and the wonderfully titled
The Joyless Economy: Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction by Tibor Scitvosky
learn.canvas.net/courses/1446/f
and
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It's also the core to boydian thought if you squint a bit... in destruction and creation he proposes something in that spirit
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Can you point me to a specific statement of the principle in Bateson or Beer? I'm not familiar with that lit beyond Wikipedia level gloss
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hmm it's a fair point but in Beer it's so embedded I'm not sure. I'm fond of this from Barry Clemson, 1984 (Cybernetics: A New Management Tool) - Barry was one of Stafford's students
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I wasn't making a point, just asking for a pointer :D
I literally don't know this literature well enough to know if there's a version of this idea in there
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no, I just meant fair question - and/but so deeply embedded I'm not sure I can easily pull it out. It's in the concept of homeostasis - see nice definition here docs.google.com/viewer?url=htt (from Stafford's student and life partner Allenna Leonard)
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I mean, there's a whole body of work in Beer called variety engineering, and it's all founded on Ashby's Requisite Variety and the Conant-Ashby Good Regulatory Theorem (every good regulator must be a model of the system it controls)...
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...to achieve regulation, you have to match your variety to that of the environment. Your choices are: change your environment, change your environment (sic), increase your variety capability, or attenuate the variety of the environment(all this is by transduction of information)
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...based on Shannon's information theory.
Is this helpful/making sense?
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Yeah, I'm familiar with that end of things, but that's more general and not specific to energy and uncertainty (it maps closely to the internal model principle lit in control theory). Variety shapes uncertainty (since it sets the basis across which uncertainty exists)
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I *think* it's quite literally about regulating uncertainty, so will have to think a bit more about what you're saying...your ability to attenuate or match the variety of bureaucratic uncertainty is low, so you manage that by down-regulating the bureaucratic variety you encounter

