Thursday, January 26, 2023

Lecture B2 (2023-01-26): Real-world Examples of System "Traps"

In this lecture, we define the term "bounded rationality" as a sort of higher-level modeling trap that often leads to policy choices that can be described in terms of some of the problematic "systems traps" (systems archetypes) described in earlier lectures. We spend most of the lecture providing concrete examples of several of the archetypes, either from history or from general phenomena that frequently occur in human systems. This lets us describe "policy resistance" and how something like the abortion policy decisions in Romania in the 1960's can be viewed with multiple system archetype "lenses" (borrowing an idea from Kim and Lannon, 1997) that each highlight a different aspect of solutions tried and the problems associated with each of them. This lecture is meant to be a library of examples of applications of systems archetypes. The only major new thing introduced in this lecture is "bounded rationality" (and "policy resistance"). The lecture also helps differentiate between "fixes that fail" and "shifting the burden", which are two very related archetypes that lead to focusing on different aspects of the same system.

Whiteboard notes for this lecture can be found at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hce5ypgggontqlg/SOS220-LectureB2-2023-01-26-Real-world_examples_of_system_traps.pdf?dl=0



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