General Systems Theory

This needs to distinguish a lot more clearly between at least 4 strands of work which were popular in the 1960s and 1970s: permanent link for this note RSS feed for this note

General Systems Theory Notebooks General Systems Theory Last update : 21 Apr 2025 21:17 First version : 15 May 1997 "Lord, I disbelieve; help Thou my unbelief." An off-shoot of cybernetics , with (so far as I can see) far less to recommend it. This is not to say that none of its advocates ever produced anything worthwhile, just that the credit for it should not go to the verbiage which passed for "approaches to a general theory of systems" (query --- why is that phrase much more respectable than "theory of things in general"?). Its hey-day was in the '60s and '70s, when my father was studying

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