Subject: SD and critical pedagogy

Posted by Niall Palfreyman on 9/14/2011
In Reply To:SD and critical pedagogy Posted by Jaimie Cloud on 9/13/2011

Message:

Am 13.09.2011 18:55, schrieb Jaimie Cloud:
> I am struggling with two ideas-and I need some help:

Hi Jamie,
This sounds like a cry from the soul, so I'll try to quickly add my personal thoughts on these questions.

> If "One person's gain is interdependent with everyone's gain or one person's folly can lead to folly for all", and if "Favorable conditions for one species/group are unfavorable for another", then can we predict which of those two results interdependence will yield? Is the best we can do to solve more than one problem at a time and minimize the creation of new problems?

I think so, yes. Systems are sometimes so fragile and sometimes so stable that it's often hard to predict in advance which is true in any particular case. I take the central message of SD to be "Try it and see". Make a little change, but be _very_ open to the possibility that the consequences are other than what I intended, and to making the effort to understand how that non-intuitive consequence came about.

> I am still struggling with the notion that "problems and their solutions are endogenous-that they arise within a system, not from outside."
> I understand that once a problem has emerged-it is endogenous-but some problems actually were imposed from outside the system.

The way I see it is this. If either a problem or its solution is truly exogenous, there is nothing on Earth that I can do about it, so I have two alternatives: either I accept that I can do nothing about it and look for endogenous ways of coping despite exogenous circumstance, or I incorporate the exogenous source of the problem within my system boundary and find out how to change it.

Best wishes,
Niall.