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Thinking in Diagrams

Chapter 3: Surfacing Influences

Drafted for Aryeh's edit.

For chapter 3: Surfacing Influences

Timing

Section titled “Timing”
  • Reading the chapter: about 9 minutes, its 1,357 words of prose at 150 words a minute. Not counted in those minutes: 4 figures, 1 pair, 2 understanding checks, the reading exercise and the exercises.
  • A session: 50 minutes, the exercises set for it. (estimate)
  • Afterwards: 60 minutes, the exercises set for then. (estimate)

Common misreadings

Section titled “Common misreadings”
  • An influence claim read as a causal one, its direction taken for granted. An influence claim says that one variable bears on another, not which way: more screen time might mean less reading or, with books on a tablet, more. In the understanding check about an allotment, one reinforcing loop: crop yield → seed saved → crop yield closes a path through an influence claim, which the conversion leaves behind.
  • A polarity given where nobody measured the direction. The bad diagram, turnout in a local election, gives all seven claims a + or −, two of them measured; the lab reports it only on a brief that requires an influence claim. In the understanding check about a bakery, all three: the owner knows her shop is this misreading. The briefs of IM 04 and CS 03 each require exactly the three upgrades someone counted.
  • Weight read as direction or as evidence. Weight says how much, not which way or how sure. In the reading’s third question, agricultural expansion → tropical deforestation, whose three dots mark it found in 96% of the cases reads the dots as grounds for an upgrade.
  • A cluster read as variables joined by claims. A cluster holds variables that share something. In the reading’s second question, economic forces and political and institutional forces, which bear on it in the most cases is a wrong choice for wood extraction’s cluster.

Exercises to set

Section titled “Exercises to set”

The session runs from direct influences through indirect ones and the published map to upgrading only what was measured; clusters, a path converted to a loop and the case come afterwards.

For a session

Afterwards

Sources

Section titled “Sources”