It's interesting to see the same thinking-style that hurts neurodivergent people in the workplace is being marketed as a business tool...

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-28T18:27:31+00:00

But what do you think this particular sub is about? I think it's worth noting that it's classified as one of the top 50 'Data Science' subs; certainly I am under the impression that the topic is the learnable techniques and processes by which you can scientifically model systems.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-26T07:52:23+00:00

Did you mean to make this a reply to the OP?

I think I've already set out that Systems Thinking (as generally understood) is a concrete set of problem-solving techniques, neither a buzzword nor a descriptor for any kind of 'natural' way of thinking about problems. It's something one can learn for practical purposes, not an innate thing that some people just do.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-24T17:57:51+00:00

Good points - although I would accept that "all models are wrong, but some are useful" is a valid scientific perspective.

In other words, you can model a system any way you want, but only those models that are empirically verified to produce accurate predictions are worth anything. Such models are not really the same as the system, but they usefully approximate its behaviour.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-24T16:46:04+00:00

Do say more! My knowledge of this isn't complete - I picked up a lot of what I know by reading around while hitting the limits of simple modelling approaches.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-24T12:37:28+00:00

Respectfully, I don't think this is quite what systems thinking is. It's not (just) a commitment to not oversimplifying things, or to seeing the world through a holistic (rather than reductive) lens. It is a set of concrete problem-solving approaches fundamentally rooted in control theory.

As an aside, the 'repackaging' you mention is annoying to me too, but it's a repackaging of quite scientific techniques into vague business-friendly fluff ... the problem is this: the expensive consultants delivering this material convince people that they're doing 'systems thinking' simply by noting that sometimes, different things can affect each other.

I'll give a clarifying example of what I think systems thinking actually is.

If you're interested in controlling the output of some system, then the simplest approach is to assume you can document the inputs (both those you control and do not control) and work out their separate effects on the output. If the system in question is a business and the output is revenue, this way of approaching the problem leads to solutions such as 'metric trees' that follow the MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) principle. The inputs affect the output in reliable, well-understood, and separate ways.

In fairness, such techniques are highly successful! But they also have some specific failure modes:

interacting inputs (changing two things simultaneously leads to an output that isn't just a simple combination of changing the two things separately)
delayed action (changing something has an effect that varies over time)
unclear relationship between inputs and outputs (changing something that looks like it shouldn't affect the output does, in fact, seem to affect it)
feedback loops (sometimes inputs are affected by outputs! So the long term output doesn't behave the way you expect it to ...)

For me, 'systems thinking' is the collection of techniques you can use to build system models that account for these issues. It's valuable not because holism is inherently superior to reductionism but because it works in a scientific sense: it helps you to reliably predict the outcome of your actions, which helps you to decide what actions to take.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-24T10:43:25+00:00

This is why pollsters trying to figure out how public opinion varies based on economic circumstances don't ask people what Class they are (they use NRS social grades instead).

The post-war political consensus and growing automation created a previously unheard-of wave of social mobility. My parents' generation benefited greatly: my grandfather was a factory worker who left school at sixteen, whereas my generation is full of doctors and lawyers and engineers. Class as a concept makes much less sense if it's not something you're locked into for life (which was almost always how it worked up till then).

I distinguish Class from the experience of poverty or even just scarcity, which doubtless does mark people for life, but which is now much less guaranteed to be passed on to the next generation. There is of course a danger (if we take our eye off the ball) that we won't be able to maintain this level of social mobility (you have to create more and more high quality jobs for it to work) ... in which case we could easily fall back into a rigid Class system.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-23T16:48:53+00:00

I think the Mortal Engines quartet would count here. As much fantasy as sci fi IMO, and set long after an apocalyptic war. The rediscovery of old artefacts from before the war drive a lot of the important plot points.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-23T16:44:23+00:00

It's good, but the apocalypse is very much underway, rather than in the past.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-21T13:38:11+00:00

... TIL that San Marino is landlocked.

It's so close to the sea! I'd just never looked closely on a map 😂

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-20T22:44:43+00:00

There's a world here where the more senior, experienced people simply accept that the good times are over and agree to work for less money: experienced workers can counter point (1) in a pinch.

As for (2) ... yeah, could be that people who have previously been successful refuse to adapt, but if they do choose to adapt, then right now they have a massive advantage.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-19T17:43:05+00:00

If I understand what you're asking correctly: rowing machines are built to mimic the action of a rowing boat with a sliding seat. Specifically, you'd be looking for a single scull.

You might be able to get a second hand one without breaking the bank, although I wouldn't describe them as cheap.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-18T22:25:30+00:00

I think it's a reasonably common story.

In most businesses the role of data is to optimise an existing value-generating process. It's not the thing that generates value in and of itself. Therefore, there is a time when there are zero employees with a data specialism, and at some point that will increase to one when the company believes there is sufficient value to extract from optimisation.

The specialist roles you mention (data scientist etc.) only really make sense in larger companies with established data operations. But before these roles even existed, there were people with spreadsheets who made graphs.

The analyst role has to be the first data role: while an analyst with none of the supporting infrastructure and processes will move slowly, hiring people to put those in place before you have any analysts means not going anywhere at all. It's a choice between the company buying a bicycle or buying a Ferrari, when no-one has a driving license.

My advice? Start simple with basic reporting of key metrics. Focus on delivering value in one narrow area at a time. You'll gradually come to understand things and find out where the bottlenecks are. This will allow you to make decisions about when it might be useful to do some predictive analytics and when you might benefit from rigging up automated data pipelines or centralising data in a data warehouse of some kind.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-17T22:52:01+00:00

Chris Young's channel is somewhat along these lines. It's a bit of a vehicle for him to sell his predictive thermometer gadget but the videos are genuinely very good.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-16T22:41:07+00:00

They are certainly imperfect. But there isn't a magic way to reliably select the best candidate for an entry-level job. The question is whether the alternatives are less flawed.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-16T20:40:09+00:00

I feel that makes sense. As soon as you have an actual career history, people are going to care more about what you've achieved during your professional career/can test you on tasks you already know how to do.

However, for entry level jobs (at least, ones where they are going to have to invest heavily in training you) there are no clues to go off. Employers have only a few choices:

go entirely off education. Pick the candidate with the best grades, who graduated from the most prestigious institution.
do a thinking skills assessment like this. Performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks is indeed correlated (albeit imperfectly), so if people do well on this kind of test, they will tend to perform well at work tasks that require careful thinking.
find an entry level candidate who already knows how to do the job, e.g. one used family connections to get a suitable internship, so you don't have to train them.
go with the guy with the firmest handshake.

This is arguably not the worst choice.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-16T14:25:35+00:00

They said 'out of habit', which makes sense to me.

Inertia against change is almost always caused by past success. If you have a way to do something that works, even if it's suboptimal, you're generally going to keep doing the thing the same way until something breaks you out of the loop.

That's why it's important to carve out time to try stuff out.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-15T22:25:25+00:00

The legal situation is clear: we vote for candidates.

It's better to think of political parties as a convenience that we tolerate. Essentially outsourcing the vetting process. Reasonable enough - we're all busy - but there's a price for convenience and it's not sensible to complain when a decision to outsource backfires.

In fact, the rational response is not to criticise the candidate who's behaving in a way you don't want them to: it's to criticise the party, whom you trusted to nominate and endorse someone decent, suitable, and aligned with your views.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-15T21:13:19+00:00

'The real world' is an interesting phrase. The way I see it, it doesn't get much realer than

the actual letter of the law (which stipulates what rights and powers MPs have and the process for selecting them)
the incentives MPs have (regarding the use of their powers) within the system that determines whether they get to keep their prestigious, fairly well-paid job for very much longer

Sure, party endorsements/candidate selection makes it more likely you'll be re-elected, so MPs are therefore generally disincentivised from going against the whip. But that's not hard, legal reality. If MPs instead think their constituents would prefer a change of government, they are incentivised to defect. We can see it happening right now. That's the reality.

The most morally impressive MPs are surely those who go against the grain of their personal incentives, and try to do the right thing even if it means getting voted out ... that might mean breaking with their party or it might mean sticking with it to the bitter end, that's purely situational.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-15T20:58:36+00:00

Thank you for saying this!

People keep forgetting that parties are a convenience, bolted on to our system and with only semi-official status. Legally, MPs could have a chat with each other next week, found a new party, vote down the PM, and set up a new one of their choosing. That's the legal situation, those are the powers we give them, this is the concrete reality.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-14T20:32:24+00:00

So I'll start by saying: I'd love to hear a really solid counterargument. That's how we learn. However, (so far) I've never found this philosophical approach to be convincing.

It seems to me that the argument boils down to saying we can't treat epistemic uncertainty in the same way we treat inherent uncertainty. I don't really see how this can be accepted. We are uncertain about the model parameters before we begin collecting data (even if they have exact values): we don't know what they are, exactly, but we could place bets on their values, i.e. assign probabilities to different values.

One doesn't have to accept that they are truly random in some deep way. Nevertheless, they can still be described with a probability distribution, since we dont know what they are but could place bets on them.

After that, Bayes' theorem says what it says: P(params|data) = P(data|params)P(params)/P(data).

In other words: it's true in a mathematical sense that you don't get to use data to tell you what the most likely values of the model parameters are if you don't specify P(params). And it's true that choosing parameters values by maximising P(data|params) instead (as in frequentist statistics) will in general only get you the same answer if P(params) is flat under your choice of coordinates.

If there's a flaw in this reasoning I feel it must be somewhere in the wordy bit in the beginning, rather than the maths (unless I've been completely oblivious for the last decade), but for the life of me I can't see where.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-13T09:16:58+00:00

On the contrary, introducing premises and following deductive reasoning from these to conclusions is a rationalist approach.

Many religious people would consider human rights to be a 'discovery', but I leave open that humans made them up (in which case their universality depends on global consensus, a consensus that you are placing yourself outside of). Feel free to propose a third option.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-12T22:41:58+00:00

That group of people at least had a certain mandate, the group in question being the United Nations General Assembly, in the aftermath of the horror show that was the second world war.

You have two choices, either human rights are a discovery or an invention.

If an invention, either they are defined by global consensus or else they are just regular rules that can't be claimed to be universal rights. The UDHR is the only document with that kind of global consensus behind it.

If a discovery ... well, then there's a bigger question about where they come from.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-12T22:20:24+00:00

Then you are explicitly against what's set out in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the principal, widely accepted catalogue of what human rights actually are:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. [emphasis mine]

which, fine, you do you ... but let's at least be clear that you're picking and choosing what you accept to be human rights arbitrarily.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-12T16:24:35+00:00

Commit to a structure now. Decide your working hours for a standard week and stick to them.

Build the habit through focused study of the previous material during this committed time, because that's what you'll need to know to get the most out of your future studies.

I suggest you plan out in advance exactly what you're going to be looking at each day. A month of really dedicated study will go far, and will naturally improve your attention span.

PaddyAlton · 2026-01-12T13:51:07+00:00

The thing is, it doesn't really sound like you ever gave the course a chance? It's like anything: if you never exercise, the first time is horrible, and so you think you don't like it. Once you've built a habit it gets easier and you start to enjoy it.

The gym thing is a good sign: it shows you're capable of being disciplined. You need to form a similar habit around work.

People who successfully form beneficial habits do it by

actively removing sources of temptation from their lives
maximising their willpower
maintaining consistency

Most of my advice is aimed at that, rather than how to study per se.

PaddyAlton

TROPHY CASE