these two lists match up? Here also is the full list of 12.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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