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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Having systems thinking is a bit like being Cassandra: doomed to know the future yet doomed never to be believed.

What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.

As an example, I can think of one politician (edit: not trump) who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.

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> As an example, I can think of one politician who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who always makes stupid mistakes.

Not sure whether you’re talking about the Orange Man, but calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell given the damage his tariffs, defunding, and other nonsense are causing.

i have a feeling that he sometimes listened to advisors who were capable of it, especially during his election campaigns but as you correctly point out the tariff clusterfuck was probably the most poignant example in recent history of where systems thinking was so desperately needed and so obviously lacking.

But yea, definitely not him.

>calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell

You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.

Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.

Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.

He’s definitely a good salesman. People already distrusted the elites and the `deep state` and he marketed himself as the outsider who’d fix things.

That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

>People already distrusted the elites and the `deep state` and he marketed himself as the outsider who’d fix things.

Q: If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate? Wouldn't that make them stupider than the Donald for such an obvious oversight of the electorate?

>That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

Managing to become president twice is insuficient evidence?

> If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

The Democratic party in it's current state is ineffective & incompetent in many ways.

> Managing to become president twice is insufficient evidence?

Yes. You are ignoring the damage he is doing now, which is direct evidence against him being a good “systems thinker”

"Good system thinker" was obviously meant in a self serving way that benefits himself and his cronies. I assumed that was obvious since we're talking about world leaders here, not nurses. Presidents aren't there to make YOUR life better.

All world leaders are cut from the same self serving cloth as you don't get to become a presidential nominee if you're a genuine threat to the establishment.

These kinds of selfish policies backfire when they cut the ground out from under you. Trump and his cronies live in the US and are predominantly invested there, and undermining the US in the long term also undermines them and their interests. The stability of the US correlates with the stability of their power, I would consider this to be basic systems-thinking on the scale of a nation.

>These kinds of selfish policies backfire when they cut the ground out from under you

How? They keep giving themselves more tax breaks. Sounds like their ground is just fine.

> why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

For one thing, the GOP have had a successful campaign over the last 50+ years to win the framing war. They're now able to present themselves as the plucky outsider who'll come in and fix things, even when they're not. Likewise, the Dems are *not* able to do this, even when they are.

Also the Dems are incompetent boobs.

Grifters are systems thinkers but in a limited short sighted way. Their answer to the prisoner dilemma is to betray their partner.

The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy

>Grifters are systems thinkers but in a limited short sighted way.

For the average voter, the grifts are irelevant since all candidates do it anyway, they just want a candidate that executes on their dissatisfactions with the system and that turned out to be the Donald.

Just follow the portfolios of those who funded the campaigns of the presidential winner, it doesn't matter if it's Clinton, Bush, Trump or Obama, all politicians are grifters, since once elected they need to pay back via grifts those who funded their campaigns as that's the main reason wealthy elites spent million for their candidate to win, to get into grifts with the government that make them even richer.

>The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy

What IS the optimal strategy? I think MAGA base is getting what they voted for (mass deportations and shit) so for them IT IS the optimal strategy.

Right. In 2019, I was like, I am worse off than 4 years ago, the Trump Presidency sucked. But in 2024, I was like, I'm worse off than 4 years ago, the Biden Administration sucked.

If you know both sides are going to leave you worse off, it's probably pretty understandable that I'm always mad at the last guy to take a strip off my ass.

They are gonna be sad about the health care cuts, and the hit to the economy from tariffs and kicking out the folks who do all the shit jobs, though. We'll see how they feel in a year or so.

Successfully leverages barbarism isn't a virtue of systems thinkers. You're proving GP's point.

I think you might be proving mine actually.

"Vices and virtues" are pretty much irrelevant to systems thinking but they are the bread and butter of tribalism.

This is exactly that classic dril post

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/994/418/48b...

i was not making a normative statement at all.

bizarre. tribal thinking doesnt seem to let you comprehend this.

If you're a systems thinker who can see the future then you can prove it in trading basically anything.

The number of people who have done this is vanishingly small (and skeptics raise credible objections about even the best examples).

Jim Simons was such a man, and (to the satisfaction of most) proved it. Some might say the same of Buffet. After that a list that started controversial rapidly gets into the zero consensus asymptote.

So if you genuinely believe that your systems thinking prowess is prescient in its scope like something out of a Herbert novel, I can point you the narrow way through: get an account on Interactive Brokers and ascend!

Well this is a new angle for MAGA isn’t it? Stop questioning him as he’s a stable genius with systems thinking. Nice try, but you’re going to have to own that one with a full explanation to get anywhere with it.

>Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.

^^ this bit was in anticipation of a response exactly like yours.

I was actually referring to Putin. It was quite impressive to watch him successfully provoke sanctions to just about the level needed to result in a steady and sustainable level of import substitution and export oriented industrialization over the course of 12 years. It reminded me of that scene in die hard where the FBI cut the power.

This was the same thing Trump fell flat on his face trying to do even when he was setting his own tariffs.

Hiding what you’re talking about with no actual examples so you can spring a gotcha is just dumb, sorry. This is how the far right works generally online.

Im left wing.

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