how would you compare cybernetics to like, gst, control theory, ops research, cogsci, compsci etc
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gst was basically just premature speculation… bettanfly etc.
The rest are ordinary normie fields
cybernetics, system dynamics etc… shaky forks of control theory
wiener tried to build a cult off early technical contributions
forrester was fragile overextension
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This is… not good. At one point in grad school I made a map like this going back to James Watts governor
This chart emphasizes LinkedIn value over significance
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i will defer to you cause i have not done the reading besides a little wiener here and a little simon and meadows there, and well, you did your phd on it lol
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This stuff has a lot of solid historical scholarship where the story is reasonably well told, but periodically enjoys a pop revival based primarily on the more visibly sexy bits
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The computer science branch of the story is reasonably accurately known in public/pop versions, but the controls branch is basically not known at all
Stuart Bennett’s 2 volume history of controls upto 1960 and David Mindell’s books for the “cybernetics” circus are solid coverage
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i…apparently have this bookmarked as of october 2010; probably you
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The bs theater around cybernetics used to bother me a lot back then. It’s like salting a mine… throw in a few gold nuggets and sell a scam mine as real. But then I decided it was a kind of performance art by Wiener in particular. He was the Wolfram of his time. Claim everything.
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Fred Turner had a nice theory of how Wiener’s influence developed and evolved. It’s like a scholarly P. T. Barnum story. fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/upl

