#stafford beer

[comparativetarot]

King of Chalices. Art by Suzanne Treister, from HEXEN 2.0.

Stafford Beer 

#Suzanne Treister #HEXEN 2.0 #King of Cups #King #Cups #Minor Arcana #Tarot #Stafford Beer

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

Project CyberSyn - Chillean Cybernetics

Project CyberSyn was a Chilean socialist effort led by Salvador Allende to direct the national economy using cybernetic systems - bypassing multinational companies to create an egalitarian economy. Its designers aimed to preserve worker and lower-management autonomy instead of implementing a top-down system of centralised control. As per usual in the late 20th century, Allende got coup’ed by a United States backed dictator and the project was left to rot. It was, however, a huge inspiration on the creation of Silicon Valley. British management cybernetics expert Stafford Beer was involved in this effort - effectively creating a practical version of his Viable System Model VSM.

This podcast is a great primer on CyberSyn and the context surrounding it.

https://the-santiago-boys.com/episodes

#cybersyn #stafford beer #cybernetics #cybernetic #computing #computer science #salvador allende #allende #pinochet #chile

[teledyn]

#stafford beer #viable systems model #cybernetics #government

[robertogreco]

Trailer for The Santiago Boys: The Tech World That May Have Been, a podcast by Evgeny Morozov (co-produced by Chora Media and Post-Utopia), July 2023.

A wild tale of how Allende's engineers and a British management consultant dared challenge corporations and spy agencies - and almost won. 

[…]

The Santiago Boys is a nine-part podcast about a group of radical utopians around Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist president. Undeterred by the Cold War and machinations of their enemies and aided by an eccentric British consultant, they try to wrestle control over technology from multinationals and intelligence agencies and use it to create a more egalitarian economy. As their dream gets crushed by Pinochet’s bloody coup, the Santiago Boys find an unexpected afterlife - and in Silicon Valley of all places.” This project has been two years in the making and involved more than two hundred interviews and countless hours spent poring over historical documents. Given the immense importance of the topic - especially in light of our own contemporary struggles with and against Big Tech - we’ve decided to preserve the fruits of our research in the form of a website containing transcripts of the interviews that we conducted as well as pointers to readings, videos, and other historical materials that might enhance the listening experience.

#Chile #Salvador Allende #Cybersyn #cybernetics #history #Stafford Beer #technology #Big Tech #1970s #Youtube #Evgeny Morozov

[eagle-writes]

When you see something and you’re wondering if it was truly designed to have the effect it is…

#calligraphy #calligraphy practice #stafford beer #quotation

[nem0c]

In 1975 he sent the article to Beer and received an enthusiastic response which led to them meeting at Eno's flat. Eno recalls a big hairy guy arriving laden down with sherry and cigars. Most of that initial conversation was dominated by recent events in Chile.

They quickly became friends and Beer perceived Eno as something of a protégé (he later commissioned Eno to write a chapter - an extension of the Studio piece - for a book called Challenge To Paradigm, but the book never materialised). Eno also visited Beer at his Welsh hideaway; this could be described as a character building experience for him. The cottage was very much geared to Beer's simple needs (sherry and cigars) and the famished musician soon discovered that food was not high on the agenda. What's more, on this occasion Beer happened to be looking after two large Old English sheep dogs, the weather was typically wet and Eno has depicted how the dogs, resembling large mud paint brushes, gave him a good mauling on arrival. In turn Beer has described how they sat up throughout the night talking ideas and playing musical instruments - drums and flutes - brought back from Chile.

Much of the work that Eno did from this period was characterised by playful exploration using not only Beer's ideas but also those of John Cage's book Silence and Morse Peckham's Man's Rage For Chaos (the latter arguing that the biological function of art is to provide a safe milieu wherein to take risks).

#brian eno #stafford beer

[smeetlinglord]

The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims it does that it repeatedly fails to do.

#op #Stafford Beer #theory

[earhartsease]

this is so on the nose

just adding (since it seems to have stirred some people up) that obviously this is not an absolute - it just points to how some oppressive systems (for example) rely on bad faith to cover for their systems doing what they're really intended to do by claiming that they're still in progress - but there are plenty of other less bad faith examples too that are more to do with poorly thought out or poorly implemented plans

[ID: post by The Garantine quoting the start of a wikipedia article

Very tired of hearing about what the intentions are. If a system constantly produces a different outcome than the one it is "intended" for then it's perfectly reasonable to assume the actual intention is the outcome it continues to produce.

beginning of quoted article below reads as follows:

The purpose of a system is what it does

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.

ID ends]

#cw war in the comments

[deramin2]

Orym's argument against Ludinus Da'leth and the Ruby Vanguard is essentially "The purpose of a system is what it does."

This is a systems theory coined by Stafford Beer around 2001. He posited there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." It does not matter what someone tells you a system does if it does not reliably do that. The things it does consistently do are the actual purpose of the system.

Ludinus (and Liliana) claim the purpose of the Ruby Vanguard's violence is to free Exandria of oppression from the gods. Orym's point is that they have not consistently protected anyone from oppression. They consistently murder innocent people, indoctrinate vulnerable people into doing terrible violence (including children), support a ruling class that dominates the population through mind control and eugenics, and seek to release a predator so terrifying that the warring alien gods and native primordials worked together to seal it away as a threat to both of them.

So the logical conclusion is that the purpose of Ludinus' system is not to free anyone from tyranny, it's to install himself as the tyrant. And it does not matter what Ludinus says it's for or even what he believes it's for. The purpose of a system is what it does. And Orym has been personally and repeatedly victimized by what it does. Why wouldn't he keep reminding them of that?

Add onto that, the Ruby Vanguard is a death cult. They lure people in with believable lies. They use propaganda to control how people view them and to convince people to support them. Liliana has been groomed into a true believer who genuinely thinks what she has been told is true and that Ludinus' system does what he says it will. She has been convincing other people of this for years. Not because she's an inherently bad person but because everyone generally tries to convince others that what we believe is true. It is actually dangerous to let a cultist try to talk you into the cult's perspective. That's why Orym shuts it down.

Orym was already on edge but it's fully in a breakdown after FCG's sacrifice. One more iteration of Ludinus' system consistently murdering the people he loves. But he still told Imogen he wants her to have a good relationship with her mom again. He wants Liliana to make it through the other side of this. But that has to involve consistently stating the reality of what's happening against what she believes.

Ludinus believes in the rapture of the revolution. Burn everything to the ground on a fundamental level and a new perfect society will grow, with him to guide it. The reality is that kind of power vacuum consistently leads to horrific violence and conditions often get much, much worse. Especially for vulnerable people, who often do not survive. A lot about the gods' relationships to mortals probably needs to change, but this an incredibly dangerous gamble to fix it.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Any suggestion otherwise is cold comfort to Orym's family in the ground.

#POSIWID #critical role #critical role spoilers #critical role meta #critical role campaign 3 #Bell's Hells #Orym of the Air Ashari #Ludinus Da'leth #Liliana Temult

[zvaigzdelasas]

Some of my fav (& the most approachable) stuff from Stafford Beer, a gentle introduction to Cybernetics

[ingdamnit]

"The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer,[1] who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."[2] The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it"

At a certain point, Google is basically engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to commit mass IP theft.

Imagine if Ubber was used consistently by bank robbers to be get away drivers. That's basically what google is doing.

Also no surprising AI is the tool of choice for criminal plagerism

#Youtube

[mariacallous]

NextCity recently published a hot take by Steffen Berr tying the ways in which the US is failing at reducing pedestrian deaths to the misaligned training that most transportation engineers in the US receive. Berr explains that a transportation engineer “is a really a civil engineer who has received a little exposure to the transportation sector.” Due to the structure of accredited degree programs, “In a best-case scenario, a civil engineer will only take three transportation classes during their bachelor’s degree. In the worst case, they’ll only take one: Introduction to Highway Engineering. To put this into perspective, the most educated professionals we entrust to design and run our roads and streets have received only half of a minor with a handful of credits on the topic.”

Berr goes on to address the reasonable objection that in many fields, people learn on the job. But what transportation engineers learn on the job, per Berr, is not things like how to choose the most appropriate intersection for the desired use, how the road system should be laid out at a network/route level, or how to fix congestion (none of which, he argues, they learn in school either.) Instead, they learn “how to navigate the impressive amounts of bureaucracy that have been built up in the industry, memorize an impressive vocabulary of technical jargon, practice with design software like AutoCAD to produce engineering plans, and how to copy the current engineering standards. There is no exposure to deep levels of theory that can help our future professionals create original solutions to fundamental problems like safety, congestion, emissions and ethics.” 

I’m less interested in Berr’s point about the wrong degree requirements than I am in his observation about what the job of transportation engineer actually is. As Stafford Beer observed, “the purpose of a system is what it does,” and by analogy, the purpose of a job is not its stated goals but what the people who do it actually do day to day.1 When talking to people who’ve never worked in government, the biggest disconnect is usually a lack of understanding of the actual jobs of public servants. A rather dramatic illustration of this comes from a Mercatus Center podcast with Lant Pritchett in which he shares an anecdote about advocating for evidence-based policy in the Indian bureaucracy. 

After they had done the RCT [random control trial] showing that this Balsakhi program of putting tutors in the schools really led to substantial gains and learning achievement and reading outcomes, he took it to the secretary of education of the place in which they had done the RCT. And he said, “Oh, by the way, I have the solution to your problem of low learning levels, or at least part of the solution. Look, we’ve got this powerful evidence that this works to improve leading outcomes by putting these volunteer tutors and pulling their low learning kids out.” The response of the secretary of education was, “What do you think my job is? Why do you think that this is a solution to a problem I have? Look around my office. See these piles and piles of files that keep me busy 60 hours a week and not one of these files is about a child not learning. I’m under no pressure about that problem. If I try and transfer a teacher, I’ve got a court case on my hand. If I try and close a school, I got a court case on my hand. My job is to administer the existing education policy such that there’s policy compliance. Super kudos to you for this cute little study you’ve done. It has nothing to do with my job as secretary of education.”

Ouch. And that’s a secretary of an agency serving a county with 1.5 billion people.

I suspect a lot of public servants in the US will read that and think “My job is not quite as bad as that but it sure feels that way a lot.” The people I know maintain enough connection to the actual mission to avoid such a meltdown (though I find the secretary’s frankness refreshing.) But both these stories help explain a conundrum that many who care about effective government (or, shall we say, state capacity) struggle to explain: the contradiction between the dedication, smarts, and creativity of most public servants and the sometimes terrible outcomes they are associated with, like the recent tragic lapses in administering student loans by the US Department of Education. (Or in Berr’s world, the 40,000 traffic deaths we’re stuck with every year while countries like the Netherlands have dropped their own already low number by 46%.2) To be sure, there are often extraordinary outcomes (hello Direct File!), and we notice them far less often, to our own detriment. But while it’s impossible to give government a meaningful overall grade, if its job is to meet challenges we face (national security, climate change, an effective safety net, etc.), we are at risk of falling dangerously short. The problem isn’t that public servants are doing a bad job, it’s that they’re doing a great job — at the wrong jobs.''

The (unnamed in this context) Indian Secretary of Education seems to agree: “My job is to administer the existing education policy such that there’s policy compliance.” I highly doubt that’s the job he thought he was getting, or the job he wanted to do. Berr is on the same general theme when he says that what transportation engineers learn on the job is “how to operate in the industry effectively as it has been currently set up.” Note his use of the word effectively. Effective towards what? Not towards reducing traffic deaths or congestion levels. “All the experience in the world of copying and pasting a standard invented fifty years ago is useless when the problems that the standard was invented to resolve have changed,” he says. “Understanding this sheds a lot of light as to why 40,000 people are still dying on our roads every year and why your local city insists on laying down sharrows [which are known to be ineffective and often dangerous] in their latest round of “safety improvements.” Quite frankly, it’s because we have no idea what we are doing.”

This is a useful nuance as I develop a framework for building state capacity. One of my admittedly obvious and oversimplified tenets is that systems have both “go energy” and “stop energy,” much as a car has a gas pedal and a brake. You wouldn’t drive a car without a brake, but you also wouldn’t drive a car in which the brake was pressed all the time, even when you were trying to accelerate. This is a good metaphor for how we’re dealing with the implementation of CHIPS, IRA, and the Infrastructure Bill, for example, where the clear intent is speed and scale but the public servants responsible are held back from that by the brakes of overly zealous compliance functions. I hear a version of this at every agency I visit: “Congress tells us to do something. Then the compliance offices keep us from doing that very thing.” (And side note for further discussion: This is an issue of representation, voice, and democracy.) The stop energy in our government is currently a lot bigger than it should be. We’re hitting the gas but we’re not accelerating because we’re pressing the brake at the same time. 

Lots of people in government have “stop energy” jobs. We need them, and we need them to be good at them. I don’t want to live in a country where our government doesn’t exercise “stop authority.” I try to remember not to complain when my flight is delayed because I really don’t want to die in a plane crash, and a rigidly implemented checklist is a big part of how we keep safe (the current epidemic of doors and engine cowlings blowing off notwithstanding). I also really like being pretty confident that a pill I’m taking has been tested and not tampered with. I like thinking our nuclear arsenal is protected. You know, little things like that.

Stop energy is critical. Rigid adherence to protocol is usually lifesaving. But it must exist in balance. I recently learned the Navy concept of “front of sub/back of sub.” The back of a nuclear submarine, where the nukes live, is run by the book. You don’t deviate from the checklist. You don’t innovate. You don’t question. The front of the sub, on the other hand, is responsible for navigating through dark waters. You have to improvise. You have to make judgment calls. There are manuals and checklists, for sure, but the nature of the work calls for a different approach, and the Navy recognizes that the cultures of front and back have evolved appropriately to meet distinct needs. 

There are times, of course, when you’ll need front of sub judgment in a back of sub context. If the plane I was on was about to be bombed by an enemy combatant (unlikely in my life, I hope), I would be okay with the pilot using her discretion to cut a corner or two on the takeoff checklist, because the very thing that checklist is there to protect (the lives of the people on board) would under threat from a different vector. Taking every precaution in that scenario could be reckless. That’s a bit how I feel about the NEPA reviews and other bureaucratic processes that are holding back building the infrastructure we need to move to a low-carbon economy. I wish for the public servants in charge to see the threat of inaction – those species the checklist is trying to protect are threatened by temperature rise as much or more than they are by the project in question – and make good judgment calls about getting the plane off the runway a lot quicker, so to speak. This feels like a domain where back of sub culture has more hold than it should given the circumstances. And to Berr’s point, we can’t rely on back of sub culture when the checklist and protocols it uses no longer serve the purpose.

Of course, “stop energy” roles can themselves be balanced – if only I had a dime for every discussion about the value of lawyers who get to yes and the frustrations with those who seem to do nothing but block. The analogy breaks down a bit here because the items on a pre-flight checklist are binary – they are either red or green – whereas the ad hoc checklists that lawyers assemble to ensure compliance before signing off on an action are almost always shades of gray – they can be open to lots of interpretations. Any given lawyer, or compliance officer, or ethics cop can treat their role with appropriate balance, reserving their stop authority only when the risks truly outweigh the benefits. But getting the culture of a team, department, or agency to balance stop and go correctly at a macro level is extremely difficult. It’s rare to see leadership really change that balance, or for it to stick. It’s a retail approach, hugely dependent on personalities and circumstances.

What would a wholesale approach to getting back into balance look like? One answer should be a simple matter of top-down workforce planning, of the kind our Office of Personnel Management should be empowered to do: fewer stop energy jobs relative to go energy jobs. Hire more doers than brakers, both in how the position is defined and in the characteristics of the people selected for the job. But that proposal needs several important caveats. Of course, every great employee is some mix of these energies – a “go only” employee would be exhausting and dangerous in all but the most extreme circumstances – so we’re talking about a general orientation. More importantly, having fewer brakers will only result in enormous backlogs if they have the same stopping power. But there are plenty of functions where its possible to safely move from default no to default yes, possibly with an after the fact correction mechanism.3 Instead of requiring form redesigns to go through a long White House approval process before they can be made available to the public, for instance, allow agencies to apply the appropriate level of scrutiny and sign-off for the form at hand and develop a process for catching and quickly fixing anything determined to be detrimental. This example speaks to the issue of multiple levels of safeguards. Loosening a safeguard that operates at the top level of federal government may not make much difference to overall stop energy if agencies, or in turn their subcomponents, or even teams, react by strengthening their own safeguard processes. There might be something like a Law of Conservation of Safeguards at play here. But it’s still worth considering the value of moving to default yes processes where appropriate. 

Of course, the question of the nature of the job public servants are tasked with is about much more than just stop vs go. It’s about what kind of work we’ve decided to invest in. I go into some depth about this in Chapter 5 of Recoding America as it relates to our lack of investment in digital competencies and how ideologies about private sector superiority led to a big outsourcing push just as digital was beginning to massively transform society.

…these internal competencies in digital became necessary just as we were jettisoning internal competencies of all sorts, not developing them. Instead of digital competency, government has developed extensive processes and procedures for procurement of digital work, and the ins and outs of procurements sometimes seem more complex and technical than the latest programming languages.

This points to another way to understand the disconnect between high employee performance and the outcomes our government produces (or fails to), especially relative to the investment made.4 Take procurement. I know a lot of people in procurement who are really good at their jobs. Some of them are considered really good because they’re great at the “back of sub” tasks of making sure every box is checked, and a manager might feel compelled to give them a high performance rating because of their thoroughness and dedication, even if the people who need the thing being acquired are frustrated by the slowness and rigidity of the process, and even if the thing that is ultimately acquired has checked all the boxes but doesn’t actually work. (For an example of this, see Chapter 4 of Recoding America.) But many of these procurement professionals operate according to “front of sub” principles, and are enormously creative and mission-driven. The other public servants who rely on them to procure things value them enormously. They may or may not receive high ratings, if the manager is judging them based on a “back of sub” approach. But procurement processes simply should not be as complex and burdensome as they have become. Both of these kinds of procurement professionals are doing a job that simply shouldn’t exist in its current form.

Especially with the looming threat of the return of Schedule F under a possible Trump administration, there’s a lot of talk of public sector employee performance and protections. I agree strongly with Donald Kettl, who has said about the left’s silence on civil service reforms in the face of Schedule F: “You can’t fight something with nothing.” I hope to be part of proposing a something there, something that improves government’s ability to fill many open positions and to effectively and ethically manage the workforce. But we could succeed entirely at that and still fail to meet the challenges in front of us if the jobs we fill are the wrong jobs.

Another of my admittedly obvious and oversimplified principles of how to build state capacity is that there are really only three things you can do:

You can have more of the right people

You can focus them on the right things

You can burden them less.

There is obviously quite a lot to say about each of those things, and they are all deeply intertwined. A big reason we don’t have more of the right people is that we overburden both the people responsible for hiring and the applicants, focusing both on the wrong things. We overburden public servants generally because we have designed too many of their jobs to stop bad things instead of to enable the things we desperately need. We are too often asking if public servants are doing a good job instead of understanding and questioning the nature of the jobs they’ve been hired to do. 

We need a much more robust understanding of how to fix the problem of hiring the right people to do the wrong jobs. We need wholesale strategies for tuning the dial between front of sub and back of sub, between stop and go, between brake and gas, and refocusing the job of public servants on the work that’s most directly meaningful towards the outcomes we want. We need staffers in agencies who act as if the climate crisis is the enemy plane that’s about to bomb us. We need transportation engineers whose actual job – as practiced on a daily basis, at scale – is to reduce congestion and pollution and improve and save lives. We need Secretaries of Education who have time in their day to look at the study on improving learning achievement, and maybe even take action on it. We need all of this now.

Imagine a world in which this — not just enforcing rules, not even just helping agencies fill open jobs, but ensuring that federal government fills the right jobs — was the mandate of an empowered and deeply collaborative Office of Personnel Management. They couldn’t do it alone, of course — it’s agencies that define the jobs they think they need and Congress that throws down law after law they must comply with, feeding the need for compliance. The White House Office of Management and Budget adds its own reporting and compliance burdens. Each would need to buy in on an agenda of building state capacity and do their part. But this is what workforce planning should really be, and in 2025, we will need it more than ever. If Biden gets a second term, this is the kind of ambitious agenda he should set.

1

Please read Dan Davies’ excellent new book The Unaccountability Machine for a lot more on Beer and why this is important.

2

The US has 12.8 traffic deaths per 100,000 people, the Netherland 3.6 per 100,0000.

3

I think this is a Guarino-ism… if I’m misattributing it, someone will correct me.

4

Some will point out that perverse incentives in the performance management practices can sometimes make it hard to give public sector employees poor ratings, which may skew the data. I don’t quite know how to evaluate that claim, but I also don’t think it’s all that relevant if you’re trying to

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

Stafford Beer on Cybernetics and Management Theory

#stafford beer #cybernetic #cybernetics #vsm #Youtube

[teledyn]

The Intelligent Organization, PART I

Reconstructed lecture by Stafford Beer on how you can't solve problems using the tools that caused the problems.

#Stafford Beer #Cybernetics #Viable Systems Model #Youtube #alterdestiny

[female-malice]

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.

#cc

[collapsedsquid]

But something else also happened, because cybernetics didn’t die a natural death. The most obvious place for these ideas about the organisation of a modern economy would surely have been within the subject of economics, but they didn’t end up there. Some elements of management cybernetics – even some of the ideas of Stafford Beer himself – live on in business schools, usually as personal idiosyncrasies of individual researchers. In the economics departments, however, they have their own theories. The way in which the economics profession ignored most of the work done in information theory is striking. It ignored its own traditions relating to uncertainty and decision-making, instead ploughing ahead with a frighteningly simplistic view of the world in which everything could be reduced to a single goal of shareholder value maximisation. Why did they do this? Any account of how we got to where we are must cover three intellectual and organisational revolutions. There was one that happened but we forgot about it – the managerial revolution, where control was transferred from owners and capitalists to professional administrators. There was one that looked like it was going somewhere interesting but never arrived – the cybernetic revolution, which might have helped us understand that what mattered were the systems of professional management rather than the individual managers. And then, sometime in the early 1970s, we had the neoliberal revolution, which succeeded in shaping our society and its discontents, right up to the present day. In a more fortunate counterfactual history, this book might have told the story of an academic debate between the neoliberal economists and the management cyberneticians, on the nature of a corporation and the organisation of decision-making. But that debate didn’t happen. Or rather, it did happen, but not with diagrams and equations. It played out, very suddenly, with helicopters and guns at the presidential palace of La Moneda, in Chile on 11 September 1973, when the government of Salvador Allende was brought down by a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, and Stafford Beer’s consultancy project to bring a new form of economic organisation to the country came to an abrupt end.

#Unaccountability Machine #*sniff* cries a single tear