Subject: Metaphors

Posted by Linda Booth Sweeney on 2/1/2006
In Reply To:Metaphors Posted by Richard Turnock on 1/27/2006

Message:

Richard,
I share Niall’s appreciation for this posting. I’m intrigued by your search for an “adequate” definition of a feedback loop. For the few years now, I’ve been pulling together a culturally diverse inventory of systems-based folklore, myths, proverbs and teaching tales and include some pop culture examples as well. I’ve been doing this because, for many, the language, metaphors and graphics used to describe system behaviors can be, as Richard says, inaccessible. I wonder if any of what I’ve collected might be helpful?

Here are a few examples:

There is a Buddhist teaching used in everyday Japanese culture -- 因果律を出す - “cause and effect will reply and return.” This phrase helps us to get to the notion of feedback, but perhaps is a bit abstract, at least in its English translation.

This Chinese proverb gets right to the notion of vicious and virtuous reinforcing loops...
“Learning that does not daily increase will daily decrease.”

In the following sonnet written by Kenneth Boulding (one of my all-time favorite “systems thinkers”), he describes the reinforcing dynamics that underlie the notion that there can be “too much of a good thing” (and, perhaps, shifting dominance?):

“We must always be on the look out for perverse dynamic processes
which carry even good things to excess.
It is precisely these excesses which become the most evil things…
The devil, after all, is a fallen angel.” Kenneth Boulding, Sonnets



I’ll keep looking. Thanks for the push.

Linda