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Gustavo, For the past 16 years I have used soft variables and system dynamics to model and simulate consciousness during a 10-hour religious experience. It works, because it has helped me to gain some comprehension of the experience. Ill grant that a system dynamics analysis can never do full justic...

System dynamics is a bootstrapping operation. It overcomes the human cognitive capacity weakness to conceptualize the structure of complex systems and predict their consequences. Once this bootstrapping is accomplished, the great power and depth of the mind can then organize vast amounts of informat...

There is a well written and exciting book just published by Simon and Schuster, "The Invention that Changed the World" by Robert Buderi. It tells "the great and largely untold story of the colorful band of brilliant scientists who created the microwave radar systems that not only help...

Here is what puzzles me most about the World Dynamics model: While there is no clearly advocated policy, the book finds high-leverage policy in capital-investment generation reduction: It recommends a capital-investment generation reduction of 40%(1971). This percentage will be higher in 1996. It pu...

Not many people know the details of World Dynamics. So it is important to have at least some of the details to promote intelligent discussion. Here are some key quotes from Jay Forresters World Dynamics (Wright-Allen Press, Cambridge, 1971): 1) His comment on criticism of the World Dynamics model: &...

(Hosts note - I added in some headers to clarify the responses, apologies if I got things mixed up) 1st Reply to Comments: 1) Making the different format attractive to academics To stimulate Commentary on Target articles by those on tenure track, such Commentary would be indexed or abstracted like a...

Here are two questions on the US economy. Perhaps someone could bring me up to date: 1) Has a system dynamics model of the US economy been published which includes all the model equations? {I know there was a lot of effort put into this model in the late 1970s; that Prof. Forrester stated in 1979 th...

On March 10 I submitted a plan to the SD Discussion Group for reformatting the System Dynamics Review. It is shown at the end of this email[clipped]. On March 20 I made some additional comments on why a reformatted SDR would make our journal into a more effective communication tool. Now let me give ...

Dear Network Companions: The following is a status report on my project to develop a general theory of religion using system dynamics. For an introduction to this project, point your web browser at http://world.std.com/~awolpert The following are some items of value issuing from the project: 1) It p...

On March 10 I submitted a plan to the SD Discussion Group for reformatting the System Dynamics Review. It is shown at the end of this email. Let me make an additional comment on this reformatting plan: I have been working on a system dynamics model full time for the past nine years. The first four y...

Prof. Forresters comment of March 24 appears to be a major policy statement. The body of his statement is as follows: "The future of system dynamics rests on high quality work that serves a useful, practical purpose. Dangers lie in proliferation of models that are trivial, and in modeling that ...

Open Letter to the System Dynamics Community: I believe the System Dynamics Review should be reformatted in the following way: 1) All main articles should include the following three items: a) Target article b) Open Peer Commentary on the target article. c) Target article authors Reply to the commen...