cybernetics

From its earliest days cybernetics valued the cross-disciplinary pollination that occurred when experts from a variety of fields convened to discuss a common problem

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Cybernetics “is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society,” Ashby predicted. “And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Systems analysis and computer modeling also played important roles in formulating strategies used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. These approaches allowed the government to compile detailed quantitative maps of the political climate in different regions of Vietnam and use these data to guide U.S. wartime tactics. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara championed these so-called scientific approaches and used them to create what he believed to be objective policies that emphasized cost effectiveness and centralized decision making

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Pittsburgh city planners drew explicitly from the work of defense intellectuals at RAND and elsewhere and used these approaches to predict future city processes, such as determining residential patterns

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Lindsay’s view of the city as an information system spurred the creation of computerized data systems to increase data sharing among city departments and centralize decision making and control, although such efforts did not succeed in cutting city operating expenses nor, as Light observes, did they make life noticeably better for city residents.

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

the interpretative flexibility and broad applicability of cybernetic ideas also caused some in the scientific community to dismiss the field as a pseudoscience that lacked disciplinary rigor

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

With regards to application to social systems:

These approaches have subsequently been criticized for oversimplifying the dynamics of social systems and for encouraging policy makers, academics, and Wall Street bankers to place too much trust in numbers

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

In addition, critics have pointed out that quantitative approaches encourage top-down management hierarchies that have grafted the structure and culture of the military onto the civilian agencies, businesses, and institutions of a democracy

– Cybernetic Revolutionaries

if we use ‘control’ in the sense of ‘maintain a large number of critical variables within limits of tolerance’.

– Anarchist Cybernetics

• Viable System Model