What should I read to understand how to build and verify a cybernetically valid system? (e.g. cybernetically valid planned economy)
I understand that production needs to be controlled, and that the decision-making needs to be linked to the front-line workers (because they have eyeballs on the reality of the work). And it's a design-error if decisions are made removed from work, because the controller doesn't have first-hand knowledge.
But I don't understand how to describe that in formal terms. Is there a list of all possible system-design-errors? Is there a methodology/checklist for confirming if me mum is cybernetically valid?
Is there a textbook on all this?
Vampire [any] - 6mon
Probably Cybernetics by Wiener is the basic text?
6
Sebrof [he/him, comrade/them] - 4mon
Although I don't have the definitive method for determining if yur mum's cybernetically valid, I thought I could share some resources and thoughts I’ve gathered over the years of wondering about me own mum’s viability.
Classical Cybernetics
First, there are resources from I think of as Classical Cybernetics - These are works and insights from the OG cyberneticians. Think Project Cybersyn as semitocbreakdown mentioned.
Viable System Model
The first concept that you’ll probably encounter, and the biggest one in classical cybernetics is the Viable System Model (VSM). You can also read more about here and here. This was developed by Stafford Beer and had real life application in Cybersyn.
A VSM is composed of five systems, and each of these is recursive (each is its own VSM)
In fact, one of the Chilean cyberneticians, Raul Espejo, who worked on Cybersyn wrote a brief introduction to the Viable System Model
Ross Ashby gave us The Law of Requisite Variety, which is probably the fundamental law of cybernetics, especially for your question on what makes a system viable. More on this later.
Many of the ideas of cybernetics have been wrapped up in information theory and complexity science. This is much more mathematically rigorous than the above. Ideas like variety in cybernetics get discussed as entropy in complexity science. If you have the mathematical chops then I’d definitely also take time to learn these fields as well.
One introduction to complexity is What is Complexity by Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann also has other articles on formalizing complexity measures, they can get pretty dense though. And it becomes all too easy to lose sight of the forest.
Another introductory article is An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and its Applications by Alexander Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam. You’ll find your typical anti-Sovietism in it though (”dumb dumb soviets were stupid to try to out-complexity the free hand of the market”), but Yaneer Bar-Yam has done some work on trying to formalize the Law of Requisite Variety, and has also introduced scale to this law.
Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety
Essentially, the variety of a system is the number of states/actions/responses that it can have. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety says that for a system to be viable it must have at least as much variety as the environment it is in. Put simply, for a system to not collapse, dissolve, or be absorbed, it must have a matching response for any “move” the environment throws its way.
Other ways of stating the law are
in order to be efficaciously adaptive, theinternal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts
or
the regulator must account for all the possible states in which the variables to be regulated may fall within
or as Ashby stated it
only variety can destroy variety
It actually seems pretty obvious. A good defense has to have a response to each offensive move, else it is defeated.
Meeting the law of requisite variety is a requirement for a system to regulate itself, but it alone may not be sufficient.
Bar-Yam adds to this the element of scale. Variety (states/actions/responses of a system) has a scale or size. A system can respond in a manner of ways, but can also do so at different scales (i.e. the number of elements/agents/etc. Involved in the action).
You can think of guerrilla warfare as being an example. A large military definitely has a high variety, there are many maneuvers, operations, weapons that a military can use in war. Each operation involves a number of soldiers, equipment, units, energy, etc. and has an impact on a number of other soldiers, equipment, units, etc. So each operation has a scale associated with it. Large armies or navies with many destroyers, tanks, planes, etc. are making large scale actions.
But guerilla armies, with their smaller units, fewer soldiers, less equipment, etc. have small scale variety. Their actions are more focused and targeted. They are also more maneuverable because of this.
So a large military can apply large scale actions/variety but may suffer at matching the low scale operations of guerilla armies. And vice versa, guerilla armies would suffer if trying to match large scale armies and navies face-to-face. Each side plays to their scale advantage.
Bar-Yam and Siegenfeld have a few papers that attempt at formalizing the scale-dependent law of requisite variety
I don’t know how accepted this is by others in the field of complexity science, though. With new fields like this some quack may get through - and I’m not in the field enough to discern what’s accepted vs what’s not.
It lays out a formal model for analyzing complex systems as co-evolving multilayer networks, these are networks with n units and multiple types of relations between the units. Each relation-type gets it’s own layer in a network.
The networks are co-evolving in that
a.) the states of each nodex~i~ evolve depending on the states of other nodes x~j~, x~k~, … as well as on the each relations's network M^α^~i,j,k,...~, M^β^~i,j,k,...~, …
b.) the network also evolves depending on the state of all the nodes as well as each layer’s network
The authors have used this framework to model social networks and their evolution, as well as creating a general evolutionary model that can recreate known phenomena such as punctuated equilibrium.
In fact, I see a lot of overlap between this work and dialectics. The dialectic transition from quantitative to qualitative changes I see reflected in phase changes or punctuated equilibrium. And the dialectic interplay between changes in the material base and changes in social relations I see reflected in the evolution of node-states and the different network-layers.
The above may not tell you something explicitly about cybernetics, but it hints at a formal model that could be developed for cybernetic work.
Vampire in theory
ur mum's not cybernetically valid
What should I read to understand how to build and verify a cybernetically valid system? (e.g. cybernetically valid planned economy)
I understand that production needs to be controlled, and that the decision-making needs to be linked to the front-line workers (because they have eyeballs on the reality of the work). And it's a design-error if decisions are made removed from work, because the controller doesn't have first-hand knowledge.
But I don't understand how to describe that in formal terms. Is there a list of all possible system-design-errors? Is there a methodology/checklist for confirming if me mum is cybernetically valid?
Is there a textbook on all this?
Probably Cybernetics by Wiener is the basic text?
Although I don't have the definitive method for determining if yur mum's cybernetically valid, I thought I could share some resources and thoughts I’ve gathered over the years of wondering about me own mum’s viability.
Classical Cybernetics
First, there are resources from I think of as Classical Cybernetics - These are works and insights from the OG cyberneticians. Think Project Cybersyn as semitocbreakdown mentioned.
Viable System Model
The first concept that you’ll probably encounter, and the biggest one in classical cybernetics is the Viable System Model (VSM). You can also read more about here and here. This was developed by Stafford Beer and had real life application in Cybersyn.
A VSM is composed of five systems, and each of these is recursive (each is its own VSM)
In fact, one of the Chilean cyberneticians, Raul Espejo, who worked on Cybersyn wrote a brief introduction to the Viable System Model
The Viable System Model as a Framework for Understanding Organizations
And another article Cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance
Books
Some works by Stafford Beer that you may also want to read:
@CyborgMarx@hexbear.net has also recommended Platform for Change (1975) and Designing the System for Organizations (1985) to me.
An older textbook on cybernetics is Ross Ashby’s An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)
Ross Ashby gave us The Law of Requisite Variety, which is probably the fundamental law of cybernetics, especially for your question on what makes a system viable. More on this later.
Another book on the history of cybersyn and the cyberneticians that worked on it is Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina
Evgeny Morozov has also written about the need to reclaim technology for economic planning and has made podcast on cybersyn - never listened to it though.
Modern Complexity Science
Many of the ideas of cybernetics have been wrapped up in information theory and complexity science. This is much more mathematically rigorous than the above. Ideas like variety in cybernetics get discussed as entropy in complexity science. If you have the mathematical chops then I’d definitely also take time to learn these fields as well.
A good bridge between cybernetics and modern complexity science is this article, The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism. If you read any of the articles in this section read that one at least.
One introduction to complexity is What is Complexity by Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann also has other articles on formalizing complexity measures, they can get pretty dense though. And it becomes all too easy to lose sight of the forest.
Another introductory article is An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and its Applications by Alexander Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam. You’ll find your typical anti-Sovietism in it though (”dumb dumb soviets were stupid to try to out-complexity the free hand of the market”), but Yaneer Bar-Yam has done some work on trying to formalize the Law of Requisite Variety, and has also introduced scale to this law.
Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety
Essentially, the variety of a system is the number of states/actions/responses that it can have. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety says that for a system to be viable it must have at least as much variety as the environment it is in. Put simply, for a system to not collapse, dissolve, or be absorbed, it must have a matching response for any “move” the environment throws its way.
Other ways of stating the law are
or
or as Ashby stated it
It actually seems pretty obvious. A good defense has to have a response to each offensive move, else it is defeated.
Meeting the law of requisite variety is a requirement for a system to regulate itself, but it alone may not be sufficient.
Bar-Yam adds to this the element of scale. Variety (states/actions/responses of a system) has a scale or size. A system can respond in a manner of ways, but can also do so at different scales (i.e. the number of elements/agents/etc. Involved in the action).
You can think of guerrilla warfare as being an example. A large military definitely has a high variety, there are many maneuvers, operations, weapons that a military can use in war. Each operation involves a number of soldiers, equipment, units, energy, etc. and has an impact on a number of other soldiers, equipment, units, etc. So each operation has a scale associated with it. Large armies or navies with many destroyers, tanks, planes, etc. are making large scale actions.
But guerilla armies, with their smaller units, fewer soldiers, less equipment, etc. have small scale variety. Their actions are more focused and targeted. They are also more maneuverable because of this.
So a large military can apply large scale actions/variety but may suffer at matching the low scale operations of guerilla armies. And vice versa, guerilla armies would suffer if trying to match large scale armies and navies face-to-face. Each side plays to their scale advantage.
Bar-Yam and Siegenfeld have a few papers that attempt at formalizing the scale-dependent law of requisite variety
A Formal Definition of Scale-dependent Complexity and the Multi-scale Law of Requisite Variety
The Inherent Instability of Disordered Systems
Multiscale Complexity/Entorpy
I don’t know how accepted this is by others in the field of complexity science, though. With new fields like this some quack may get through - and I’m not in the field enough to discern what’s accepted vs what’s not.
A Textbook on Complexity Science
If you’re up for some math, then a textbook on complexity science I can recommend is Thurner, Klimek, and Hanel’s Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems
It lays out a formal model for analyzing complex systems as co-evolving multilayer networks, these are networks with n units and multiple types of relations between the units. Each relation-type gets it’s own layer in a network.
The networks are co-evolving in that
a.) the states of each node x~i~ evolve depending on the states of other nodes x~j~, x~k~, … as well as on the each relations's network M^α^~i,j,k,...~, M^β^~i,j,k,...~, …
b.) the network also evolves depending on the state of all the nodes as well as each layer’s network
The authors have used this framework to model social networks and their evolution, as well as creating a general evolutionary model that can recreate known phenomena such as punctuated equilibrium.
In fact, I see a lot of overlap between this work and dialectics. The dialectic transition from quantitative to qualitative changes I see reflected in phase changes or punctuated equilibrium. And the dialectic interplay between changes in the material base and changes in social relations I see reflected in the evolution of node-states and the different network-layers.
The above may not tell you something explicitly about cybernetics, but it hints at a formal model that could be developed for cybernetic work.
Best wishes to all our mums.