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"Positive feedback loop" to indicate a situation in which circumstances feeding into each other result in more good things happening, or "negative feedback loop" to indicate bad circumstances feeding into each other to result in more bad things happening.
I have worked with enough controls folks to know that positive feedback in a control loop often leads to instability (bad), while negative feedback in a control loop can be used to stabilize the system (good). It just comes down to the math in the situation.
So people saying that they are in a positive feedback loop can, to a controls person, sound counterintuitive. E.g. "I'm in a positive feedback loop of working out, having more energy as a result, and working out more, making me healthier!" would be momentarily confusing.
I did grad school at an engineering/STEM-focused school, and the campus psychiatrist actually used these terms correctly when discussing anxiety attacks! As an engineer myself, that made my nerdy heart happy ๐คฃ
Another control theory phrase issue: The phrase "more optimal" is incorrect and very well may earn the speaker an "umm, actually" from any controls folks in the conversation. Optimality is not a scale--either something is optimal (with respect to a specific metric), or it isn't.
(EDIT: reducing verbosity)
One of the things I remember most from high school biology is "an organism exists in a state of negative feedback, and when that feedback becomes positive it dies". It applies to way more than just biological organisms, and is less confusing to laymen than anything about valleys in the space of possible configurations.
More optimal is not only wrong but a bullshit, unnecessarily wordy way of saying "better" in the first place.
Interesting! My last biology class is a tiny speck in my rearview mirror, so I'm not sure that I'm understanding it the way your class meant for it to be understood, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Too much of one kind of input to a living thing without an output to balance it out can be disastrous.
They meant it in a homeostasis kind of way, not matter conservation. If a cell responds to an increase in osmotic pressure with more osmotic pressure it will not be a cell for very long. Ditto for body heat, hormones, cell growth or any number of other things in a multicellular organism. I guess it was just an interesting, birds-eye way of approaching the topic, and most of the other stuff was not as memorable.