In today’s post, I am continuing on my thoughts on stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. In Cybernetics, we call regulation the act (art) of responding to external disturbances in order to maintain selected internal variables in a range. For example, our body maintains the internal temperature in a specific range. We have internal regulations built in through evolution to ensure that this is done. In the language of cybernetics, regulation refers to the act of countering the external variety. In order to counter the external variety, we must have requisite variety. As noted in the last post, only variety can absorb variety. If the external temperature goes up or goes down, our body should have a mechanism to react so that the internal temperature is maintained in a specific range. If it is not able to do this, we will not stay viable. The goal of requisite variety in…

Jessica Flack, Panos Ipeirotis, Thomas W Malone, Geoff Mulgan, Scott E Page

Collective behavior is a universal property of biological, social, and many engineered systems. However, the study of collective intelligence—roughly, the production of adaptive, wise, or clever structures and behaviors by groups—remains nascent. Despite that, it is growing in various disciplines, from biology and psychology to computer science and economics, management, and political science to mathematics, complexity science, and neuroscience.
With the launch of Collective Intelligence, we aim to create a publication that transcends disciplines, methodologies, and traditional formats. We hope to help discover principles that can be useful to both basic and applied science and encourage the emergence of a unified discipline of study.

Read the full article at: journals.sagepub.com

The Complex Systems Society (CSS) organizes every year a main conference (CCS) – the most important annual meeting for the complex systems research community.

The Complex Systems Society invites bids to host the edition for 2024 and 2025.

The conference is generally held in September/October of each year.

More at: cssociety.org

This is a reading diary of a naïve complexity / computational social scientist’s first encounter with F. A. Hayek + Eastern Bloc tektology & cybernetics.

You might have heard about project Cybersyn? In 1970s Chile, Salvador Allende’s socialist regime was betting on a systems-theoretical approach to the complex decision-making that’s an inevitable consequence of a planned economy. Captain Kirk would feel at home as operators were rocking the latest cybernetic algorithms. That all ended with the US-backed military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as a dictator. But did the influence of complex-systems ideas end? Oh no! Pinochet called in economist F. A. Hayek—a vanguard of complexity economics and a firm believer in emergence and self-organization for the social good—to shape a Chilean free-market economy.

In its broadest sense, is complexity science spacious enough to support any ideology? Curious about that, I went on a weeklong tour to the…

In today’s post, I am looking at the dichotomy of control in stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. My main source for the dichotomy of control (DoC) is the great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus. One of the common interpretations of this dichotomy is that we need to realize what is in our control and what is not in our control. We should accept the things that are not in our control as they are. The only thing we can control is how we react to them. As a fan of cybernetics, I was attracted to the notion of “control”. I will discuss this idea of DoC first from a first order cybernetics standpoint, and then from a second order cybernetics standpoint. First order cybernetics is the study of observed systems, and second order cybernetics is the study of observing systems.

There are many translations out there for Epictetus’ Enchiridion. My main…