General Systems Thinking

I read Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking years ago in college. It was not an assigned book for a course but I came across it at my favorite used bookstore, the Red Cross bookstore in Washington, D.C. where they had the marvelously straight-forward pricing system: Hardbacks - $1, Paperbacks - 50 cents.

With a title as intriguing as An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, it could not be left neglected on the shelves. It appears to be out of print now. I can't have absorbed but 10% of it's insights way back then. I simply had not yet lived long enough. I am reminded of General Systems Thinking from an entry at The Neglected Books Page. Some of the gems:

A state is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again. But no state will ever occur again if we don't lump many states into one 'state.' Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything. Or, codified as The Lump Law:

If we want to learn anything, we musn't try to learn everything.

The Lump Law of course mirrors E.D. Hirsch's observation "In some of our national moods we would like the schools to teach everything, but they cannot. There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities."

Then there is Weinberg's Used Car Law:

1.A way of looking at the world that is not putting excessive stress on an observer need not be changed.
2.A way of looking at the world may be changed to reduce the stress on an observer.

Which of course echoes Alison Gopnik and her research about babies and how their brains develop ("As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new.")

Again:

"All general systems thinking," he writes, starts with one of three questions:

1.Why do I see what I see?
2.Why do things stay the same?
3.Why do things change?

Of our grappling with these questions, Weinberg says,

. . . [W]e can never hope to find the end; we do not intend to try. Our goal is to improve our thinking, not to solve the riddle of the Sphynx.

Which is also why I've found myself returning to An Introduction to General Systems Thinking again and again in the twenty-plus years since I first stumbled across it. I know no better spark to revive a mind that's stuck in dead-end thinking than to open this book, dive into one of Gerald Weinberg's wonderful open-ended questions, and rediscover how one looks at the world.

Again echoing the observation of Gopnik's; babies explore in their thinking while adults exploit.