It wasn’t just Beer. The leading cyberneticians all were doing these sorts of odd demonstrations (and that’s what they seem to have been really–demonstrations, rather than experiments). Building strange devices like “homeostats” and “turtles” to demonstrate abstract principles of homeostasis, for instance.

Beer’s computing pond does sound like a particularly out-there experiment/demonstration, in that he seems not to have had any very clear idea of what he was trying to demonstrate or achieve. The people who built the homeostats and turtles at least had a clear idea of what abstract principle they were trying to demonstrate. Beer’s computing pond sounds to me more like just messing around to see what happens. Which definitely has its place in sparking creative science. But I do think there’s a (fuzzy) line between “funding exploratory research and creative, off-the-wall ideas” and “paying people to mess around aimlessly”.

I’m thinking back to my review of How the Hippies Saved Physics. The Fundamental Physiks group did do some creative and important science. But they also did stuff like “try to build a quantum typewriter, so that we can send messages to the dead, and the dead can reply.” I dunno, maybe I’m just falling into the hindsight-is-20-20-vision trap, and so overestimating my own ability to distinguish creative-but-potentially-promising research from just messing around. But I do feel like there’s a difference between funding mRNA research even though many biomedical people didn’t think it was promising, and funding computing ponds and quantum typewriters.

And yes, Stafford Beer and the other cyberneticians do seem to have been smart creative people from various backgrounds who were on to something. Beer didn’t have any advanced degrees; Ross Ashby was a psychiatrist; Norbert Wiener was a computer scientist/mathematician/philosopher. Among other things, Davies’ book is an attempt to revive interest in them. There was a time when cybernetics seemed like it was going to be the next big thing. Norbert Wiener became a legend at MIT, and Stafford Beer became a pretty prominent management consultant and public intellectual. But in Davies’ telling, cybernetics was outcompeted/killed off by the rise of neoliberal economics.

I have an old post on “Buddy Holly ideas”–scientific ideas that took off initially, but then got killed off/abandoned too soon. Cybernetics probably belongs high on the list of Buddy Holly ideas.

More on cybernetics and ecology in a future post, hopefully. There are some fun connections between cybernetics, and key ecological ideas from the 1960s and 70s. In particular, Norbert Wiener is the “Wiener” (not “Weiner” or “Weaver”) in “Shannon-Wiener diversity index”. And Gardner and Ashby 1970 Nature presents simulation results on stability and complexity of large random matrices, that May (1972) later derived analytically.