Lecture B3 (2022-01-27): Chapter 2, Introduction to Feedback Systems Thinking (Morecroft, 2015)

In this lecture, we cover chapter 2 from Morecroft (2015), which introduces feedback systems thinking -- a shift of mind away from an event-oriented perspective to a more endogenous viewpoint that takes into account the (often long-term) side effects of solutions as they feed back into future problems. This discussion is motivated by a traffic congestion example. The discussion provides the opportunity to discuss Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD's) and the conventions/rules for drawing them that make them useful for either finding systems archetypes that predict behavior or coming up with dynamic hypotheses to test later with simulation. That provides an opportunity to bring up Behavior Over Time (BOT) plots and how to use them in real-world data as compared to simulation data to test and refine plausible causal hypotheses about dynamic behavior.