mini-book title: Radical Double-Linking for Organizational Learning and Worker Quality of Life Improvement

Too long, taking suggestions. “Worker Empowerment” would be ideal but the word Empowerment has been ruined.

#cybernetics #sociocracy #ViableSystemsModel

@systemspractitioner I'm not working in these fields but I'm interested, so I'm going to answer anyway. 😀

In my opinion, systems thinking is also about improving existing systems (e.g. the #ViableSystemsModel as a debugging tool for systems). Systems thinking can uncover the impact of the environment on the system, thus showing that no matter how hard a system is trying to improve, it might still be sabotaged by the environment.

I think the (Self-)Improvement industry often does not want us to know that our ability to self-improve is limited or even sabotaged by the environment (#capitalism).
E.g. a person in danger of poverty will have difficulties improving their artistic expression.

So the conflict is between the profit interests of the self-improvement industry and the privatization of "personal issues" on the one side and a systems perspective on the other side. I hope that makes any sense to you.

@libsoc I don't like the mixup of #hierarchy and #dominance or #oppression. There are hierarchical structures that are not oppressive and can be useful, like the hierarchical organization pattern of books in a library, the structure of federated organizations in the #InternationalOfAnarchistFederations or the structure in a #ViableSystemsModel. Those hierarchies can be called functional hierarchies, and they are ok even from #anarchist perspectives. Dominance, oppression, and power over people, on the other hand, are never ok.

Most fields have only a few laws.

I've been diving into #StaffordBeer over the past few days, #cybernetics guru of the 1970s-90s. His concepts of #AshbysLaw of #RequisiteVariety, and of #ViableSystemsModel get toward this. Notably, a model should be as simple as possible, but no simpler (Einstein).

An overly complex model invites #overfitting

Breakthroughs in domains occur where an accumulation of many complex rules can be discarded for a small set of simpler ones. Physics: Newton on gravity, motion, and optics. Chemistry: Mendeleev on chemical elements (valance electrons and atomic masses), Biology: Darwin and evolution (and genetics and DNA). Geology: Wegener and plate tectonics. Information; Shannon. Computer science: Turing & Church.

The social sciences have been approached repeatedly by their core truth but to date have rejected it.

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