12 Quotes Tagged: systems

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

[...] Queste difficoltà possono essere risolte nel modo migliore facendo buon viso a cattivo gioco. I ritardi possono essere tollerati accettandoli ed elaborando una scansione temporale che li preveda. Si può poi tollerare una certa imprecisione nella risposta pensando in termini di <>. Così invece di dire: <>, noi diremo: <>. Le varie classi devono essere del tutto distinte e ben lontane dal sovrapporsi, cioé - topologicamente parlando - potremmo dire che devono avere tra loro una distanza finita. Con una decisione del genere avremo introdotto una ben definita divisione del lavoro tra il matematico e l'ingegnere, che permetterà a ognuno dei due di andare avanti senza preoccuparsi se le sue assunzioni siano in accordo con quelle dell'altro.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.

"It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task
which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for,
and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence canjump out of
its task, but that does not mean that it always will. However, a little prompt-
ing will often suffice. For example, a human being who is reading a book
may grow sleepy. Instead of continuing to read until the book is finished,
he is just as likely to put the book aside and turn off the light. He has
stepped "out of the system" and yet it seems the most natural thing in the
world to us. Or, suppose person A is watching television when person B
comes in the room, and shows evident displeasure with the situation.
Person A may think he understands the problem, and try to remedy it by
exiting the present system (that television program), and flipping the chan-
nel knob, looking for a better show. Person B may have a more radical
concept of what it is to "exit the system"-namely to turn the television off!
Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision
to perceive a system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had
never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often
devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there,
and that it ought to be exited from!"

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change

When you see a problem or an opportunity, I want you to shift your thinking from “We need a solution for that” to “We need a system for that.” A solution is a onetime fix that requires you to keep reinventing the wheel and puts you in a reactionary place. A system is an ongoing activity that becomes duplicatable.

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.