On the final day of the horrible first month of 2020 for journalists, I would like to start this Process Log for my thesis research.
Here are some brainstormed ideas on projects that I am interested in:
Notes from the Crazy 8’s
My key words from the brainstormed ideas are: storytelling, LGBTQ, media, space.
I realized that I have been developing personal interests based on these key words for a while, and it has been embed in many of my previous works. I am thinking how much I want to push forward these topics, and how much risk I would like to take out of my comfort zone. Do I want to continue work on the similar projects and make it bigger and deeper? Do I want to make something more practical and visible? Do I want to challenge myself to make more impacts outside my social connections?
I also got inspired by the concepts of space being introduced during the class on Jan 27.
We are our environments. Our space is our brain. Space = System = Social norms.
E.g We are students in the space of classroom. We are employees in workplace. We are party animals in clubs, etc.
It’s also interesting to think about how environment and agency functions in our daily life. When commuter got tripped by the one-inch higher steps, is it the environment fails or agency fails or the users’ fault?
Notes from the first week of Pre-Thesis.
I also created this map for the system of coronavirus crisis going on in China and around the world. It matters to me, because I have experienced the crisis of SARS when I was young; my closed ones are being directly affected by the crisis; and as a journalist, I have been following up how media shapes the story and help or not helping the crisis.
Here is a rough system. It’s still a work in progress:
Public health emergency system
https://graphcommons.com/selections/14b72ded-588a-4bd8-b3f5-c0196d4b59c4
Some notes from the reading "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System", by Donella Meadows:
Leverage points are points of power.
a clear leverage point: growth.
Counterintuitive反直觉的—that’s Forrester’s word to describe complex systems.
Leverage points frequently are not intuitive. Or if they are, we too often use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.
The “state of the system” is whatever standing stock is of importance. E.g 人之于人口，水之于水坝
System states are usually physical stocks, but they could be nonmaterial ones as well: self-confidence, degree of trust in public officials, perceived safety of a neighborhood.
There are usually inflows that increase the stock and outflows that decrease it. 下雨增加水库量，腐败减少政府权威
Insofar as this part of the system consists of physical stocks and flows—and they are the bedrock of any system—it obeys laws of conservation and accumulation. 有进有出
It takes time for flows to accumulate in stocks, just as it takes time for water to fill up or drain out of the tub. Policy changes take time to accumulate their effects. 需要一定时间的积累才能沉淀，看到效果
As systems become complex, their behavior can become surprising.
Key Concepts: Places to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Numbers: Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, and standards
Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay far out of range of critical parameters. Mostly, the numbers are not worth the sweat put into them.
11. Buffers 缓冲物: The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows
The stabilizing power of buffers is why you keep money in the bank rather than living from the flow of change through your pocket.
There’s leverage, sometimes magical, in changing the size of buffers. Buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change. The storage capacity of a dam is literally cast in concrete. So I haven’t put buffers very high on the list of leverage points.
10. Stock-and-Flow Structures: Physical systems and their nodes of intersection
The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it, if you can. But often, physical rebuilding is the slowest and most expensive kind of change to make in a system.
9. Delays: The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
They are common causes of oscillations摆动.
It’s usually easier to slow down the change rate, so that inevitable feedback delays won’t cause so much trouble. That’s why growth rates are higher up on the leverage point list than delay times.
8. Balancing Feedback Loops: The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct
The strength of a balancing loop—its ability to keep its appointed stock at or near its goal—depends on the combination of all its parameters and links—the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring, the quickness and power of response, the directness and size of corrective flows. Sometimes there are leverage points here.
The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct.
7. Reinforcing Feedback Loops: The strength of the gain of driving loops
A balancing feedback loop is self-correcting; a reinforcing feedback loop is self-reinforcing. 存的钱越多，利息越多，银行里钱越多；小孩子越多，长大了生的小孩子越多。
There are many reinforcing feedback loops in society that reward the winners of a competition with the resources to win even bigger next time—the “success to the successful” trap. Rich people collect interest; poor people pay it. Rich people pay accountants and lean on politicians to reduce their taxes; poor people can’t. Rich people give their kids inheritances and good educations. Antipoverty programs are weak balancing loops that try to counter these strong reinforcing ones.
Look for leverage points around birth rates, erosion rates, “success to the successful” loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more.
6. Information Flows: The structure of who does and does not have access to information
It’s important that the missing feedback be restored to the right place and in a compelling form. To take another tragedy of the commons example, it’s not enough to inform all the users of an aquifer that the groundwater level is dropping. That could initiate a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set the cost of water to rise steeply as the pumping rate begins to exceed the recharge rate.
There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops—and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).
5. Rules: Incentives, punishments, constraints
Constitutions are the strongest examples of social rules.
4. Self-Organization: The power to add, change, or evolve system structure
Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list—adding completely new physical structures, new balancing or reinforcing loops, or new rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change by changing itself.
3. Goals: The purpose or function of the system
2. Paradigms 范例: The mindset out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises.
Paradigms are the sources of systems.
You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
1. Transcending Paradigms
There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. 出家了