REPLY Renaming System Dynamics (SD6360)

[SDMAIL ybarlas]

Posted by  ybarlas at boun.edu.tr

Dear Bob,

You observe:
>> - we should be very careful about changing the name. it is becoming 
>>   extremely well known as a very powerful methodology (set of methodologies,
>>  approaches etc) within the systems sciences. 

I have two related comments:  

- I don't think we should (at least in the near future) discuss 'changing the
name.' System dynamics denotes an extremely general field that we are part of
and we can/should continue using it in this sense. But I was suggesting that we
actually don't have is a good name for our methodology. (System dynamics method
or system dynamics approach, system dynamics model...these are the ones that
don't work, awkward and ambiguous, that can NOT become unique dict. entries).

- The huge number of google hits may actually be proving my point: perhaps half
of these are NOT the sort of publication, center, company, project... that we
would  associate at all with system dynamics 'in our sense.' In addition to
plain 'system dynamics' that engineers and mathamaticians use so often in
general, you add any adjective and it means something specific and very
different form what we mean: vehicle system dynamics, 3-body sd, particle sd,
molecular sd, flow sd, on and on... Perhaps we should do a quick check of the
first 10-20 pages of google results and see -unscientifically- the picture. (It
did not look very good when I did a limited and difficult search 10 years ago
when google did not exist).

thanks and best,

Yaman Barlas
Posted by  ybarlas at boun.edu.tr
posting date  Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:14:08 +0300