Tag: systems theory

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Thank God a picture says a thousand words…

Because his paper didn’t do the picture justice.

This may sound like one of those stupid passive-aggressive Facebook status messages where the person is implying something angrily, but doesn’t outright say, “Jeremy, pull your head out of your ass and stop having sex with my girlfriend! I hate you!” In this case, I know my classmate is a good guy, but… ugh.

In our current class, we’ve been split into small groups and there are three things we have to do every week: 1) Write an individual paper about the topic, 2) use everyone’s information and analysis to write a group paper, then 3) make a group presentation. Doesn’t seem too difficult and might be fun in some cases. This group paper… not so fun.

It was about systems theory (I mentioned it back on November 8th) and we were each supposed to observe something. An event, a situation, your neighbor naked in the shower—whatever tickled your fancy. Along with describing it according to systems theory, we were supposed to draw a diagram that included a bunch of elements that had an influence within that system: traffic is bad because rubberneckers crash into each other, Dick Cheney got away with shooting someone in the face because he was the vice president, there’s no steam in the neighbor’s shower because she likes using cold water, etc.

The diagram and the paper were supposed to match. You could look at either one and get the same information with the same relationships of the elements in the system. In this person’s paper, the final page was a very complex and elaborate chart with a lot of items and a lot of arrows. Very dynamic, very informative—I thought it was really good. The section of his paper that coincided with that chart was two paragraphs long.

I was working on the group paper using what we’d all written and sometimes I could copy and paste some of the information. Not in this case. Nope, I had to choose a portion of his diagram on my own and write about that. I finished the paper, sent it out to the group and told them explicitly what I’d used their papers to focus on. Since some of the information overlapped, having people talking about the same stuff during our group presentation wouldn’t leave a good impression, you know?

Once that was done, I had plenty of time to roam around the house, feeling frustrated and angry and doing a lot of swearing inside my head. It was so upsetting, I didn’t even bother trying to watch my neighbor naked in the shower tonight. Yeah, it was that bad.

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Systems theory = shit happens

Systems theory is the subject of the hour (because this is the hour when I’m doing homework… or at least the hour when I’d be doing homework if I wasn’t writing a blog entry). Basically, everything is related to everything else in some form. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? We may not know how each thing connects to the other—what the interactions might be—but ultimately, you can always find a chain that leads from one point to another and all of those chains can relate back to their source (albeit by different means). Consider:

In baseball, Alex Rodriguez hits lots of home runs for the New York Yankees. Hitting lots of home runs leads to a bigger paycheck. A bigger paycheck gives A-Rod more money to buy steroids. More steroids leads to him hitting more home runs. It’s a reinforcing cycle that will probably only end when he retires. Or if George Steinbrenner runs out of money, which ain’t gonna happen, so probably when A-Rod retires.

So there are reinforcing relationships and then there are balancing relationships. In politics, Democrats and Republicans almost never accomplish anything for the sake of the citizens. The citizens don’t like what one party does, so they elect members of the other party. Nothing gets accomplished after that, so they elect members of the other party and the cycle continues. It’s a balancing relationship that leads to stasis, not progress. So maybe the title of this blog entry should be “Systems theory = shit doesn’t happen.”

I imagine there’s a long chain of potential factors as to why I don’t get my homework finished several days in advance, but this blog is probably one of them, so I should probably reinforce my relationship with my textbook and bury my nose back in it.