36 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. In order to develop a model for stability in design problems, Alexander looked to cybernetics for models of homeostasis and ultrastability. Such systems could stabilize themselves regardless of what disturbed them, including variables that weren’t considered when the system was designed.
  2. May 2024
    1. 07:30 At the root of cybernetics and Chris his research lies the question of communication. This combines his interests of mnemonics, orality, cybernetics, et al. (literacy, indigenous people)

      08:12 Even music and dance can be used to transmit information from one generation to the other.

    2. Chris Aldrich on Cybernetic Communications
  3. Apr 2024
    1. But stepping back even further, one can only see this imagined software as an enhancement to Latour’s larger model of interplay in his actor-network theory, a theory that does not need software or special equipment to exist. The activity in a spatial environment is not reliant on the digital environment. It may be enhanced by a code/text-based software, but a spatial software or protocol can be any platform that establishes variables for space as information
    2. Compared to the relative trickle of space made by special practitioners, these technologies produce a fire hose blast. The most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written in the protocols or softwares of infrastructural space.
    3. On the one hand, Alexander expands the repertoire of design to include activity. But on the other, he quickly codifies and taxonomizes that activity. He mimics the object of this own critique by reforming the artificial with a “natural” corrective—instead of the tree, the semi-lattice becomes the placeholder. Despite his attempt to incorporate active form and information, Alexander only creates another immobilized form.
    4. In his 1965 article “The City is not a Tree,” he critiqued what he deemed to be the infrastructural or organizational template of many settlements and cities. A “tree,” in Alexander’s parlance, is a branching structure in which sets are either completely disconnected from one another or entirely contained within one set without overlapping sets. The branches do not grow together but emanate separately from a single trunk.
    5. This capacity seems to finally fulfill the dream of artists and architects of the mid- to late twentieth century, among them Jack Burnham, Cedric Price, Archigram, and Christopher Alexander, who experimented with a cybernetic apparatus for modeling space.
  4. Feb 2024
  5. Jan 2024
  6. Nov 2023
  7. Jul 2023
      • 06:40 Norbert Wiener/cybernetics: technology shouldn't replace humans, they should complement each other
      • 14:00 infinite buffer effect (there is infinite knowledge work, optimising the shallow leads to more work, not a transition, perse, to deepwork) (16:57 example of his grandfather before the computer age)
  8. Nov 2022
    1. Weaver distinguishes ‘three levels of communication problems’, beginning with the technical problem (A), which is concerned with the f idelity of symbol transmission and thus the level where Shannon’s mathematical def inition and measure of information are situated. But Weaver then also postulates a semantic problem (B) that refers to the transmission of meaning and an ef fectiveness problem (C) that asks

      Three levels of communication problems: technical problem, semantic problem, and effectiveness problem. (Shannon and Weaver. 1964. A Mathematical Theory of Communication)

  9. Aug 2022
    1. in terms of the new perspectives provided by cybernetics and thecommunication sciences,

      Did Chomsky get onto the cybernetics craze aka "The Bandwagon"?

  10. Jul 2022
    1. now we go back to jakub von ogskul and we find him critiquing exactly the 00:09:20 same thing for exactly the same reasons 30 years after john dewey there on the left he has picked out the reflex arc pointing out that it is a linear throughput which leaves no room 00:09:34 for subjectivity no room for intentional action no room for meaning to arise if you if the middle is only animated by inputs then it's a puppet 00:09:47 he replaces this with a model on the right that will whose terms will not be entirely clear to you as you read the article but i want you to notice one thing about it it's circular it's not a linear 00:09:59 throughput it's circular he starts by noting the embeddedness of the body in the world and the fact that the activity of the 00:10:13 body is meaningful at all times and not separable into inputs and outputs his replacement of the linear throughput with this circular model that he elaborates in various ways 00:10:25 is remarkably prescient of the basic cybernetic insight that will arise after the second world war in which it's all feedback systems positive feedback systems negative feedback systems 00:10:37 homeostatic systems um reciprocity is always involved the fact that you do something and something is done to you at the same time that that we dance in the world 00:10:50 rather than standing apart from it and recording a movie of it so his um uncovery of this basic cybernetic principle with which one might approach the body and its being in the world is 00:11:02 remarkably prescient but these profound ideas of vulnerable are often hidden because he's well frankly so charming well he's a problematic character as we'll see lately 00:11:14 but he tells a good story and he does cool experiments

      30 years after Dewey's paper, Uexkull affirms the same finding as Dewey in his article: A Stroll Though the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934).

      In his article, Uexkull compares two diagrams, a linear input/output and a circular with subjectivity in the middle. Uekull anticipates the fundamental cybernetic concept of positive and negative feedbacks - you do something to the world and the world does something back to you.

  11. Jun 2022
    1. The Antinet’s permanent-address scheme, with its shifting nature, gives the system a unique personality. The Antinet’s unique personality stands as one of the most integral aspects of the system. A key component that enables insightful communication with a human being is the human’s personality–the person’s unique way of communicating with you based on their unique perspectives and interpretations. The Numeric-alpha addresses provide the Zettelkasten with a unique personality. Over time, unique structures form due to Numeric-alpha addresses. This is important because it allows one to communicate with the Antinet, transforming it into a communication experience with a second mind, a doppelgänger, or a ghost in a box, as Luhmann called it. (5)5 This is the entity Luhmann referred to when he titled his paper, Communicating with Noteboxes. Numeric-alpha addresses make all of this possible.

      Scheper seems to indicate that it is the addressing system alone which provides the "personality" of a zettelkasten, whereby he's actively providing personification of a paper and pencil system by way of literacy. We need to look more closely, however at the idea of what communication truly is to discern this. A person might be able to read an individual card and have a conversation with just it, but this conversation will be wholly one sided, and stops at the level of that single card. We also need the links between that individual card and multiple others to fill in the rest of the resulting potential conversation. Or we will rely on the reader of the card extending the idea or linking it to others of their ideas (and that of the zettelkasten), to grow the system and thereby its "personality".

      Thus the personality is part that of the collection of cards using their addresses and the links between them. This personality, however, isn't immediate. It might grow over time reaching some upper limit at the length of time of the user's life, but much of its personality is contingent upon the knowledge of the missing context of the system that is contained in or by its creator. Few zettelkasten will be so well composed as to provide full context. (cross reference: https://hyp.is/5gWedOs7Eeyrg2cTFW4iCg/niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/Zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8_V).

      The question we might want to look at: Is there a limiting upper bound (a la a Shannon Limit) to the amount of information that a zettelkasten might contain or transmit, even beyond the life of an initial creator? Could it converse with itself without the assistance of an outside actor of some sort? What pieces are missing that might help us to define communication or even life itself?

    1. ZK II: Note 9/8 9/8 Zettelkasten 1 as a cybernetic system Combination of disorder and order, of lump formation and unpredictable combination realized in ad hoc access. Precondition: waiver of fixed order. The upstream differentiation: search aids vs. content; Registers, questions, ideas vs. Existing forms and partly makes superfluous what must be assumed in terms of inner order .

      Niklas Luhmann thought of the zettelkasten as a cybernetic system.

      He considers a precondition of its creation is that it ought to waive any "fixed order", allow for search, and the asking of questions.


      There are only the outlines of brief and scant thoughts here however, which would have required significant amounts of additional context not contained on the card. As a result one would require additional underpinning to understand what Luhmann means here as the card definitively couldn't have been directly or easily reused for future writing beyond the basic sketch outline he provides. What proportion of cards have brief thought sketches like this versus more fully thought out and directly reusable ideas within his system? Does Schmidt provide any guidance here without reading portions of the larger corpus? How does this differ from the guidance of Ahrens?

      (Translation from German to English via Google)

  12. Apr 2022
    1. The book was reviewed in all major magazines and newspapers, sparking what historian Ronald Kline has termed a “cybernetics craze,” becoming “a staple of science fiction and a fad among artists, musicians, and intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.”

      This same sort of craze also happened with Claude Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Information which helped to bolster Weiner's take.

    2. In Hubbard’s case, the trick was to latch onto popular fads and run with them. It all started with his 1951 book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which was an unabashed parasitization—some have argued, a parody—of the 1948 zeitgeist-bending international bestseller Cybernetics, published by MITs’ prodigy-in-chief Norbert Wiener.

      L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental health was a parasitization of Norbert Weiner's 1948 best seller Cybernetics.

  13. Dec 2021
    1. The unwritten rule of Cybernetics seems to be - Maintain the homeostasis until you break it for the better. #Cybernetics #Ashby

      This is a good rule of thumb for political science as well. Some of our issue in America right now is that we're seeing systemic racism and many want to change it, but we're not sure yet what to replace it with.

      The renaissance created scholasticism which created a new system, but too tightly wound religion into the humanist movement. Similarly Englightement Europe and America subsumed the indigenous critique, which opened up ideas about equality and freedom which hadn't existed, but they still kept the structures of hierarchy which have caused immeasurable issues. These movements are worth studying to see how the new systems were created, but with an eye toward more careful development so as not to make things even worse generations later.

  14. Aug 2021
    1. William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a British pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory. He is best known for proposing the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, intelligence amplification, the good regulator theorem, building the automatically stabilizing Homeostat, and his books Design for a Brain (1952) and An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).

  15. Apr 2021
    1. O’Rourke’s “stuff” ranges from frequent releases on Bandcamp under the “Steamroom” label, including hushed, avant-garde instrumentation and complex mosaics of sound in all its beautiful and messy forms. In that same interview, O’Rourke explained his process for creating one of those works — “Steamroom 47” — culling from a wide range of touchstones including data points in music information retrieval, cybernetics and Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations.” Heady stuff.

      Now I'm really intrigued, an artist using these methods (especially cybernetics?!) .

  16. Nov 2020
  17. Oct 2020
    1. Walter Pitts was pivotal in establishing the revolutionary notion of the brain as a computer, which was seminal in the development of computer design, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and theoretical neuroscience. He was also a participant in a large number of key advances in 20th-century science.
  18. Aug 2020
    1. See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

      Try and figure out when you actually are the most productive. When your usage of tools actually works. The insight you gain there could help you figure out what your ideal "productivity situation" is.

      Side note, just realized this is a perfect application of cybernetics (at least as far as I understand it so far).

      1. Apply a system
      2. Observe myself within that system
      3. Gain feedback by observing how I behave in that system
      4. Use that feedback to tweak that system until I've achieved my desired goal
  19. Jul 2020
    1. first-order cybernetics is “the science of observed systems,” while second-order cybernetics is “the science of observing systems.

      Inception, but make it Cybernetic.

      When observing a system, it's important to also observe the observer of the system

      This is important because the observer is directly influencing the observation of said system. One must consider any implicit bias the system's observer may introduce in what they're observing.

    2. If shared conceptual models applicable to solving problems in many sciences could be found, then “by agreeing on the usefulness of these models, we get glimpses of a new lingua franca of science....

      Cybernetics is key in that it allows for models of thought to be transferred across areas of knowledge

  20. Jan 2020
    1. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician with extraordinarily broad interests. The son of a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, Wiener was reading Dante and Darwin at seven, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, and received a PhD from Harvard at eighteen. He joined MIT's Department of Mathematics in 1919, where he remained until his death in 1964 at sixty-nine. In Ex-Prodigy, Wiener offers an emotionally raw account of being raised as a child prodigy by an overbearing father. In I Am a Mathematician, Wiener describes his research at MIT and how he established the foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics and the theory of feedback systems. This volume makes available the essence of Wiener's life and thought to a new generation of readers.

  21. Mar 2019
    1. at the Second Cybernetic Conference, Pitts announced that he was writing his doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks.
    2. Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core.

      Wiener always did like cyberneticians for it's parallelism with mathematicians....

  22. Feb 2019
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  24. Jul 2018
  25. May 2018
  26. Jan 2014
    1. I was surprised to encounter empathy again in the context of cybernetics. This rediscovery happened thanks to a Twitter exchange with @seungchan​. Cybernetics tells us that, in order for any one or any thing to function, it must have a relationship with other people and/or things.