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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actually, doh! Best quote from Beer - the First Principle of Organization: "Managerial, operational, and environmental varieties, diffusing through an institutional system, tend to equate; they should be /designed/ to do so with minimal damage to people and to cost"
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All useful context for the general space of ideas... I'll likely end up crafting my own precise statement though

