The Prince — Machiavelli

“The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

The often used pejorative term Machiavellian is something of a  misnomer, as it describes one who deceives and manipulates others for gain, while the thrust of  Machiavelli’s discourse is not whether the gain is personal or is not  but rather that any actions taken are only important insofar as they affect the results.



Tags: cybernetics, The Prince

Introduction to Cybernetics – Ross Ashby

“Principia Cybernetica has selected Ashby’s “Introduction to Cybernetics” as a classic book that deserved to be published again electronically. The original version has been out of print for many years. A few copies may still be found in libraries or ordered through the Amazon bookshop. However, we believe that the book is so important that it should reach as an wide audience as possible. The best medium to achieve that seemed to be the world-wide web. This publication has been made possible largely through Mick Ashby, the author’s grandson, who has convinced the copyright holders (the Ashby estate) that they should allow us to produce an electronic version.”

Tags: autopoiesis, cybernetics, Systems theory

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”
— Gregory Bateson

Steps to an Ecology of Mind — Gregory Bateson

on Goodreads

Tags: cybernetics, Ecology, Gregory Bateson, mind, thinking

In “The Heart of Enterprise,” one of the classics in the field of management cybernetics, Stafford Beer includes a select bibiography for the Viable System while explaining that a supportive reading list, in a form for which a consensus of cyberneticans could be found, just wasn’t possible.  With this said he went on to construct what looks like a map, but is truly meant as model of a reading list (although as he freely admits, the map remains more artistic in nature than conforming to a scientific statement).

Tags: cybernetics, systems thinking, VSM

“In 1948, Norbert Wiener pondered a new science in his classic book Cybernetics, one that flirted with the “boundary regions of science.” Sustainability today occupies a similar state, but the concept is used more as a policy guide and buzzword than as a true science.”

via The New Science of Sustainable Dynamics: ENN — Know Your Environment.

Tags: cybernetics, Ecology, science, Sustainability, systems

“The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”— Norbert Wiener

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• Nov. 26, 1894: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener Born

Tags: Artificial intelligence, cybernetics, Robotics

Man adapts by conquering the reducible; the irreducible is impregnable.

W.Ross Ashby

The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive – Aphorisms

Tags: Add new tag, cybernetics, knowledge

These are my Delicious.com links for December 7th through 15:43:

• Quick how-to – tarpipe Developer Preview @ Webcracy – tarpipe is a publishing mediation and distribution platform that simplifies regular upload activities:* Publishing content to multiple Web locations;
  * Combining different media into a single blog post or article;
  * Transforming documents on-the-fly;
  * Managing repeatable upload actions.
• ‘Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed’ -
• Cybernetics and Systems Theory – The following links provide general background information on the field of Cybernetics and Systems Theory, an interdisciplinary academic domain.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, cybernetics, economy, politics

Image via Wikipedia

Stafford Beer 1926 – 2002

If, as will become the dominant theme of this blog, the Purpose of a System is What it Does ( POSIWID) what does it mean to mankind that so many of our systems appear broken to even unseasoned observers?

Stafford Beer of course had a lot to say on this subject in his many works but one example that often haunts me comes from his work of prose Chronicles of Wizard Prang.

Tags: cybernetics, design, freedom, POSIWID, software, systems