Why an over-reliance on system-thinking may be holding you back
Table of Contents:
- An analogy between an over-reliance on genetic gifts: brute-strength and logic-based intelligence
- Types of thinking - Accumulatory vs Exception based
- The bias in choosing the pattern
- Escaping the bias of low-depth pattern repositories
- Becoming multidimensional thinkers
Notes: - I use the word pattern but the meaning is interchangeable with first-principles, first principles are a collection of axiomatic patterns, patterns we internally do not question the veracity of. The more you have of these, the more complex patterns you are able to build by using the first-principles like lego building blocks of logic.
An analogy between an over-reliance on genetic gifts: brute-strength and logic-based intelligence
We live in a period of unprecedented peace. After all, until about 80 years ago mankind was a warring species. This becomes even more true if you go further back. Physical security was constantly at risk, and hence, the male of the society may have come to be prized and preferred for their physical abilities. This was not the only reason but in my view an important one. In these times, the highest achievements were associated with the physical capabilities of the body. Thanks to their genetics, people who were born with brute strength were able to easily overpower the average and the weaker. These people, you can imagine, did not have to work very hard to earn their keep. In any war, an excess of 90% of the soldiers are within two standard deviations from average. Those gifted with abilities three standard deviations out could conceivably fight many battles before coming upon someone who posed a threat. If this opponent was similarly gifted, then it was a battle of innate strengths; the more gifted one wins.
However, there was a different kind of opponent that they could encounter. The ones who went beyond their strength (or lack thereof) and disciplined themselves into becoming the finest warriors they could. From a young age, these individuals honed their physical capabilities to their limit, the difference being that they don’t rely on a single overpowering ability. Put simply, they don’t rely just on their strength. They develop the ability to strike at vital points so that they are most efficiently able to immobilize a person. Even the strongest person is not much of a threat if their knee cap or legs are taken out. They practice their swordsmanship so they can parry a blow before it comes so that they can see an opening in an attack that the attacker themself isn’t even aware of. They are able to tell which way a sword is going to swing based on the grip, the leaning of the body weight and the movement of the eyes. These are subtle clues that operate at the most granular level of operation. You wouldn’t think to consider such details if you are quite strong, you never needed to rely on these subtleties. Your strength was enough.
Fast forward to the present world, pure physical strength is not valued as much by society because of unprecedented peace. Now we value mental prowess, what we generically refer to as intelligence. Howard Gardner posits the existence of at least 8 types of intelligence that go beyond the purely cognitive ones we like to default to. These include kinesthetic, clerical, spatial, musical and logical (to name a few). Let us focus on logical intelligence, which is associated with a more common-sense meaning of the word intelligence. A particular aspect of this that is favored in technical jobs, academia, computer science applications, and scientific research is “systems thinking”.
Types of thinking - Accumulatory vs Exception based
Thinking in systems is a powerful ability. It is the ability to take a set of facts and glean the underlying pattern that connects those facts. You could say that most people are system thinkers by that definition, and that is generally true. However, the difference is in the edges. There are two types of thinking that I will lay out, one is called the accumulatory and the other is called the exceptional. In accumulatory thinking, the brain takes a set of facts and is constantly coming up with a hypothesis of the underlying pattern and adopting that as a general rule until contrary evidence presents itself. When contrary evidence presents itself, the pattern is updated to account for the new fact and updated throughout.
For example, seeing a few chairs you are able to generate a hypothesis pattern that chairs usually have 4 legs, a base, and a backrest. This pattern holds until a chair with 3 legs shows itself. You update the general pattern of the number of legs and leave being a stable, supported system with a base and backrest unchanged. Then you come across an office chair with wheels, and now you again update the rule. Then you come across a stool, and you realize this can also function as a chair, but it doesn’t have a backrest, so you generalize the definition to something stable you can sit on. Then you come across a beanbag, and that cannot be called a stable system. So you further refine your pattern of a chair. This process continues, indefinitely. However, with each change, the probability of a subsequent change decreases.
Since most of us do this without even trying, we can see that this is a general skill humans have. The difference is in our ability to use this skill in more complex domains. Science is the process of extracting these underlying patterns by running experiments and using those as the facts to build a hypothesis of a pattern on. Since we know not all of us can be scientists, there must be another way of thinking.
The exceptional way of thinking is one where the most important characteristic is not the pattern but the exception. If a pattern can explain 80% of the actual happening (which is a pretty good explanatory power) the pattern is still not accepted and internalized because of the 20% that it cannot. An example of this is in the work of Noam Chomsky, who has extensively studied language out of his own curiosity and noticed the pattern of similarity in the mechanics of language across cultures, geographies, and time; and posited the general pattern of a Universal Grammar. This is an appreciation of the fact that human brains seem to have a common underlying structure that seems to hold a universal grammar system that enables us to learn something as complex as language so easily when we are young. While he calls it universal, people have found remote tribes in the Amazon that seem to have developed a simple language system that deviates from the Universal Grammar rules that Chomsky laid out. In essence, a vast majority of languages seem to fit the pattern, but exception based thinkers argue that we cannot give it as much importance because of the few deviations observed from it. Here the important thing is not the pattern, but rather the exception. That is what I mean by exception thinkers.
Exception thinkers do very well in operations, supply chain, logistics, crime-analysis, and so on where the most important things are the exceptions, while accumulators make good scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians.
The bias in choosing the pattern
Hence system-thinkers tend to be accumulators. As accumulators the skill is in choosing the pattern. Recognizing novel patterns on the fly is extremely hard, especially in adulthood. When we are children we engage in some of the most sophisticated pattern recognition and accumulations that we will ever do in our lives. The reason is that a baby’s brain is a hyperconnected collection of neurons. This means that our brain is never more interconnected in its neurons than it is when a brain is in early development. Childhood and puberty is the sequential pruning of these connections, deciding which connections to keep and which ones to discard. This hyperconnected brain is an incredibly sophisticated pattern recognizer. No wonder something as complicated as language is understood so easily by the brain. This is also when we play games, form social connections, and learn love from our family. So many of our abstract patterns are learned at this stage. Our interests, proclivities, biases, and experiences shape this initial set of patterns we build a repository of.
However, no matter how intelligent we may be, we are a reflection of the diversity of the universe we experience. As children, we experience only a small cross-section of the universe from a relatively safe vantage point (care of our parents). It is rarely representative of the realities of the world. However, we don’t know that, and to us the patterns we build seem fairly robust. So when a system-thinker identifies a pattern that explains the facts they witness, they are drawing from this repository no matter the depth of the repository.
This reflects the analogy of the physically gifted brute strength of a soldier. As somebody who has relied on their genetic predisposition and ability to system-think, and never really developed it, they too rely on their given strength, and rarely invest the time to develop that skill. If you personify the system-thinking ability, it develops a false sense of importance from being always relied upon. This is not unlike a merchant who is a middleman that passes the goods to the appropriate recipient, doesn’t add much value but since all trade passes through them they grow wealthy and arrogant. They do not allow the development of other businesses that may pose even a remote threat to their hegemony. In this way, they suppress innovation, unless it is of the type that helps them grow their own influence and become even wealthier. The arrogance develops into selfishness. If the system-think is not able to system-think, it questions the data, even the very problem it is given to solve. If I cannot see the larger pattern here at a first glance, then maybe the problem is wrong or unsolvable, or at minimum incomplete.
Escaping the bias of low-depth pattern repositories
Is there a way out then? Let’s recap the weakness imminent in always relying on system thinking. We know that system thinking allows you to quickly glean the pattern that explains the data. The individual is less worried about the relevance of the pattern, rather that they were able to see a pattern. However, these patterns are typically drawn from a pattern repository. This repository can also be thought of as a collection of first-principles. If you have very few patterns to pull from, then your system thinking is going to go around in circles or choose the same one repeatedly. What you then need to do is add to this repository. But isn't that hard in adulthood?
Yes, it is. There is still a way out, and it is easier because we live in an information age. If system thinking is the input of facts or experiences and the output of a pattern (or series of patterns with a hierarchy of their own), then how about changing those two variables. Philosophy and logic is the study of the art of developing patterns that have been collectively honed in the minds of the extraordinary humans that came before us. Study of philosophy and logic helps you avoid making false equivalences, see a pattern’s overfit or underfit, and look beyond your personal bias in building up patterns. The other way is the study of science, where people like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Turing, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, and Dirac, to name a few, spent their lives dedicated to the study of the universe and gleaned some of the most profound patterns. If philosophy is the meta-skill to aid pattern extraction, then science is an incredible repository of patterns gained from the study of the universe.
The universe is THE repository of applied patterns, where certain patterns find resonance and are elevated at different scales of reality. As an example, gravity is a pattern of particles gaining power in accumulations, the larger the accumulation the larger the pull. This resonates at the level of atoms, stars, and planets, but also at the level of an organization in human societies. The bigger the organization, bigger the pull.
Some of the simplest patterns are incredibly far-reaching, as the emergence of evolution and descent into chaos of entropy. Quite likely evolution and entropy were the basis of yin and yang. The human body survives when homeostasis is maintained, balancing the calming (sympathetic nervous system) and the excitatory (parasympathetic nervous system). In our brain too, we have excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters. Evolution and entropy are far-reaching in their implication. These were but a few systems at different levels of scale that manifest the applied patterns.
Another way to improve your system-thinking is (ironically) by suppressing it, and allowing other skills to develop. The personification of system-thinking is quite apprehensive of this move. It does not like being relegated to a non-primary position where it is not the lead character running the show. So it protests and tries to create pandemonium. When the slightest hints of difficulty arise from deliberately focusing on other skills, system-thinking protests the loudest and screams - see, you need me, look at you unable to find the solution that I so obviously can see. Put me back in charge, and I’ll show you how it’s done. This is the trap laid by the loudest skill in your repository, the one that enjoyed the spoils of being the most experienced and adored skill. So it’s easy to fall back into that trap and seek the comfort of knowing rather than go through the discomfort of deliberately thinking.
Becoming multidimensional thinkers
The beauty is that system-thinking is a meta-skill, like how philosophy and logic are meta-skills, specifically the art of recognizing patterns. A meta-skill does not grow stronger by itself, it is only as strong as the number of hard skills that it has access to. So when you sharpen the other skills, your system-thinking grows stronger. It also gains hubris and realizes that it doesn’t have sway over you like it once did, and that is for the best. Since, now, you truly are a multi-dimensional thinker, relying on a growing repertoire of skills.