Systems Thinking Ep. 1: Lists & Models (Learn to think like a genius)

hey everybody David Shapiro here with a video today we are going to start a new series called systems thinking so uh this video was um an idea that I had and rather than writing a book I figure I'll just do videos this seems to be the primary way that I disseminate information anyways so here we go episode 1 lists and models all right so before we dive in you need to know like what are some examples of famous systems thinkers I have here the two um adversarial uh enemies of all time Nikola Tesla and um

Thomas Edison so both of them were likely neurodiverse um and both of them were profound systems thinkers now these are towering Geniuses who change the world with their intellect in these cases they are likely at least partially genetically predisposed to systems thinking now that being said there are plenty of other people who have managed to change the world through systems thinking without having to be you know a genius or autistic here's an example of the Ford Model T assembly line from more than 100 years ago all right so systems thinking what is it what is

our working definition of systems thinking so here's my definition of systems thinking systems thinking is a set of cognitive skills that can be honed while some people have a natural inclination towards systems thinking such as myself anyone can practice and develop these abilities systems thinking allows you to solve novel problems gain unique understanding and change the world through mental powers so before we dive into this series there's a couple myths that we need to dispel about intelligence first of all IQ is um IQ was originally invented as a way to track children's progress it was

never even intended to be static that being said the psychology the the establishment of academic psychology they say that intelligence is fixed which there's not any any good evidence of that but that's because psychology is a pseudoscience um intelligence is dynamic over time it changes with your life and so for instance your IQ changes depending on how tired you are or how well you've eaten or if you're stressed or whatever um and it and it is also uh uh intelligence is also composed of many aspects or facets another thing is that IQ tests primarily measure

speed they don't actually measure intelligence they measure speed which is a proxy for other abilities so it's true that some people are naturally mentally faster or naturally mentally slower that is something that you're probably not going to be able to change too much um but it it also it is what it is um but it's important to remember that if you score low on an IQ test that just means that you depending on the kind of test you might just be slower than average um or in my case I'm much faster than average again it's

a proxy for other cognitive abilities but it is not actually measuring intelligence there are hundreds of actual dimensions of intelligence um but some of them are things that you can change easily over time such as accumulated knowledge practice skills and other various cognitive abilities now the jury is still out as to whether or not like you have a cognitive ability or not right could anyone could could anyone on the planet eventually figure out the same things that Isaac Newton did and Albert Einstein did I don't know it's entirely possible that some people do have entirely

unique cognitive abilities that other people will never be able to achieve but that being said you absolutely can accumulate knowledge and you absolutely can practice skills so your level of intelligence will absolutely change over the course of your life and we call this stuff like wisdom and experience but those are just all attributes of intelligence okay so with all that out of the way the first lesson or concept of systems thinking that I want to share with you is the idea of lists lists checklists categories classifications so this comes from the book checklist Manifesto by

Atul gawandi this is the first systems thinking book that I ever read and it is also one of the best it is a short book and it will completely change your ideas about what a list is and what a checklist is um obviously I'm not going to delve into the entire book here but I can give you a little bit of a taste so one there's so much that you can do with a list there are different kinds of lists so there's checklists there's procedures there's classifications there's categories and in his book he goes through

the history of all these things in different ways to use lists excuse me um lists can have different roles so you can have reminders that's how I use lists here right your what you're seeing is the learning from this book in real time I'm using this to cue myself to remind myself what to talk about and also as a visual cue for you so it's reminders you can also take notes in list format um where it's just like and I if you come if you came from my AI Channel you you probably have seen that

I use notes quite extensive extensively um notes have a really powerful way of summarizing information you can also use lists to list facets of Concepts right just as I've done here you can also use list to solve problems to list out everything that you know about a problem for instance you can also do chains of thought cause and effect all sorts of stuff now how do you practice this practicing lists is super easy just make lists just as as pictured here get a pen and a piece of paper and write the lists longhand the act

of dis of distilling things down into lists is really good right that's why we do uh chapter outlines book outlines right you're just saying let's get this in a sequential list um and uh in particular writing longhand does unique things neurologically speaking um so list everything that is lesson number one in becoming a better systems thinker read uh read checklist Manifesto and practice lists it will change your life um another aspect of this is I wanted to delve into a very specific kind of list which is that cause and effect that's sequential and so in

the book the pattern Seekers by Simon Baron Cohen um he he articulates that there is one formula that um those of us with certain kinds of autism tend to excel in and that is if then because it's a simple pattern if x then y because Z so like if I throw this at the wall it'll make a sound because of the reverberation right so if you're if your brain naturally is curious and you explore things you say if I do this or if if you know situation A is true um then uh result B happens

and here's the cause here's the thing humans are naturally curious if you ever watch a child playing with something like pushing something over that's a natural experiment if I push this over it falls because that's just how gravity works or you know if I fold this air paper airplane this way and throw it it flies well because or maybe it doesn't fly well because so these natural experiments that's that's how our brains work science is an attempt to formalize that now here's the thing is you know there's all kinds of methods and techniques and tools

within science but that's all science is if x then y because Z it's coming up with explanations so you can practice this and and saying if x then y because Z is way easier than talking about science right it's just that's how you establish patterns right and so by listing things out you say like okay if this is true then this you know is what hap this is the natural result because why and then you can test that you can test that with Socratic reasoning and so on and so forth and we'll get into some

of these things in Greater detail in future videos um now one thing to keep in mind is uh there are some legitimate criticisms of of Simon's book because it focuses on the masculinization uh theory of autism which is Thoroughly debunked so he's basically looking at a very particular kind of autism which he never really addresses in the book I don't I don't remember um because he basically ignores the existence of of autism in women and females and girls um that being said his thesis is here is the pattern of the pattern secret so interesting book

okay so the second lesson of systems thinking is taxonomies layered models and hierarchies so rather than um rather than teach you with lists I'll just show you so this is the um the taxonomic system as created by Linnaeus so Linnaeus one thing that you have to keep in mind is that many many years ago people would look out into the world and not understand the relationship of how animals and plants and all living things related to each other so for instance people used to group Things based on where they were so everything in the water

was a fish and now we understand that you know fish is different from a mammal because they're hot blooded and cold-blooded so on and so forth um you know or plants fungus and Moss would have been all like our trees uh moss and and mushrooms would have all been categorized the same because they're in the dirt um bats and birds would have all been you know flying things uh even though we understand that they're different now and so what Linnaeus did was he went around the world and categorized and created a classification system to understand

the relationship between animals and so what he basically did is he reverse engineered the tree of life and so by breaking it down the way that he did he created a taxonomic ranking system a tiered system that has layers of abstraction and so the smallest layer or the bottom layer is the species that is the individual classification of organisms and above that you have the genus family order class phylum kingdom and domain so on and so forth getting progressively larger and more all-encompassing um so this is an example of a one it took many many

years to collect enough evidence to do this and I don't think he had it right the first time and he was also let's say very sure of himself um after walking around I think Scandinavia for a couple years he's like I have clearly classified almost every uh species on the planet and that was not true he did like five thousand or fifteen thousand species um you know here we are you know a couple million species later uh but the system he created uh was very prescient in that it was able to accommodate um the rest

uh ditto for the uh the Periodic Table of Elements which I forgot to include but that is an example of creating a taxonomic system now am I going to tell you you need to practice creating taxonomic systems and change the world no there are other things you can do so here's another example of of a layered model or a taxonomic system so this is the OSI model which has to do with computers and networking so at the bottom of this model is the physical layer so the physical layer is you know if you plug in

your uh your your router uh to your home or your Wi-Fi or whatever this is the physical medium over which information traverses um and then the next layer up is the data link layer so this is the first layer in which bits and bytes are traversing between one device and another and it goes so on and so forth higher up the up the stack until you get to the until you get to the application which is what it is that you're actually consuming so like you know YouTube is presented over the application layer right this

is the highest layer although I will say that like HTTP so HTTP is the protocol that you're familiar with that is the application layer that delivers the application that you're consuming um and so this is an example that like this is taught in computer science 101 uh networking 101 so on and so forth so that that way you understand that all of networking is is uh created in this layered model which helps you with designing systems with troubleshooting systems um and understanding where the boundaries between certain kinds of systems are so this is another example

of a layered model um uh also borrowing from from computer this is this is a security model so this is called the defense in-depth model so this is another rather than looking at it like a stack this looks at it more like an onion right so but again the point is is that it's layered it's a hierarchy and so at the bottom of Defense in depth is the device this is the physical device which I don't have a phone right now um but here I've got a camera um so this is like a device so

device security I have physical control over this device um and so if you want to steal the data you would need the device my you know my um my card in it or it would need to be connected and I don't have this connected to Wi-Fi um but the point remains your phone however is always connected right um if it has power it is connected to a network somewhere and so then you get you know the individual device you get the application uh the computer at system as a whole um so a device would be

like peripheral I guess and then a computer is the whole computer system then the network so we just looked at the OSI model then you have physical security so that's like security around the building um in which data is housed or machines can be accessed and then you have the human layer at the top which is policies procedures and awareness so again this is this is a hierarchical way of looking at cyber security here's another example this is this is a taxonomy that I created for cognitive architecture um and at the bottom there is episodic

and declarative memory which is just raw data that you're uh that the AI accumulates then there's recall then there's um the morality the objective functions um then there's memory and distillation above that there's cognitive control which is you know managing tasks above that is problem solving and then finally executive function which is behavior and output so again it's a layered hierarchy um whoops I forgot to add the end title screen so um I apologize so these are all examples of taxonomies or hierarchies or layered models um and so what you can do is you don't

have to necessarily create these but you can be aware of them and use them right and you can also create do these with lists you notice how they're all nice and ordered so creating order with lists is one of the primary things you can do in order to practice systems thinking so that is the common theme of today's video which is to create these structured uh lists or these orders of whatever it is that you're doing and um so you know uh whatever it is that you're whatever it is that you do your job you

can probably list it out like this in terms of protocols procedures and then you have these these more conceptual models that you can also create like you could probably create a conceptual model around um you know cooking dinner or driving your car or whatever so I hope this was helpful um let me know what you think in the comments because uh this is this is a topic that I haven't really taught before so anyways thanks for watching I hope I hope this was hope this was valuable