I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.
Any study of a society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands.
When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal.
By cultivating rich social networks, by cultivating weak ties, not just close ties but the weak ties, by becoming connectors and by connecting others so that they connect us, we create a world in which these self-amplifying feedback loops feed on top of each other.
The orbs create feedback loops that can influence either personal of employee behavior.
Phenomena are constantly folded back upon themselves.
Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.
You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.
It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.
What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future.
Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.
The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops.
When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.
If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement
You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.
A decent man who doesn't consider himself a bigot can indeed be trained to behave like a bigot if he welcomes feedback exclusively from those who consider bigotry no big deal or, indeed, an attribute to be admired.
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
We resurrect 'Mezzanine' with a promise that we can break free from the data of the past and escape the feedback loops.
the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine
Closed systems run down and get more chaotic over time. Always get better by being 'open' to outside energy and templates of better ways to function.
The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.
The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty, and this novelty is often qualitatively different from the phenomenon out of which it emerged.
