this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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You might find the discipline of systems engineering of interest.
Can you give a couple quick rudimentry exemplars to illustrate?
Edit: whats that thing that concerns bottlenecks in business and manufacturing systems/processes?i remember something about sufficient/necessary dichotomy or sumfing
For sure. Systems engineering is a way of trying to apply more rigid thinking to what are known as 'wicked' problems. There's a whole bunch of tools that come under the discipline, but to pick one specific example, causal loop diagrams are often used to help understand why complex phenomena happen. An example:
This shows a causal loop diagram for an energy network. The pluses indicate positive causation in the direction of the arrows, the minuses negative causation. If you were tasked with coming up with all the causes and impacts of fluctuations in energy demand, you might find it difficult to show (e.g.) positive and negative feedback loops
Thats what I was thinking of
Are you thinking of Lean methodologies? Part of Lean is to try to streamline your processes so you don't have a bunch of raw material/intermediate product/final product just sitting around in a warehouse doing nothing. Or you might be thinking of something along the lines of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), wherein chasing perfect efficiency yields diminishing returns.
~~No there's something else. Its not quite scientific but its this pop-business study of bottleneck condtions and how to structure processes and organizations to remove bottlenecks/optimize for particular outcomes by resolving strategic bottlenecks.~~
~~Don't know why I can't remember.~~
~~> Something something neccessary but not sufficient~~
~~There's a famous book, something about an auto plant...i dunno its gone from me~~
Thats what I was thinking of
Ah! ToC does synergize very nicely with Lean Six Sigma principles.
It sounds like some study of Systems Engineering, Process Improvement, and Project Management would help you in your goal. Not so much in the way of the kind of dense and precise operative symbology you get out of formal Logic, but in the form of less rigorous but still useful analysis and problem-solving methodologies. Just formally mapping dependencies alone can be a powerful tool.
I just like the idea of certain symbols: conventions as a leverage for more systematic or explicit thinking. I like my coding stuff has helped give me some tools I wouldn't generally have based on background and I wanna collect them in the same way MentalModels are aggregated/referenced
It's math instead of coding for me, but same. That's what pushed me to SE/PI/PM. Formal Symbolic Logic is going to be where you find pretty much all of the explicit symbols you're looking for. General System Theory also makes frequent use of differential equations, and if you understand DE than it can provide a helpful framework, but Logic is going to be most of what you want.
What about LaTeX or whatever? Would that be of any use to me?
Eh, I haven't really used it personally but from what I can tell it's more about formatting than anything else. It would probably be useful if you want to type up any analysis that uses less common symbols, but as far as I know it doesn't really present symbols which don't originate elsewhere.