Thanks to @vaurora for pointing me in this direction 🤓

I guess everyone probably needs to get stuff explained in a way that ties in with the things they already know. I’m sure this probably is a whole field in pedagogy.

I have been sidetracked into what is a side quest in the book. A strange electronic system set up in Chile under Allende before the dictatorship. I was looking on Wikipedia and found this podcast: https://the-santiago-boys.com/ imagine grafana dashboards and data driven decisions meets socialism and… Star Trek aesthetics.

This thing is wild “Project Cybersyn”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Also, even if I kind of grew up in this, I hadn’t really thought about it for years. But one of the big things Latin America saw in this period were dictatorships brought about by large international corporations (often backed by the US) that preferred a “strong leader” so that they could extract the country’s resources in peace without being bothered by the pesky people who lived there. Ref the expression Banana Republic.

This scholarship might be progressively more relevant for the rest of the world going forward.

The US had their hand in pretty much every single military dictatorship in Latin America, this included money (remember Iran-Contras?), military training and supplies (everything to equip your friendly military dictatorship) and running disinformation campaigns.

And the US is still doing this BS apparently: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

Finished first read, but now I need to reread the beginning. Current impression is that I find the arguments individually interesting. I’m not sure the underlying logical argument they are a part of is logical or if the conclusion is a logical result. But I still found the book very interesting. Especially the first 3/4ths. The basic logical argument he seems to present is that current capitalism has constructed a mechanism that forces managers of publicly traded companies to serve shortterm goals. And that this makes it impossible for companies to adapt sufficiently to accommodate looming crises like climate change. When leadership has to deliver on quarterly numbers they cannot steer according to any other metrics. I think his idea is that if we can somehow break that mechanism then… and this part I’m unclear on and I’m not sure I find it very interesting either.
Basically I don’t know how I feel about the broader logical argument, but I found the discussion to get there very interesting.

He also seems to think that the international tendency to elect populist wannabe dictators is a cry for help. That seems a bit… infantilizing?

I think I need to have lunch with an economist. I have questions.

I think the people for which Cybernetics will make the most sense are people who work in vulnerability research and exploit development. This systems theory fits very well with a lot of their findings and methodology.

Possibly also folks working in machine learning

And people in distributed systems tbh

Basically any field where you have acknowledged that the systems you are concerned with are complex and might never be fully understood, but where you still have stuff to do and you work with the knowledge that these systems are adaptive and might have emergent behavior. And that poking in one place might have unknown consequences. Where the primary tools are around monitoring and feedback to detect and diagnose new behaviors. And to manipulate these complex networks of stuff to do the thing you want, all the while knowing that it might very well also do something completely different and probably not desired.

Oh shit, this fits with medicine too, doesn’t it, @siljelb ?

I guess the fundamental difference from modeling is that even though you might try on occasion to reduce things to a formal model and reason about things in that formal model, you don’t really believe in it. You know the real thing is “alive” and that the information that is removed to model whatever process you are concerned with, will contain data that is essential and even more importantly: you know that there is essential data that has been removed that you don’t even know is essential.

As a programmer, it’s funny to read about people believing in their models. It’s a very junior developer thing to do. Senior folks don’t. They do their best and then they observe. And even more interestingly: if they don’t see unintended consequences of significant changes, they become suspicious.

The more I think about this, the more I need an economist to tell me this isn’t how they actually work and what they actually believe. Because that’s just bananas. First let’s “simplify” a complex system into a formal model and then you reason in it, maybe run some simulations and then… you believe it? And this idea of believing in a “market” as some sort of entity that will not only stabilize into a state, but that that state is somehow “good”, or even “optimal”. That’s bananas. That’s a fucking religion.

I’m sorry, but that’s on level with worshiping kubernetes. That’s fucking mind boggling.

@Patricia If I understand them correctly, it is precisely because we do not all agree on what is “good” that markets are important.

@eternalgoldenbraid the “market” isn’t an entity. It’s a distributed system, and a distributed system isn’t a moral thing. It’s a thing that is serving the purpose it’s supposed to serve or not, and usually somewhere between those. And we try to keep it on that path, we don’t sit back and… wait for it to do its thing? And believe it’s Good because… I don’t even know. This is a religion. This isn’t something that can be taken seriously.

@Patricia There are certainly a lot of people who not only believe they know what “good” is, but want to force it on everyone around them. I would say the problem with a network is that a lot of pressure gets exerted by majorities, however you want to define that, and it can be hard sometimes if you don’t want the same things as that majority.

@eternalgoldenbraid oh I’m not even remotely pretending that I have the secret for a Just System, but I am saying they don’t either. They just have a model that they are worshipping. Which not only is irrational, it blocks all discussion about what would be better or how improvements can be made. Because their “God” is infallible. “The Model” will emerge with the Truth and the Optimal Solution. That’s just ridiculous.

@Patricia I see. I guess I just haven’t encountered market-oriented people like that.

@eternalgoldenbraid I’m just saying that the “market” isn’t any more than any other distributed system. It isn’t magic.