I think I saw the first thing, but with Lee Marvin and during the war.
Right? I was thinking more sketch comedy, but your take works as well.
I'm really looking forward to Dsquared's book (I'm waiting for hard copies to be more available in the US before ordering).
Henry Farrell had a great post about it which really pulled a bunch of interesting ideas together: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/cybernetics-is-the-science-of-the
wondering what is wrong with the British
Oh my god, woman, steel yourself for 150 comments about what is wrong with you, the U.S., and you as a exemplar of the U.S. (The actual problem with Americans is that there's a chance I will read them all, which is, to be clear, insane behavior.)
I'm happy to blame management types and economists for what's l whatever problem you have.
3: Amazon will just send you a copy, I guess from the UK. It arrived a little slow but otherwise seamlessly.
4 postscript: I think I would have gone more in the direction of asking anyone who knows more about the British Army to clarify, but this is the more entertaining route for sure. In possibly related news, I should just give up on Google at this point. It feels like a dire effect of middle age that I haven't yet. Also yes, I'm in a terrible mood; I'll be quiet and everyone can have more time to read NickS's link.
Well the US did do this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
Also, presumably if you have all the illiterate soldiers in the same unit it's easier to teach them all to read though I can't speak to the "psychopathological personalities" bit.
Beer was doing operational research into human factors. (Now would be a good time to look those phrases up if you don't know what they mean.) Dsquared has phrased it badly, in two ways.
First, the unit in question wasn't an operational unit like an infantry battalion, it was an experimental unit of 180 soldiers in an education centre. Second, "psychopathological" doesn't mean "is a psychopath". It means "has any symptoms of any mental illness".
Beer was looking at how organisations develop and function by studying a very unusual organisation that had still developed its own internal structure and culture. I would imagine the army wanted to know about this because, in an age of conscription, you'd get illiterate soldiers coming in, as well as mentally ill ones, and also because knowing how organisations work and how to make them work better is the army's lifeblood.
But don't worry, Americans - it was almost certainly still an all-white unit, so the basic decencies were being preserved.
In dsquared's defence he does clarify this quite well in the book.
I think it was last week that I read that any book that sells over 2,000 copies is already a top 10% bestseller, because nobody reads anything except LOTR and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so am tending to be extra sympathetic to anybody who has published something recently.
Otoh, I'd be surprised if the answer to the 'polycrisis' turns out to be 'better management'.
I was a bit disappointed by dsquared's previous book, the fraud one - good concept, well written, but shallow - so interested to know if this one is any better.
12: the ability of institutions to get stuff done is pretty critical to, well, anything.
"nobody reads anything except LOTR and The Very Hungry Caterpillar,"
I am not Gandalf the Very Hungry Caterpillar, whom you betrayed. I am Gandalf the Beautiful Butterfly, who has returned from death.
Gandalf the Cabbage White, and I come to you now, in your hour of needing pristine brassicas.
14: He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty management consultant!
I am a little puzzled by the relationship of 11 and 13 -- have you read the book, and if not how do you know this is well-clarified?
The post is mostly kidding -- I'm sure there's some sane explanation for how this unit came into existence and for what purpose exactly (research? Purely abstract research, or with some specific goal, such as to develop systems for the military to use to make use of illiterate and 'psychopathological' recruits? Or possibly it was not exactly research but training, to try and turn the specific recruits in the unit into soldiers that could successfully be placed into regular units?) as far as I can see the book really does speed past it in a way that leaves it sounding all terribly poorly advised. And of course Beer's early military career is not the primary subject matter of the book: I'm drawing attention to something that struck me funny rather than meaningfully criticizing the book on that basis.
"have you read the book, and if not how do you know this is well-clarified?"
The book is on Google Books.
There are few references in obituaries etc to what Beer was trying to achieve though none are detailed. It also may have had something to do with studying illiteracy and how to remediate it - obviously an army concern, as noted above and here https://www.education-uk.org/documents/minofed/pamphlet-18.html
19: So, quote the clarification you're thinking of?
Pp 39-40 clarifies the nature of the unit.
Nope. P. 39 has the sentence I quoted and two more: one saying that the unit had never received any kind of treatment, and another saying no one objected to letting Beer, an unqualified but interested officer, "see what might be achieved". This makes it sound as if the unit was a pre-existing entity before anyone tried to do anything with it, and doesn't explain how it came about in the first place.
And p. 40 talks about Beer's observations and strategies, but still doesn't tell you how and for what purpose the British Army brought together a unit of mentally ill (by some standard) and illiterate soldiers, rather than spreading them out or discharging them. I am not seriously asserting that it was as weird a thing to do as it superficially sounds, but there had to have been a pre-Beer goal for the unit's existence, and that's not in the book.
It is perfectly possible that what's missing is genuinely missing from the records -- that no one's found the explanation for why those soldiers were in that unit, the only thing that's survived is accounts of what Beer did with them. Without a footnote or something giving at least that much explanation, it did sound peculiar.
but there had to have been a pre-Beer goal
What was I trying to do before I got drunk?
To be honest it's getting difficult to tell which bits are genuine requests for information and which bits are deliberate misunderstandings for comic (well, sort of) effect, so I reckon I'll leave it there. Off to swim!
8: Not the same thing at all -- the US loosened their standards to let in people with lower IQs, but they didn't put all the low-IQ people together in a separate unit.
26: To be honest I can't even tell whether you're actually going to swim or just making an ogged reference.
27 that would be the Marines, peep.
30: that would be a great trolling, but probably not on Unfogged.
Bob Hope used to get good milage from those jokes.
Very relatedly, this event just transpired out here at the Santa Fe Institute: "The Calculated Economy in the Era of Machine Learning" organized by Farrell and Cosma Shalizi. And per this dsquared post (and the one previous to that), he apparently presented at it--so quite Unfogged/Unfogged-adjacent. I would love to have been there/heard it, but it seems to have been a closed workshop, and even if it had not been I only became aware of it via dsquared's post after the fact.
I do find the area of endeavor to be quite interesting (but more in application to organizations than society more broadly); something I could imagine pursuing if I had ever had academic discipline and enduring intellectual energy. But alas.
Herb Simon has been my go to guy, but clearly need to become more familiar with the work of Stanford Beer.
So has Substack finally become indistinguishable from the old blogosphere, or are there still key differences (apart from the fence around it all)?
OP reminds me that I have this very laptop a still unread copy of The Invisible Weapon, which apparently does for Britain what The Underground Empire does for America.
I think Substackn is easier for Nazis to monetize.
The pitch is that it's easier for everyone to monetize, including Nazis, right?
Anyway, I've now finished Dsquared's book, and my cheap shot at the British Army's peculiar staffing practices aside, it's interesting enough that I'm going to have to think about it for a bit before I have anything sensible to say about it. Very readable, as you'd expect from the source.
Nazions, the soldiers neutrons that go too fast and outrun their supply lines miss the uranium.
Thank you for deftly outrunning the more au courant wordplay there.
Did I mention that Oppenheimer is really good? It's really good.
35: Neat, although probably very little overlap except on the broadest conceptual level. Your book looks from the cover to end at WW II, and Farrell's is really about the last few decades -- Internet era.
You should read Farrell's! It's very practically clarifying on "sanctions, how do they actually work" and "what exactly is SWIFT and why is it important?" Which are areas where I am particularly slow, so clear explanations are very helpful.
To round out the reading list of things I haven't read: The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War.
Back in another life, I read "Economic Statecraft". I think it's probably out of date since the cold war ended.
A separate military unit for illiterate soldiers makes sense, since it needs a different means of command communication: only oral orders. This was one of the stated justifications for the U.S. having racially segregated units in the same war.
The Czechoslovak army had units in the sixties where politically questionable, criminal, and illiterate conscripts (including foreigners, that is Hungarian speakers) served together. That was my dad's military service. Seems normal to me, an arbitrary maybe useful decision. Asking why in a military context, does that often lead anywhere?
I'm looking forward to reading this, but haven't ordered it yet.
There's an hourlong video from that Santa Fe institute meeting: https://www.youtube.com/live/q0Hghul4oEI?si=G2B5XYK4IJ2tPsAd
I think they point was to let them get shot first.
Shorter than the book:
Not as pointed as a LizardBreath review.
38: The ones who marched at Charlottesville were Nazis. The ones who invaded the Capitol were Nazions, because they were charged.
54: I would endorse that review. Aside from the bit about having known Henry Farrell in grad school, which I didn't.
So has Substack finally become indistinguishable from the old blogosphere, or are there still key differences (apart from the fence around it all)?
That question is discussed in Oral History of the Blogosphere Part 11: Jill Filipovic.
It's a really good conversation which is summarized as, "blogs are actually making a comeback, but the blogosphere is gone forever."
I was going to joke that substack is the blogosphere crossed with an I Want song -- but there's a lot to like on substack.
I have finally read all of Henry's post in 4. Did anyone else (besides NickS) get through it? It's long and dense, but not an entire book; we could talk about it.
I tried but I'm allergic to Brian Eno.
But I did just learn that "Inaccessible Island Rail" is not a special train service.
I'd be good and dead by now if I were allergic to Eno. But you can definitely scroll down to the paragraph about Ashby's Principle of Requisite Variety and start there. It's comment 3, of course, my apologies.
Sold on reading the blog post by the reference to Eno; where's that from?
I don't know that there's a citation for the story about Brian Eno, but Henry introduces it as a direct quote.
Here's an example of the argument:
Hence, the "Requisite Variety." In Dan's summarization "anything which aims to be a 'regulator' of a system needs to have at least as much variety as that system." Or, put a little differently, "if a manager or management team doesn't have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they're in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated."
...
Another important difference is that Beer and people in his tradition treat the math as a source of valuable metaphors rather than directly applicable methods. There is some serious math behind Ashby's principle (which is to say: math that the likes of me can only follow if it is explained slowly and patiently by more intelligent people), but it is not the kind of math that is readily applied. Instead, it is the kind of math that rubs your nose in crucial but annoying facts about the complexities of the world, without giving you handy means to turn these complexities into truly tractable simplifications. This is, to repeat its title, management cybernetics . It gives you a sense of the problems of you have to manage, and some very useful perspectives and rules of thumb for how you might tackle them, but its fundamental message is that while you can manage a complex environment, you cannot usually manage it away, without changing the environment, or (the more common default choice) pretending that the complexities don't exist.
So how do you manage an inherently complex system? Beer talks about "variety engineering", and points to two broad approaches to making it work. One has already been hinted at: attenuation. Here, you take what is complex, and you make it less so. You reduce the variety of the environment you are trying to deal with, so that the system produces fewer possible states of the world to be anticipated or managed. Or you pretend to yourself that the variety is less than it is, and hope that you aren't devoured by the unknowns that you have chosen to unknow.
The second is amplification. Here, crudely speaking, you amp up the variety inside the organizational structures that you have built, so that it better matches the variety of the environment you find yourself in. Very often, this involves building better feedback loops through which different bits of the organization can negotiate with each other over unexpected problems.
There is a lot more to this - e.g. thinking about how different parts of the regulatory organization ought work as different 'systems' - but again, it's management more than science. What you do in a given instance will greatly depend on your understanding of the scale of the problems that you are addressing, and the regulatory apparatus you are using to address them. The great advantage of this approach is that it can be scaled up or down. The great disadvantage is that it offers you no inherent technique for figuring out which scale you ought be working at, or which particular means you ought be using at that scale. Again, management cybernetics is best thought of as a set of useful perspectives and associated management techniques, rather than a generalizable methodology.
But - like good perspectives and techniques - once you have grasped what it tells you, you see examples of it everywhere. The Unaccountability Machine has re-arranged my brain, so that I now see cybernetic problems wherever I look. Not only that - I think that there is the potential to use cybernetics as a common framework for understanding all sorts of problems that span information and politics. More about this at the end, but first, a few examples.
As a specific example, here's dsquared's post about budgeting.
I am haunted by a question raised by "Policy Sketchbook", which is the Twitter name of a friend who made some useful comments on the book draft, and who has quite deep knowledge of NHS budgeting practices. This practice involves managers putting together an annual plan, and then being held to account for divergences from it. That's quite a normal and useful thing to do; as PS says, in Stafford Beer's model of the "viable system", one of the fundamental tools used to stop the information flow becoming overwhelming is that "resource bargain". That's shorthand for the principle that a sub-unit ought to be allowed to do what it wants as long as its plans do not fail to achieve goals necessary for the functioning of the rest of the system, or drain resources needed for the rest of the system.
In information theory terms, it means that most of the time, the system's demands on bandwidth are only the single bit needed to transmit "everything's ok". Then from time to time, when everything ceases to be OK (because the unit has encountered something in its external environment that it can't handle with the resources it has), much more management bandwidth needs to be allocated for a period of time, until the subsystem has "relaxed" again. Since hopefully not everything will go wrong at once, this is a tool of "variety amplification" for the higher level management - it's an organisational form which allows them to manage a much bigger system than they could handle with their own information-processing capacity.
...
[The NHS budgeting practices, as described] puts NHS hospitals, trusts and other delivery units in a constant state akin to being a defaulted debtor. It's the opposite of a resource bargain - it's a system which exists to undermine the independence-subject-to-accountability that was built into the system-as-planned, and to put them in a position where they are always subject to control from the centre, as a condition of getting their revised budgets approved.
This is, of course, a very inefficient way of getting this outcome. If you want centralised control, then just control things centrally. Of course, one reason why you might want to preserve the forms of independence is that if it's known you're in control of something, then the location of the accountability switches from them to you. Like so much else in the public sector, it's an accountability sink.
Goodness, Henry has written six posts in the time that I have failed to read even one of them. But they do look interesting!
lurid and/or NIckS, is there one in particular that I should start with? (Except the one about Icehenge; I'm going to read the book first. I like early KSR much more than middle KSR, and disliking the middle has kept me from reading any of what must by now be late KSR.)
65/66: Should I just re-read Red Plenty?
Speaking of Spufford, has anyone else read Cahokia Jazz? I would enjoy talking about it, but one of the things I would enjoy talking about is the ending. So.
lurid and/or NIckS, is there one in particular that I should start with?
I'd suggest either the one linked above or this one.
Our model suggests that "connecting people" without paying specific attention to the kinds of connections you are building, and the social consequences of doing it at scale has some very obvious downsides. And that is not even to begin talking about the many other pathologies that afflict the platform economy.
Equally, there are some possible lessons. The Mercier and Sperber account of human psychology suggests that people are very inclined to get high on their own supply - but that they are also able to spot the flaws in other people's preferred bullshit, and grudgingly capable of accepting when the other side scores a point.
That suggests a simple theory of why we are in trouble. In a world where communications are less efficient, people will still want to construct and share self-serving rationalizations. But they will find it hard to coordinate on the same ones, instead likely going off in a myriad different directions. When it becomes easy to publish and find such rationalizations, they are likely to scale up quickly, and become more politically and socially consequential.
Equally, this understanding suggests that democratic politics are not irredeemably doomed to be a benighted clash between ignorant armies. If people are obliged to respond to each other's better criticisms, rather than self-selecting into blobs of mutually reinforcing rationalizations, they are likely to end up better off. As Cosma and I have argued elsewhere, this is how democracy is supposed to work, and what it is supposed to do - not arrive at some common truth, but to create a system of competition, where different groups are free to discover their interests and organize in pursuit of them, but where they also have to grudgingly take account of each other's best arguments (and sometimes, if they can get away with it, steal them outright and pretend they were theirs in the first place).
67.2 I was going to suggest Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), but Here Come the Warm Jets and Another Green World are fine albums to start with too.
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I just watched American Fiction on a plane and it's really good. For those of you who didn't catch it yet.
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I just watched American Fiction on a plane and it's really good. For those of you who didn't catch it yet.
IMO Eno's best work is in collaborations-- David Bowie's Low and the first Roxy Music album. His ambient music IMO is also worth a listen.
Nothing wrong with Avalon. I have been relistening to smooth music from the 80s lately. The Commodores Nightshift is pretty good. Slagging on yacht rock is easy, but the Isley Brothers (good musicians, incredible guitar playing low in the background) recorded an album called Smooth Sailing, not as good as Between the Sheets. Earth Wind and Fire started overreaching, not quite operatic, but there's some good stuff there.
I got sidetracked not just by daily obligations but also by an entire New Yorker article on attention and its uses, much of which I skimmed, and now I'm overwhelmed. As a note for whenever I return to whelm equilibrium, we could at least play around with the pithiest thing, "Stafford Beer's most famous dictum, 'The Purpose of the System is What It Does.'" (Revealed purpose like revealed preferences, I take it?) Seems like this more effectively deflates the idea of purpose than reinvigorating or rationalizing it, so it strikes me as a cautionary principle, but what do you all think? Is it catchy like that? Would you tweet it a lot?
For that matter, "revealed preferences" has made it into daily use in my household and others, but usually as a way of pointing out a problem, like the preference for eating preserved foods over perishable ones.
Nothing wrong with Avalon
This took a turn! I couldn't pick a favorite Eno album. Another Green World is the strongest unified work overall, but it doesn't have a single banger unless I'm forgetting one. Tiger Mountain has "The True Wheel" and "Third Uncle," but Warm Jets has "Baby's on Fire"... impossible to choose. (You can also choose whichever album has the lowest number of irritating songs, which is probably still Another Green World, but who wants to be ruled by negatives?)
I have no idea if that comment makes any sense. My brain is super fried for unclear reasons.
78. Weed on the way to being reclassified as schedule 3, DEA okayed that today.
Erasure (the Percival Everett novel from which American Fiction is adapted) is a hoot. I have trouble sustaining attention through an entire movie.
Have you tried watching "The Cheap Detective" instead? Peter Falk's character is basically Columbo if Columbo got laid a bunch.
Another potentially interesting look at Beer is Kevin Munger's "The Tragedy of Stafford Beer.
https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-tragedy-of-stafford-beer
(I found it just noodling around on Google and only realized later that Munger appears to be a Crooked Timber contributor.)
Kind of goes heavy on Munger's own ideas at the end but has some interesting discussion of his advising Allende and two books of Beer's from the 70s-- Designing Freedom and what looks to be fascinating and somewhat wacky project, Platform for Change that includes pages in 4 different colors, one color written in a metalanguage in an attempt to escape the linearity of the written form.
77: I got stuck thinking about "The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does" myself, reading Davies' book. It's a clever turn of phrase, but I don't like it -- once you're rejecting the intentions, stated or actual, of the people responsible for devising and operating a system as establishing its purpose, and relying only on the behavior of the system, you haven't really come up with a better way of identifying a purpose, you've just sort of rejected the idea of purpose. Is the purpose of a car with a weak spot in the wall of one tire to spin uncontrollably across traffic when the tire blows out? That seems like an unhelpful usage of the word, as opposed to a usage that would say that a car like that is serving its intended purpose badly.
If the whole idea is to say that if you don't like the behavior of a system, you have to change it into a different system that does what you want, that's perfectly reasonable, but I don't find the aphorism helpful.
Also, because purpose so strongly implies "the conscious intent of some human person", it creates a cheaply cynical impression which I don't think can be what Beer actually meant: "when you see a system that does something apparently undesirable, you can be certain that it is functioning according to the intentions of the natural persons responsible for it, who meant for the undesirable thing to happen." Which is sometimes going to be the case, but it's not an inevitability.
72: Found it fairly compelling as well. The relatively brief scenes at faculty meetings seemed to capture the spirit Russo nailed in Straight ManIn English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man.
I hear you don't write any more," he says...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread.
84: In fact if I understand his work correctly, much of it in fact reflects the opposite. And I think that is sort of what he was getting at, but it requires assigning "purpose" to the aggregate complex thing full of unintended consequences.
But out of context it is a slightly more nuanced "It is what is."
The Purpose of the Aphorism is What People Hear.
I always tell people not to defeat the porpoise.
86.last: well played.
you haven't really come up with a better way of identifying a purpose, you've just sort of rejected the idea of purpose.
Maybe we can graft an Aristotelian four-way split onto it. (A porpoise is a tetrapod.) I don't think the aphorism is supposed to imply a multiverse where every possible alteration to a system creates a new system. I'm puzzled over the implications about predictability, though. To the extent that a system reliably does a thing, that's its purpose? Maybe?
79: hot damn, maybe Avalon will sound better.
83: if your factory makes tyres with weak spots then yes, the purpose of the factory is to cause traffic accidents? (I guess the main thought of POSIWID is to equip the consultant with a way to jolt complacent managers into wakefulness.)
86.1: Right, it's not what Beer meant, but it's what the words he used strongly imply, and it's what I'd expect someone quoting the aphorism to often mean.
90.1: But it really isn't, according to any normal sense of the word "purpose" -- you could have a factory that systematically makes bad tires that cause traffic accidents even when all the human individuals with any control over the system genuinely do not want that to happen and would stop it if they knew how.
It works to jolt complacent managers into wakefulness (if it does effectively) not because it's true, but because it's sort of undisprovable even if false: something true would be more "if the predictable results of a system are indistinguishable from those of a system deliberately constructed to bring about those results, the actual intent of the people responsible is irrelevant to the problem of managing those results. 'Purpose' in the sense of human intent doesn't matter."
You, the disciple of Beer, are jolting the manager of the tire factory by saying that it doesn't matter what they, and the board of directors, and even the shareholders personally as individuals actually want in the sense of purposefully intend. So long as the factory is predictably making bad tires they're controlling, they're controlling a system whose "purpose" is to cause accidents. And I can see that as an effective jolt, but it's an effective jolt because it's false: if it there wasn't a disconnect between "what the system does" and the actual human purposes of its controllers, no one would be jolted by it at all.
To put it another way, the "jolt" is that you're threatening the people responsible for the system with the false inference made in my 84. Which might be rhetorically effective in that context, certainly, but it's effective to the extent that it's false, not because it's reliably true for conventional usage of the word "purpose".
93: Well maybe, but afaict POSIWID is said of the system not its designers or managers. It's true of them that they believe that a thing has a certain purpose, but _they_ are wrong, since the purpose is not as they believe. If beyond that belief there's a residue of intent (they _want_ the thing to have that purpose) then it's an ineffective intent.
That said, I suppose there's another question that might be asked: if a purpose is not some thinking agent's intention, what sort of thing is it (and where is it)? That said, the gist from SEP's entry on Aristotelian causes seems to be that purpose (i.e. the 'final cause') might be necessary to an adequate explanation of many if not all things. But certainly complex things such as the cyberneticians admire and wish to spend time with; possibly it's also an active concept in biology, not sure?
Whether all of this sort of thing in the end made Stafford Beer more enemies than friends ... is another question.
The point, really, is that the purpose of the system might as well be what it does. Intent isn't magic.
(on the upthread thing, Beer's surprisingly sympathetic Daily Telegraph obituary is here and they are usually very precise on anything military. It gives his career as having originally signed up with the Royal Artillery, being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Fusiliers*, at regimental duty with 9th Gurkha Rifles, having been on a headquarters staff as a staff captain for intelligence, switching into the War Office's operations research team as a psychologist, and then for some reason leading an army education centre. The Army Education Corps was pretty much dedicated to three things - providing remedial education to illiterate recruits, providing vocational courses to people leaving the army, and during WW2, propagandizing the troops, although of course we didn't call it that. At that time the AEC was a bit of a repository for random intellectuals and leftist malcontents in HM service - Richard Hoggart did his national service in it and its propaganda was regularly criticized by Tories for turning the troops socialist. Intelligence was also like that, what with being full of Oxbridge dons, writers, and Soviet agents; some of this was just because these organizations expanded hugely and needed to staff up and there were only weirdos left after every organization with higher priority had had their fill.)
*this was really common after the first couple of years of the war. despite the regimental system everyone was put in the General Service Corps for basic training and then assigned to a specialization and whatever unit needed more people, and after Normandy kicked off and infantry losses skyrocketed a lot of people, including whole units, were combed out to grab a rifle and go fight. The US version of this grabbed Paul Fussell out of the advanced technology program he was in and sent him to the front as an infantry replacement. If Beer had e.g. originally been recruited as an antiaircraft gunner - there were an absolute shit-load of AA units, the force expanded hugely immediately pre-war - he might well have been sent to the infantry when it turned out the air force had done its thing but there were still plenty of German and Japanese infantry dug into the ground, and if late enough, transferred out of the Fusiliers to the Gurkhas to go and fight Japan.
(AA gunnery, of course, was the absolute seedbed of cybernetics from the engineering side so I wonder if he got any exposure to gyro predictors, radar, and the like....)
95: Not sure. Cybernetics people like to draw comparisons with evolved systems: homeostasis of blood sugar, say. Nobody need have formed any intention with respect to something such as that, yet we might still want to talk of its purpose. If so, we seem capable of invoking purpose with no intentions in sight; that would be a striking thing, no?
What's more, it's one thing to set a widget maker straight with bracing language. It's another to start talking of national governance in the way one might talk of a living organism: is that even desirable?
Well, most things (not all) that evolved have a *function*; if you're really strict about excluding teleology that's not the same thing as a purpose but it sure looks like one!
97, 98: Right, and in the context of a living organism we wouldn't say "the purpose of a system is what it does" for a malfunctioning bodily system. The purpose of a diabetic pancreas isn't to kill you: either its purpose is to maintain your blood sugar levels and it's failing to serve that purpose; or talking about purposes in the absence of intent isn't meaningful.
What I'm griping about is that it's such a striking phrase that it sounds like it's identifying an important truth, and I don't think it does. What I think it does is aggressively push back rhetorically against someone claiming that a malfunctioning system serves a purpose which it's not actually achieving: "That's not an anti-aircraft gun, if by that you mean a gun for shooting down enemy bombers. POSIWID: Looking at what it does, it's a noisemaker." It's a good line, and a good jolt, but if you're actually trying to say truthful things, it's more meaningful to call the gun a bad anti-aircraft gun that needs to be improved or fixed than it is to call it a good, successful, noisemaker.
The function of a diabetic pancreas is to sell insulin.
Happy to differentiate 'purpose' and 'function' ... although it's POSIWID and not FOSIWID: it's for the Beer camp to explain themselves, rather than me!
And sadly, at this point Beer's Purpose is quiet decomposition. But if I had a Beer acolyte here I'd be noodging for a precise definition of "purpose" in that line: my guess is that what's actually meant is "purpose isn't a useful concept in systems analysis, you should be thinking about predictable outcomes instead" rather than "purpose is an important concept for how we think about things and this is exactly what we mean by it."
99: I found myself thinking of tendentious ways to describe things in politics. For example, the right wing tendency to label benefits systems as 'producing' 'dependents' or 'clients'.
For all I know, the Beerites have some wider theoretical framework that allows them to cope with this sort of thing. A pancreas is seen as a sub-system to an encompassing system whose purpose is to further its own survival, say. You then have a way to correctly label malfunctioning (and avoid engaging in an obtuse redefinition). Similarly with benefits payments in the context of a state with its multiple departments; there's malfunction only when the state as a whole is undermined in some way. I still see difficulty though: somewhere, notions of justice, rights and autonomy are looming.
95: That does make the Army bit make more sense: if they were assembling units of illiterate soldiers to give them remedial education, presumably before transferring them into some more active bit of the army once the education successfully brought them up to a useful standard, doing some research on them would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It just struck me funny leaving that unspecified.
101: Yeah, that begins pushing the thing in a more tautological direction which I was thinking you could emphasize to provide a different kind of jolt--but one which might not cause designers/operators to look at their own possible corrective actions. So the "Impact/Effect/Results of The System IWID" or even "What The System Does IWID" . But I guess then you really are at just "It Is What It Is" so probably never mind.
103: Funny, I was thinking of tendentious descriptions from the left, and when I say tendentious I mean descriptions that I would usually agree with in detail, I just don't think POSIWID is a clarifying way of thinking about it.
Applications for social security disability are, I understand, basically all denied at the original application level, and then if you drag yourself through an administrative appeal, meritorious applications might be granted. And that's a system whose purpose is, I believe, intentionally to deny a certain number of meritorious applications by making the process too difficult to navigate: in that case you can use the actual functioning of the system as useful evidence of the intent of the people responsible for managing and operating it. But you can't reliably make that deduction about all systems that produce bad results.
103.last: Probably stretching the complex biological system "purpose" thing too far, but I do think there are different failure causes in biological systems that are analogous to different ways complex human systems can fail. Per above, a malfunctioning organ is an internally corrupted system failure requiring repair, redesign, or replacement. Or there can be a system still internally functioning as "intended" but failing due to significant external environmental changes. For instance Passenger Pigeons had a relatively low reproduction rate for birds and very little in the way of individual self and nest protection behavior. Worked well when there was relatively safety in millions/billions gathered in large tracts of suitable habitat, but for shit with shrinking, isolated habitat and new vicious predators equipped with novel killing strategies and tools.
106: Yep. Especially things that look surficially reasonable like states (Indiana is one) that provide one ballot drop off place per county not matter the population. Inherently designed to disadvantage large urban populations. (Or of course literacy test, felony disenfranchment, Electoral College....maybe even geographically compact voting districts., although that one is probably not originally intended as such).
although of course we didn't call it that
Really? Real question.
if a manager or management team doesn't have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they're in charge of, control is not possible
I love the implied infinite regression of cybernetlici.
Propaganda is always what the others do.
108: Right. Sometimes POSIWID is true of a particular system and the actual purposes of the people controlling it. But turning it into an aphorism to be used in that context leads you to conclusion that it's always true by definition, and I think that leads to systematically neglecting the possibility that there are poorly functioning systems producing genuinely unintended results which people in power do want to fix but they need to figure out how.
77 and 90 have it. POSIWID on the face it is a more sophisticated version of "Show me your budget and I'll show you your strategy."
Though it could also imply the organizational politics factor -- the system once established becomes an end in itself for those who live in the system. IDK if that's the intended meaning. Cybernetics stereotypically doesn't like to acknowledge that human components have agency, but I know nothing of Beer or any of the texts.
95: The US version of this grabbed Paul Fussell out of the advanced technology program he was in and sent him to the front as an infantry replacement.
Also Mel Brooks, Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, Roy Lichtenstein, Gore Vidal, and Henry Kissinger.
I was actually thinking about the ASTP program when the illiterate thing was first mentioned, based on the experience of my father and an uncle of my wife's. Both were in the program and ended up in the same infantry division when the programs shut down. The division had previously been primarily stocked from rural Arkansas and southern Missouri* and had by my father's and other written accounts a fair percentage of illiterate soldiers. Inevitable tensions arose, particularly as the college punks got differentially promoted into positions where reading and writing helped. So an inadvertent (maybe?) experiment. In the event, do not have any personal accounts as how it went in combat (division was at Leyte and Okinawa) as my father was transferred to an amphibious tank battalion before they shipped out, and my wife's uncle was killed in action*. Written accounts say all got leveled out in actual combat, but who knows.
*We actually know a good bit more about her uncle's death as it occurred as part of an action where someone received a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor. An ammo carrier from rural southern Missouri unexpectedly launched a one-man assault on a Japanese position and was grievously wounded, wife's uncle (also ammo carrier) left to guard him was killed by a sniper that evening and the MOH winner also died from his wounds. Somewhat sadly, the overall context of the action makes it clear that no such individual heroism was needed; the Japanese had launched a desperate attack on an airfield well within US lines using gliders, They had initial success due to surprise but were pinned down, cut off and doomed to be rooted out within a day or so. But such it is in warfare. It was however a particularly bitter blow for my wife's family all of whom had made their way out of Vienna post-Anschluss by disparate routes (including Vienna->ancestral Polish shtetl->Trans-Siberian Express->Japan->Seattle->Brooklyn). He probably would have been a good candidate (and more valuable to the Army) for another specialized unit, the Ritchie Boys comprised of soldiers fluent in European languages used in interrogations in the European Theater. There is a good book and documentary on their experience.
113* was a long digression. Sorry, but it is one of those one thing leads to another stories for me. In the course of doing family genealogical research my daughter came across someone compiling oral histories who was in the process of interviewing the commanding officer in the action. She was able to provide him some specific questions to ask from which we received some additional specific information.
My grandmother's brother was in the army being trained to fight in the South Pacific when they pulled him out, investigated his feelings about the then-current leaders of Italy, and sent him to Italy as an interpreter for the officers doing recon. I think this worked out well for him.
I was never sure why they picked him. He was a smart man, but uneducated at that time. And his Italian would have been a Sicilian dialect and he was never in Sicily during the fighting.
What I'm griping about is that it's such a striking phrase that it sounds like it's identifying an important truth, and I don't think it does. What I think it does is aggressively push back rhetorically against someone claiming that a malfunctioning system serves a purpose which it's not actually achieving: "That's not an anti-aircraft gun, if by that you mean a gun for shooting down enemy bombers. POSIWID: Looking at what it does, it's a noisemaker." It's a good line, and a good jolt, but if you're actually trying to say truthful things, it's more meaningful to call the gun a bad anti-aircraft gun that needs to be improved or fixed than it is to call it a good, successful, noisemaker.
I think you're completely convincing about the rhetorical power of the phrase. I would also think (as others have said), that the other way to read it would be as anti-teleological. I was recently thinking about the phrase "existence precedes essence", meaning that humans don't exist as an instance of some abstract set, they just exist, and the discover themselves. You could read POSIWID similarly. I do note, however, that the Dsquared post I linked to in 66 uses the phrase in the way that LB is complaining about.
Also Mel Brooks, Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, Roy Lichtenstein, Gore Vidal, and Henry Kissinger.
What, both Kissingers?
That was supposed to be Kurt Vonnegut.... a Manichaean slip.
Recently learned that Vidal attended the Los Alamos Ranch School that became the Lab.
118.last: Speaking of dsquared and the continuing nexus of CTers, he has a new post commenting on Healey's book (which he has only partially read.
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/offer-a-meal-deal-you-cant-refuse?utm_campaign=post&triedRedirect=true
He does mention the purpose of a system, but does not use the P-phrase itself.
117: well, when Norman Lewis' Field Security Section deployed to French North Africa and then Sicily and Salerno, at least their officer commanding *was* a linguist, from Cambridge, no less. Pity the languages were classical Greek and Old Norse.
There is a wonderful bit in Lewis' memoir where the FSO tries to address a mass meeting of French settlers, in bad Latin.
Not unreasonable. They had presumably had, what, 2hrs/wk of bad Latin since birth.
At least he didn't try to communicate with them in Old Norse.
Old Norse could be great for psywar broadcasts.
||
Marginally topical bleg: Recommendations (or just suggested minimum specs) for new
1. Android phone
2. Windows laptop (is it time for AMD?)
?
(All I need is something reasonably quick that will stay usable for a few years. No gaming/LLM training/Miniplenting required.)
|>
I like my Samsung, but the battery is getting weak after just three years.
The Purpose of the Battery is what the Battery Makes You Think About Your Phone after Several Years.
I should get an iPhone so I could text with Apple people features, but learning new things is a pain.
77. that article weirdly triggered status anxiety. it was mainly about a secret society called birders. I was worried about attention problems but know I have to worry about not being cool enough to be invited into a secret society. not really helping.
77. that article weirdly triggered status anxiety. it was mainly about a secret society called birders. I was worried about attention problems but know I have to worry about not being cool enough to be invited into a secret society. not really helping.
Or Eno. Depending on how close you get to the birds.
There is a wonderful bit in Lewis' memoir where the FSO tries to address a mass meeting of French settlers, in bad Latin.
Somehow I read this comment as being about Jerry Lewis, and tried to think what movie it was referring to. The Sad Sack? At War in the Army?
130: I've heard a lot of good comments on Asus Zenbooks and here's ZDNet's glowing review: https://www.zdnet.com/article/asus-new-laptop-is-a-solid-macbook-alternative-thats-better-in-several-ways/
AMD has some very good product (look for 7040, 8040, or 8000G) out at the moment but the new Intel Core Ultras just dropped so enjoy the competition.
Obviously nobody asked for "get a Mac" but there is an absolutely mammoth sale on M2 Macbooks at the moment as Apple is plainly going to announce something cool and is clearing the supply chain. I got one for the opinionated academic when I was over for NVIDIA GTC and paid like £780 or so, a 60% discount from list price in sterling terms - the deal was so good I offered it round the family but fortunately I didn't end up as a Mac smuggler: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/promo/macbook-air-m2
Wearing a mac to cover up all the Macs
Chipotle put lettuce on my order instead of green salsa. We must crush the workers.
130, 140: I don't know anything about the current line-ups for Windows laptops but I had good experiences with Asus laptops before switching to a Macbook* about a year ago. I still have an Asus "lifebook[?]" from 2018 that runs fine for most things.
*Similar to Alex's suggestion, I got one when they were clearing out the M1 inventory before the M2 came out. I don't feel a great need to move up to M2 or M3. My short answer to "why Mac" is I wanted something that could handle video and photo editing and Macbooks started to look competitive with Windows machines once I started looking at higher-end specs. Also, I was primarily a Linux user (dual boot with Windows) and I got sick of not being able to stream movies on my laptop.
Twitter interaction re: dsquared's book. Person A gives a brief review with several teasers. Person B asks for elaboration of teasers. Person A: No. The purpose of a system is what it does, and this review's purpose is to make you buy Dan's book.
Thanks all for (non-Mac) thoughts. Thoughts for minimum CPU and memory specs?
I would note that the silly prices on Macs are on the base 8GB config which might be tight, although the unified memory architecture uses that efficiently so it's "worth" more in PC-world. Given the choice I'd go for 16GB at least, and you're never going to have too much. More and more applications will want to run a local AI of some sort and 7B parameters like Mistral uses ~6.5GB of unified memory or VRAM.
M2s with more RAM are also going cheap but it's not as much of a crazy deal. It's still a deal.
If anyone wants a really sweet kid's lappy/travel gadget, M1 MacBook Airs are $699 now: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/15/24101727/apple-m1-macbook-air-laptop-walmart
I mean, they're three generations off and the point about 8GB and non-upgradable bites but that's *cheap*.
Just realized I gave you the wrong ASUS review. This is the one I meant: https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-work-laptop-i-recommend-to-most-people-is-not-made-by-apple-or-lenovo/
On the Intel CPUs, you definitely want a Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) as they're the first that isn't on the now ancient 14nm or 10nm "+++" process and they also benefited from a lot of other new stuff e.g. the NPU, the new integrated GPU, various microarch and power electronics changes.
OT: Pretty sure Alan Moore is sitting in this waiting room.
Never mind. They called a different name.
Did it sound like a name that Alan Moore would make up?
151: No, why do you ask?
I'm been drooling over a Framework laptop. Windows sold separately.
151: Not really. I guess there's more than one guy with that hair-beard combo.
Aren't they all?
"The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does"
What this phrase points out is that systems operate according to the intentional acts of the people who make up those systems. I currently work for a tiny business that is part of an enormous corporate conglomerate, and the purpose of the Real Estate, Human Resources and Legal arms (all of which I have dealt with extensively lately) are largely unrelated to maintaining the viability of the business I am in.
My colleagues assert that this is irrational or even evil, but it's because they are failing to recognize the intent and motivations of the people involved in these systems -- the purpose of these systems.
The way I phrase this to my colleagues is: You have to ask yourself, who is the customer? And once you get out of our little organization, the customer is pretty much never us. Our task, therefore, is not to convince people that they are doing their jobs wrong, because they aren't. We must look for a way to make our needs compatible with the requirements of the actual customer -- and we can't do that until we acknowledge that the system is not intended to serve our needs, and only does so incidentally to its actual purpose, which we must discover and exploit.
And this is even true of faulty antiaircraft guns. Yes, they make noise, but that is incidental. It's a thing that they do; it's not their purpose. Antiaircraft guns are sold by people who want to make money, and if they do that, then they have fulfilled their purpose. And if that purpose is fulfilled, it's because the guns are purchased by people who have purposes that are distinct from shooting down planes.
It's tempting to describe this as a failure of the system, because of course it is. But the failure is often that the system was designed for a different task.
See also: "revealed preference."
My colleagues assert that this is irrational or even evil
There is actually another thing that my colleagues do: They rationalize the behavior of people who are unambiguously working against us. My colleagues are appropriately averse to labeling decent, smart, honest people as incompetent or crooked. So they look for a benign purpose that doesn't exist. They don't understand that the purpose of a system is what it does.