c/complexity - a community focused on Complexity and systems thinking on Lemmy.World

Comments

• JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A more full description would be appreciated, I still have no idea what it’s about. Is this a philosophy? A field of mathematics? A physics concept?

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  • naught101@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There’s a pretty decent broad overview of systems thinking (aka complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems) in the wikipedia page linked in the sidebar - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking

    I’d say it’s more of a way-of-thinking than anything (so I guess philosophy?), kind of a counterpart to reductionism. In practice, it applies (and has been applied) to basically any field, definitely including physics - early work was very physics focused, but later on the field expanded to include economics and other social science questions. There are models that do use maths/computation (especially some of the earlier approaches), but there’s also a lot of qualitative work associated with it as well.

    So I guess the answer to all your questions is “yes”? :)

    The first two posts on the community are good deeper introductions to the field.

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thanks! I guess it’s the super category of things like control theory and model based systems engineering?

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