If there is one thing that has perhaps become clearer than ever before in 2020, it is that everything is interconnected. My staying healthy depends on you staying healthy. Health and economics are critically linked. One country's economy is dependent on those of others. Scientific advances are only useful to the degree they are known and adopted by society, even if through time. The fantasy of individual isolation has been overtaken by the reality of essential interconnectedness. Our thinking needs to reflect this interconnectedness. While reductionism requires us to isolate parameters in order to understand them, it is critical that after gaining that understanding we correctly and fully accept that it does not represent the actuality of the world. As we all know, the real world is an integrated system of systems of which reductionist insights allow us to understand small pieces. While we have focused for over 200 years on the power of that reductionist insight, it seems critically important that we focus now as strongly on systems thinking in order to more fully make a positive impact on the real world.
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