The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

by Rhiannon Beaubien

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static “snapshots.” » Peter Senge3

Using feedback loops as a lens, we can understand influencing behavior at the margins as instituting a series of incentives that create loops. Over time this feedback changes the system to produce the desired outcomes.

Physician Walter Cannon* coined the term homeostasis in his iconic 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body.

Part of the reason for the change to more patient participation is the acknowledgment that diagnostics and treatments are rarely black and white. In a paper called “Tolerating Uncertainty,” the authors write that “doctors have to make decisions on the basis of imperfect knowledge, which leads to diagnostic uncertainty, coupled with the uncertainty that arises from unpredictable patient response to treatment and from health care outcomes that are far from binary.”2

Since the dawn of time, humans have had to contend with one of our greatest foes: the dark. Without any source of artificial light, once the sun goes down, our eyes are ill-equipped to see our surroundings, and we cannot keep watch for danger. Nor can we carry out useful daytime activities like making tools or foraging for food. For this reason, throughout history people have been willing to put a remarkable amount of effort and ingenuity into developing artificial light and making it better, safer, cheaper, and accessible to more people. Each time the technology available to supply us with light has improved, there have been two interesting results. We’ve had to scale up the infrastructure necessary to fuel it, and we’ve changed our productivity scale.

« The professionals plan for “mild randomness” and misunderstand “wild randomness.” They learn from the averages and overlook the outliers. Thus they consistently, predictably, underestimate catastrophic risk. » Benoit Mandelbrot

Complex adaptive systems have properties that are greater than the sum of their parts. You cannot understand them from studying their individual components, which may be simple but which interact in unpredictable, nonlinear ways.

In Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell defines a complex system as one “in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.”3

« No gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. » Murray Gell-Mann6

Ideas move in a progression: unthinkable ≥ radical ≥ acceptable ≥ sensible ≥ popular ≥ policy.1

« You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something. » Robert M. Pirsig2

Conclusion If all outcomes could be planned for by mixing specific components together, the world would be a boring place. Emergence reminds us that not all capabilities are obvious, and the innocuous can combine and surprise us. Using this mental model is not about trying to predict emergent properties but rather acknowledging they are possible. So don’t always stick with what you know. Learn new skills, interact with new people. Working and sharing with others can create unexpected possibilities.

What Popular Culture Gets Wrong about the Butterfly Effect The image of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon is a vivid one, and it’s no surprise it went on to inspire endless films, books, songs, and motivational quotes. It’s unusual for a mathematical idea to become so mainstream. The idea of a tiny thing having a big impact on the world is powerful. But this is a misreading of the actual meaning of the butterfly effect.1 It’s not that the wing flap causes the typhoon; it’s that the difference in starting conditions between a world where the butterfly flaps its wings and one where it doesn’t is sufficient to mean a typhoon in one and not the other. Chaotic systems are so sensitive to starting conditions that the minutest differences can lead to highly divergent outcomes. We cannot, however, look at an outcome and say that a particular change in conditions caused it. Within chaotic systems, no moment is any more significant than any other. Every single moment changes everything that happens after.

« Horror is fear of the unknown. Terror is fear of the known. » Ric Meyers24

For Epicurus, paying attention to the knowledge we gain from our experiences is critical for achieving a pain-free life. We need to be in tune with ourselves, noticing how our actions impact our bodies and psychological states. We also need to actively perform second-order thinking, considering the effects of the effects of our actions. Epicurean philosophy thus invites us to reconceptualize what we consider pleasure in order to attain that pain-free median at the top of the curve. Wilson explains that “regardless of the trouble other people can cause for us, Epicurus believed close human relationships to be the greatest source of pleasure in life.”7 Pleasure is not then about the attainment of things, status, and stuff, but the interactions we have and the knowledge we gain from them. It is a philosophy of experience rather than consumption.

« Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest. » Naval Ravikant1