I think cybernetics the practice / math is alive and well, even if cybernetics the name is mostly discarded. Take a look at Wiener’s wiki page:
Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society.
The right way to read that is that it’s used in seven fields, not zero.
Cybernetics is alive but I think it’s misleading to call it well.
When talking about an issue like weight loss the dominating paradigm is “calories in, calories out” and not a cybernetics inspired paradigm.
We don’t live in a world where any scale on the market allows automatic calculating of the moving averages of the hacker diet.
Quantified Self as movement is based on Cybernetics. At first European conference Gary spoke about how cybernetics is not well.
I had an old professor in university who taught physiology based on regulation system thinking (cybernetics but he didn’t use the word cybernetics). According to him there’s was no textbook that presents that perspective we could use for the course.
So it seems like cybernetics was dissected and some of its parts were digested by various disciplines, but the original spirit which connected those parts together was lost.
An analogy for the rationality movement would be if in a few decades some of the CFAR or MIRI lessons will become accepted material in pedagogics, physics, or maybe even AI research, but the whole spirit of “tsuyoku naritai” will be forgotten.
Some parts that I guess are likely to survive, because they can fit in the existing education:
treating emotions as rational or irrational depending on whether they relate to facts (psychology)
planning fallacy (management)
illusion of transparency (pedagogics)
Some parts that I guess are likely to be ignored, because they seem too trivial, and don’t fit to the existing educational system. They may be mentioned as a footnote in philosophy, but they will not be noticed, because philosophy already contains millions of mostly useless ideas:
making beliefs pay rent
noticing confusion
fake explanations
mysterious answers
affective spirals
fallacy of grey
dissolving the question
tsuyoku naritai
rationality as a common cause of many causes
EDIT: Reading my lists again, seems like the main difference is between things you can describe and things you have to do. The focus of academia is to describe stuff, not to train people. Which makes sense, sure. Except for the paradoxical part where you have to train people to become better at correctly describing stuff.
I think cybernetics the practice / math is alive and well, even if cybernetics the name is mostly discarded. Take a look at Wiener’s wiki page:
The right way to read that is that it’s used in seven fields, not zero.
Cybernetics is alive but I think it’s misleading to call it well. When talking about an issue like weight loss the dominating paradigm is “calories in, calories out” and not a cybernetics inspired paradigm.
We don’t live in a world where any scale on the market allows automatic calculating of the moving averages of the hacker diet.
Quantified Self as movement is based on Cybernetics. At first European conference Gary spoke about how cybernetics is not well.
I had an old professor in university who taught physiology based on regulation system thinking (cybernetics but he didn’t use the word cybernetics). According to him there’s was no textbook that presents that perspective we could use for the course.
So it seems like cybernetics was dissected and some of its parts were digested by various disciplines, but the original spirit which connected those parts together was lost.
An analogy for the rationality movement would be if in a few decades some of the CFAR or MIRI lessons will become accepted material in pedagogics, physics, or maybe even AI research, but the whole spirit of “tsuyoku naritai” will be forgotten.
Some parts that I guess are likely to survive, because they can fit in the existing education:
treating emotions as rational or irrational depending on whether they relate to facts (psychology)
planning fallacy (management)
illusion of transparency (pedagogics)
Some parts that I guess are likely to be ignored, because they seem too trivial, and don’t fit to the existing educational system. They may be mentioned as a footnote in philosophy, but they will not be noticed, because philosophy already contains millions of mostly useless ideas:
making beliefs pay rent
noticing confusion
fake explanations
mysterious answers
affective spirals
fallacy of grey
dissolving the question
tsuyoku naritai
rationality as a common cause of many causes
EDIT: Reading my lists again, seems like the main difference is between things you can describe and things you have to do. The focus of academia is to describe stuff, not to train people. Which makes sense, sure. Except for the paradoxical part where you have to train people to become better at correctly describing stuff.