If people actually want to understand how most systems in life work, they should take sociology and various humanities and science courses, but everyone should take a course on mathematical Systems Analysis including feedback loops and transfer functions.
Virtually every system we encounter in day to day life, from biological ones, to sociological ones, are feedback loops, and understanding the nuances and complexities of how they work, how to analyze them when cause and effect is circular, and how their output changes and can stabilize, destabilize, oscillate, etc. makes a lot of things less confusing.
Feedback circuits can be used to make amplifiers that amplify or deamplify a signal a certain amount, they can be used to make amplifiers that amplify rapidly to catastrophic of explosive failure, or dampeners that will try and reduce any signal to nothing, they can be used to make oscillators that pulse rhythmically at a certain frequency and are the heart of all clock circuits, or they can be used to always hold a steady output regardless of disturbances to their inputs like in gyroscopes and control systems and governors that always try and stay on target… And these are just simple feedback systems created out of a few components by humans, nature’s feedback systems that have evolved over billions of years are wildly more complex.
Circular systems like this can’t be examined through traditional cause and effect logic chains, but they can be analyzed as a system as a whole.
Failure to understand this leads to no end of argument from unproductive ideological or political positions. People want to take one cause in the loop or system and focus blame on that particular group or circumstance. Blame is so counterproductive for solving most of our problems, but our culture is just increasingly programmed for it.
It’s an example of a feedback system.
If people actually want to understand how most systems in life work, they should take sociology and various humanities and science courses, but everyone should take a course on mathematical Systems Analysis including feedback loops and transfer functions.
Virtually every system we encounter in day to day life, from biological ones, to sociological ones, are feedback loops, and understanding the nuances and complexities of how they work, how to analyze them when cause and effect is circular, and how their output changes and can stabilize, destabilize, oscillate, etc. makes a lot of things less confusing.
Feedback circuits can be used to make amplifiers that amplify or deamplify a signal a certain amount, they can be used to make amplifiers that amplify rapidly to catastrophic of explosive failure, or dampeners that will try and reduce any signal to nothing, they can be used to make oscillators that pulse rhythmically at a certain frequency and are the heart of all clock circuits, or they can be used to always hold a steady output regardless of disturbances to their inputs like in gyroscopes and control systems and governors that always try and stay on target… And these are just simple feedback systems created out of a few components by humans, nature’s feedback systems that have evolved over billions of years are wildly more complex.
Circular systems like this can’t be examined through traditional cause and effect logic chains, but they can be analyzed as a system as a whole.
Failure to understand this leads to no end of argument from unproductive ideological or political positions. People want to take one cause in the loop or system and focus blame on that particular group or circumstance. Blame is so counterproductive for solving most of our problems, but our culture is just increasingly programmed for it.