Best Systems Theory Quotes

"The entire system we live in is nothing but a giant energy conversion apparatus and machine."

"Systems don't work that way; you have to get the incentives right."

"These patterns emerge from the interaction of independent entities."

"The outcome only emerges as a result of interaction."

"The best incentive is no incentive, a distributed system with no incentive breeds natural alignment among stakeholders to maintain forward progress."

"Systems do not create themselves; they are created through the minds of men."

"Put a working system in place and trust the system."

"It's my belief that in two anti-fragile systems, the ones that continually evolve faster and self-anneal faster will come out the winner."

"An accident is a thing that exists in four walls: a nuclear power plant, an oil tanker. This contained thing. But something I try and do is blow out that theory to look at the much larger systems we have that correlate directly to accidents."

"The most interesting things tend to be dynamic, deterministic, nonlinear systems."

"High-dimensional systems exhibit emergent stability."

"All complex systems by definition are not non-linear."

"Complex systems can be based on simple rules. That's the big revelation."

"How does complicated global structure and behavior arise from simple local rules?"

"I think emergence is very powerful and emergence certainly happens and we have many scenarios in which highly parallel active implementation of local simple rules gives you some kind of complex emergent outcome."

"So the idea is that you have the environment, you have the population, you have technology, and you have social organization, and these constitute a system, right, which interacts with each other; and what ought to be studied is really this whole system."

"The more integrated the system is, the more holistic it is, and the more it's more than just the sum of its parts."

"They form this coherent system with new behaviors both anatomically and behaviorally."

"Life is complex and systems are self-referring."

"The characteristic equation for most linear time-invariant systems: roots determine stability."

"Everything we manage is self-organizing in system science, everything we manage is defined as a self-organizing complex system."

"The whole actually organizes the parts."

"Entirely new properties emerge that are not explainable by the constituent parts."

"Over time, the system will dance around and it will eventually come to an equilibrium state that we want."

"The passivity theorem states that if we have two passive systems placed in negative feedback, then this will produce a stable closed loop system."

"For all of our history as a species, we've contrasted two types of system: ordered systems and chaotic systems."

"Complex systems are systems with many interacting parts that show emergent behaviors."

"General System Theory is the study of wholeness."

"We can see the economy as a dynamic system in the same way we're now realizing the body is."

"If you know its impulse response, you know everything there is to know about an LTI system."

"When I speak of systems that self-organize, I mean something that starts out in a very disordered state and which somehow through its own dynamics spontaneously gets much more organized."

"Emergence is the emergence of order spontaneously out of complex interactive systems."

"Life is to be seen as a layered system in which each layer has indeed demands its own vocabulary."

"A transfer function basically tells us what is the output if you multiply it with the input, you get the output."

"You can never evaluate a system from within that system."

"Entropy means measure of disintegration; every system, if it is not supported by constant input, tends to decay itself."

"A system is a whole which is defined by its function in a larger system of which it is a part."

"Dynamical systems are either a differential equation with an output function or just an output function, and they're pretty much how we model everything."

"Emergent properties result from the arrangement and interaction of parts within a system."

"We know that linear systems benefit from the fact that linear superposition holds."

"Emergence is the idea that you can take the small parts in a system and look at the interactions between them and put them in a simulated environment and watch the complexity of that system emerge spontaneously."

"A complex adaptive system isn't causal, it's dispositional."

"A system is an entity that is separable from the surroundings or the environment of the system by means of physical or conceptual boundaries."

"It's a reverberating system on itself."

"Reality is systems based on systems based on systems, therefore God."

"Life is an open system, there's a throughput of energy and export of chaos."

"Optimization refers to a set of algorithms which can be applied to a mathematical model of a system."

"A system which is completely flexible cannot survive; a system which is completely rigid also cannot survive."

"This is the output \( y(t) \) of a linear time invariant system if these are the inputs and this is the impulse response."

"Complex exponentials are eigenfunctions for all such systems."

"Systems which are allowed to reach harmony naturally tend to lie just upon the edge of chaos."

"Virtually any actual system is nonlinear to a certain extent, at least when examined in sufficiently fine detail."

"The idea is that what we wanted to do was exploit the properties of linearity and time invariance for linear time-invariant systems."

"Systems do bifurcate; they do change dramatically and qualitatively sometimes when tiny changes in my parameter can cause big changes in my system."

"The transfer function is a property of the system, not the input."

"A system could be a collection of some physical components, biological components, sometimes even abstract components, which talk to each other to kind of perform an intended objective."

"A linear system is the system for which the output varies linearly with the input."

"The system state is the collection of state variables necessary to describe the system at a particular time."

"An increase in A causes an increase in B, which causes an increase in C, but this time the effect of C on A is to remove the increase, so now we get a stable system, a negative feedback system."

"A system is stable if the system comes back to its equilibrium state when the system is subject to an initial condition."

"Every linear time invariant system is characterized by the impulse response."

"We recall from our previous discussions that a rational transfer function corresponds to a linear constant-coefficient difference equation."

"Two linear shift invariant systems in cascade can be cascaded in either order without affecting the overall transfer function of the system."

"Cybernetics is the science of whole systems, and since everything is part of the system, from atoms to galaxies, it's universal."

"A system is a set of interrelated elements or parts that function as a whole."

"A system that is moving towards a critical point has a high degree of connectivity and interdependence between its subunits."

"Once the system has reached its critical point, even the smallest perturbation can have major consequences."

"This process of non-equilibrium social dynamics is equally applicable to social systems on the micro and macro level."

"The boundary just represents the interface between our system and what's outside of the system."

"There are indeed principles of control which apply whether you are talking about brains or computers or for that matter economies or political systems or anything else."

"There's a whole lot of research these days on how larger systems emerge out of smaller components."

"Every viable system has parts which are themselves viable, and that same viable system with those viable parts is itself part of another viable system."

"I hope you remember all about the cybernetic model of the viable system because this model deeply underlies the story I want to tell you now."

"A system basically is an interconnection of components, a meaningful interconnection which takes in one or more inputs."