Principia Cybernetica

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Principia Cybernetica Web" - tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies."


how could it be useful for ilx? etc

Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 21 April 2003 12:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Ashby's introduction to Cybernetics is a great start for reading in this area. If I remember correctly, he was a doctor who worked on prosthesis and later developed these little mathematical systems to describe discretized systems. It's a good background, with a very minimal math requirement to understand it.

Useful for ilx? I don't know. Maybe you could program some kind bot crawler for ilx that could link threads with posters. Posters that often post in the same threads can be socially linked. You might be able to show certain social clusters emerge over the board. I don't know why that would be useful though...

cprek (cprek), Monday, 21 April 2003 13:35 (twenty-two years ago)

this is interesting, indeed it could be a module of ilx: the Zettelkasten

Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 21 April 2003 14:02 (twenty-two years ago)

it's from BELGIUM! Then again it's the VUB university. hah.

nathalie (nathalie), Monday, 21 April 2003 17:53 (twenty-two years ago)

twenty-two years pass...

Recently watched Max Linz's Weitermachen Sanssouci (which has a great academic schlockhouse title in English: Music and Apocalypse) and needed something other than a film thread for it. Limited audience appeal and the satire is best described as "cybernetic theory food fight" but if you've ever spent time in academic-corporate crossovers it's great.

There's a long review out there that I'll clip from:

]his is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.

If the thread title pulled you in and you have a hankering for dry jokes about Stafford Beer and socialist cybertopias, I suspect you'll like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOn-Q09Dz4Q

Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 21 October 2025 09:00 (two months ago)

I am currently reading Norbert Weiner's 1948 work Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . The man was really really really ahead of the curve. I mean, he's basically theorising the curve which the late 20th/early 21st century took.

H.P, Tuesday, 21 October 2025 11:26 (two months ago)

Yeah the Weiner stuff was really interesting when I dipped into it 10+ years ago. I would be curious to revisit it now, with less drug-addled eyes, in the era of fully metastasized algorithms

Tell me who sends these infamous .gifs (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 21 October 2025 12:17 (two months ago)


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