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p.36 Even the most renaissance of renaissance men these days cannot hope to know more than a very small
fraction of what is known by somebody. The general systems man, therefore, is constantly taking leaps in the dark,
constantly jumping to conclusions on insufficient evidence, constantly, in fact, making a fool of himself. Indeed,
willingness to make a fool of oneself should almost be a requirement for admission to the Society for General Systems
Research, for willingness is almost a prerequisite to rapid learning.
p.36 To be a successful generalist, then, we must approach complex systems with a certain naive
simplicity. We must be as little children, for we have much evidence that children learn most of their more complex
ideas in just this manner, first forming a general impression of the whole and only then passing down to more particular discriminations.
p.37 No approach, be it analytic or synthetic, can guarantee a flawless search for understanding. Each approach
has its characteristic errors.
p.37 Lord Rayleigh once remarked that: It happens not infrequently that results in the form of "laws" are
put forward as novelties on the basis of elaborate experiments, which might have been predicted a priori after a
few minutes consideration.
This is the characteristic error of analysis. Though in the long run it always rewards our patience,
in the long run, as Keynes noted, we shall all be dead. Therefore, those who are impatient with precise methods are attracted
to the general systems approach... To be a successful generalist, one must study the art of ignoring data and of seeing
the "mere outlines" of things.
p.43 The main role of models is not so much to explain and to predict - though ultimately these are the
main functions of science - as to polarize thinking and to pose sharp questions... The "survival of the fittest" applies
to models even more than it does to living creatures.
p.45 The general systems approach, then, can engender a parsimony of thought for the study of subjects.
[JLJ - parsimony: n.
- Unusual or excessive frugality; extreme economy or stinginess.
- Adoption of the simplest assumption in the formulation of a theory or in the interpretation of data, especially in accordance
with the rule of Ockham's razor.]
p.52 a system is a way of looking at the world.
p.55 Perception responds just as well to illusion as to reality
p.60 Properties "emerge" for a particular observer when he could not or did not predict their appearance.
p.61 A system is a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their
attributes.
p.160-161 To revive our handyman analogy, science has been working in the same neighborhood
for a few hundred years. It has a particular box of tools, transformations to apply in the search for invariant properties,
with which it has been able to solve many of the local repair problems. But after a while, we begin to have a residue
of problems - the ones the handyman cannot fix with his particular set of tools. The systems researcher sees
the residue, the situations in the world that science cannot, or has not, brought under its control.
This residue consists of two parts. First, there are those situations in which present scientific
methods could work, but have not, either because they have never been tried or because they have been tried without
proper imagination and understanding... Second, there are those situations in which the present tool kit will prove
insufficient. These second situations are the proper concern of the general systems movement.
p.171 In my own case, pursuit of operational analysis has resulted in the conviction, a conviction which
has increased with practice, that it is better to analyze in terms of doings or happenings than in terms of objects
or static abstractions.
P.W. Bridgmen
p.177 "We can talk about any problem. Solving is another matter..."
p.196 If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it.
p.199 As we have seen, discovery of independent variables leads to economy of thought. Where there are no dependencies,
we could study fewer variables and obtain the same precision of prediction... As usual, the choice of system properties must
be a compromise between the convenience of independence and the necessity for completeness.
p.203 Science may be thought of as the process of learning which ways of looking at things yield invariant laws. The
laws of science may thus be descriptions of how the world looks ("Eureka" - I have found), or prescriptions
for how to look at the world ("heuristic" - how to find). We really have no way of knowing which."
p.236 If you look at automata which have been built by men or which exist in nature you will very
frequently notice that their structure is controlled to a much larger extent by the manner in which they might fail and by
the (more or less effective) precautionary measures which have been taken against their failure... they are arrangements
by which it is attempted to achieve a state where at least a majority of all failures will not be lethal... All we
can do is to arrange an automaton so that in the vast majority of failures it can continue to operate... John von Neumann
p.251 we live in a world surrounded by systems whose "structure is controlled to a much larger extent by
the manner in which they might fail and by the precautionary measures which have been taken against their failure." ... Small
changes in structure usually lead to small changes in behavior.
p.252 Small changes in behavior will usually be found to result from small changes in structure.
p.253 Stress is the state manifested by a specific syndrome which consists of all the non-specifically induced
changes within a biological system.
The elements of its form... can express the sum of all the different adjustments that are going on
in the body at any time. Hans Selye
p.255 the organism that keeps down the total stress need not adapt, but that the organism will adapt,
or collapse, once the stress reaches an unacceptable level.
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