 Online workshop – 11th August 2021 at 2.00 pmUnderstanding Systems – a very short introduction. This is designed for colleagues new to systems as well as those wanting to renew their knowledge. This is a special session run by Professor Frank Stowell. The Zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88579246678?pwd=MkhvUFRHMzZKVExYczFGMUlxc0xCUT09 |
Online workshop – 11th August 2021 at 2.00 pm
UKSS Online workshop – benjamin.taylor@redquadrant.com – RedQuadrant Mail
Systems Convening (Wenger – Trayner) Systems Changes
daviding
Given that Etienne Wenger’s original research coming out of the Institute for Research on Learning at Xerox popularized Communities of Practice (mind the subtitle of Learning, Meaning and Identity), I can’t say that I’m surprised at the continuing development of their work. The focus is on the leadership of the community, the convenors
continues in source:
Systems Convening (Wenger – Trayner) – Systems Changes – Open Learning Commons
After “Jane-Jacobs-Thought”| Doug Saunders | 2021 Systems Changes cities urbanism Aug 8 1 / 2 Aug 9 1m ago daviding 14h When Jane Jacobs passed in 2006, she was said to have been studying suburbs. Her work had been famous in urban cores. As a systems thinker, however, part of her curiosity about suburbs was that, given a choice, many people chose to live there. This study might have been next book, if she had continued to live. Doug Saunders writes that while “Jane-Jacobs-Thought” (as it’s known in China) would seem to be conventional wisdom for most urbanists, they’ve missed an important point: urban planning (conducted by professionals centrally) is counter to the general idea of self-organization.
After “Jane-Jacobs-Thought”| Doug Saunders | 2021 – Systems Changes – Open Learning Commons
In today’s post, I am continuing from the last post, mainly using the ideas of Dirk Baecker. We noted that every observation is an operation of distinction, where an observer crosses a line, entering a marked state. This is shown in the schematic below. Here “a” refers to the marked state that the observer is interested in. The solid corner of a square is the distinction that was used by the observer, and “n” refers to the unmarked state. The entire schematic with the two sides and the three values (“a”, “n” and the distinction) are notated as a “form”. The first order observer is observing only the marked state “a”, and is not aware of or paying attention to the distinction(s) utilized. They are also not aware of the unmarked state “n”. When a second order observer enters the picture, they are able to…
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Cybernetics and Systems Social and Business Decisions Edited By Sergio Barile, Raul Espejo, Igor Perko, Marialuisa Saviano 2019
Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions – 1st Edition –
pdf:
http://repositorio.uportu.pt/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11328/2538/9780429486982_preview.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Advances in Cybernetics Provide a Foundation for the Future
[PDF] Advances in Cybernetics Provide a Foundation for the Future | Semantic Scholar
Interest in cybernetics declined in North America from the mid 1970s to 2010, as measured by the number of journal articles by North American authors, but increased in Europe and Asia. Since 2010 the number of books on cybernetics in English has increased significantly. Whereas the social science disciplines create descriptions based on either ideas, groups, events or variables, cybernetics provides a multi-disciplinary theory of social change that uses all four types of descriptions. Cyberneticians use models with three structures – regulation, selforganization and reflexivity. These models can be used to describe any systemic problem. Furthermore, cybernetics adds a third approach to philosophy of science. In addition to a normative or a sociological approach to knowledge, cybernetics adds a biological approach. One implication of the biological approach is additional emphasis on ethics.
A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity
A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity | SpringerLink
The bulletin of mathematical biophysics volume 5, pages115–133 (1943)Cite this article
Because of the “all-or-none” character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behavior of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing circles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behaving in the fashion it describes. It is shown that many particular choices among possible neurophysiological assumptions are equivalent, in the sense that for every net behaving under one assumption, there exists another net which behaves under the other and gives the same results, although perhaps not in the same time. Various applications of the calculus are discussed.
pdf:
The Cybernetics Moment Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age Ronald R. Kline
The Cybernetics Moment | Johns Hopkins University Press Books
Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
Ronald R. Kline
How did cybernetics and information theory arise, and how did they come to dominate fields as diverse as engineering, biology, and the social sciences?
Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice
Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age.
Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines.
Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.
Review by Andrew Pickering
Ronald R. Kline: The cybernetics moment: Or why we call our age the information age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xi+336pp, $54.95 HB
(PDF) Ronald R. Kline: The cybernetics moment: Or why we call our age the information age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xi+336pp, $54.95 HB
Ronald R. Kline: The cybernetics moment: Or why we call our age the information age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xi+336pp, $54.95 HB
full text: http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Kaufmann%20The%20Sciences%20of%20Complexity%20and%20Origins%20of%20Order%20PSA%201990.htm
The Sciences of Complexity and “Origins of Order”
The Sciences of Complexity and “Origins of Order” | PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association: Vol 1990, No 2
This article discusses my book, Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution, in the context of the emerging sciences of complexity. Origins, due out of Oxford University Press in early 1992, attempts to lay out a broadened theory of evolution based on the marriage of unexpected and powerful properties of self organization which arises in complex systems, properties which may underlie the origin of life itself and the emergence of order in ontogeny, and the continuing action of natural selection. The three major themes are: 1) that such self organized properties lie to hand for selection’s further molding; 2) hence that the order we see is not due to selection alone, but in part reflects the order selection has always acted upon; 3) and finally that the marriage of natural order and natural selection may inevitably lead living entitites to a novel organized state, lying on the edge between order and chaos, as the inevitable evolutionary attractor of selection for the capacity to adapt.
A very good historical review.
pdf: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.89&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective
Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective – François – 1999 – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library
Charles FrançoisFirst published: 07 April 2000 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1743(199905/06)16:3<203::AID-SRES210>3.0.CO;2-1Citations: 46PDFTOOLSSHARE
Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. The process started more than a century ago, but has gathered momentum since 1948 through the pioneering work of Wiener, von Neumann, von Bertalanffy, von Förster and Ashby, among many others. This paper tries to retrace the history of the accretion process and to show that our systemic and cybernetic language is an evolving conceptual network. This is of course only a first and quite incomplete attempt, merely destined to give the ‘feel’ of the process. Systemic concepts and models are underlined in order to enhance the perception of the process, as well as its systemic significance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cybernetics for the Social Sciences
Scott | Cybernetics for the Social Sciences | 1st edition | 2021 | beck-shop.de
Published: April 30, 2021
A book. Soft cover
2021
VI, 130 pp.
In English
Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 9789004464346
Format (W x L): 15.5 x 23.5 cm
Weight: 239 g
The work is part of the series: Brill Research Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences / Brill Research Perspectives in Sociocybernetics and Complexity
Product descriptionBernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). Scott provides user-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. He explains how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. He also recounts how encountering cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general.
well, I can’t wait for this to become available!
Gary S. Metcalf and Stuart A. Kauffman
Systems science, cybernetics, and complexity all evolved out of concerns for understanding complex phenomena in science. They also share many of the same theoretical roots, as well as histories which converge across leading figures and places in time. They can be conceived as three realms which shared and competed for prominence. All have influenced and been incorporated into scientific disciplines, though much of the history has been forgotten by current generations. Those historical roots remain relevant and important to future progress in science. This chapter provides a brief summary of the history and foundations of these domains.
Read the full article at: link.springer.com
I have an affection for and an interest in ‘Game B’ and/but I can’t help thinkin there’s a peculiarly ‘Game A’, rationalist drive behind it. Like the thinking is almost there, but not quite… anyway, this is a nice example – a nice article but not a framing that fundamentally appeals to me.
From the Game B resoucre archive:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kVcMwjk2XvSaHCyopXyBy_dkNfdPDCCzqSuQjgVPd5Q/edit#gid=0
More on Game B at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/gamebcore
and
https://www.game-b.org/
source:
The under-appreciated drive for sense-making – ScienceDirect
Author links open overlay panelNickChateraGeorgeLoewensteinbShow moreAdd to MendeleyShareCitehttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.10.016Get rights and contentUnder a Creative Commons licenseopen access
Sense-making is a fundamental human motivation.•
Sense-making is a drive to simplify our representation of the world.•
Sense-making is traded off against other ‘utilitarian’ motivations.•
Sense-making helps to explain information avoidance and confirmation bias.
This paper draws attention to a powerful human motive that has not yet been incorporated into economics: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a ‘drive for sense-making’ which motivates people to gather, attend to, and process information in a fashion that augments, and complements, autonomous sense-making. A large fraction of autonomous cognitive processes are devoted to making sense of the information we acquire: and they do this by seeking simple descriptions of the world. In some situations, however, autonomous information processing alone is inadequate to transform disparate information into simple representations, in which case, we argue, the drive for sense-making directs our attention and can lead us to seek out additional information. We propose a theoretical model of sense-making and of how it is traded off against other goals. We show that the drive for sense-making can help to make sense of a wide range of disparate phenomena, including curiosity, boredom, ‘flow’, confirmation bias and information avoidance, esthetics (both in art and in science), why we care about others’ beliefs, the importance of narrative and the role of ‘the good life’ in human decision making.
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The under-appreciated drive for sense-making – ScienceDirect
In today’s post, I am looking at observation. This will be a general overview and I will follow up with more posts in the future. I am inspired by the ideas of George Spencer-Brown (GSB), Niklas Luhman, Dirk Baecker and Heinz von Foerster. In Cybernetics, observation does not mean just to utilize your eyes and look at something. It has a deeper “sensemaking” type meaning. Observation in Cybernetics does not follow the rigid subject-object relationship. Toth Benedek explains this:
Heinz von Foerster tried to develop a point of view that replaces the linear and rigid structure of the object-subject (observer-observed) distinction. According to von Foerster, the observer is really constructed by the observed and vice versa: ‘observation’ is nothing else but the circular relation between them. Observation as a relation defines the observer and the observed, so the observer refers not only to the observed, but also to himself by…
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Rapid Transition Lab: Towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food system. Cool initiative from @DarkMatter_Labs @vinnovase @sthlmresilience !
(3) Mikael Seppälä on Twitter: “Rapid Transition Lab: Towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food system. Cool initiative from @DarkMatter_Labs @vinnovase @sthlmresilience! #systemschange #foodsystems #systemsthinking https://t.co/lWZepUql9d https://t.co/JH4DBsKdGJ” / Twitter
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