Cybernetics: a reading path
The word comes from the Greek for the one who steers. It is the study of how anything stays on course by watching what it does and correcting: a thermostat, a cell, a team, a person, a cluster of machines.
I am reading its founding texts in order, with my guesses written down before I open each one, and building what I need to follow them. This page is the way in.
Start gentle
Gentler On-Ramps to Cybernetics The founding papers were too steep and so were my own primers. So here are the gentler ways in: stories and a game to test the water, an hour of free reading, then a shelf of books.The reading, in order
- A Cybernetics Reading List, Written Before I Read ItAn agent can check a quote for me. It cannot read for me. So before I open Ashby, Wiener and the 1943 paper, here is the list, and what I expect to find, written down first.
- A Map Before the ReadingI opened the first paper on my cybernetics reading list and bounced. I had no map of the domain, so I stopped and built one: a primer for every work, in print and audio.
The primers
One for each work: a short listen and a sheet to print. If the words are new, the companion comes first, and the lesson before the lesson comes before all of them. How they are made is in A Map Before the Reading.
| The work | Listen | New to it? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requisite VarietyW. Ross Ashby, 1956 | 13 min | Sheet | Companion |
| Behavior, Purpose and TeleologyRosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow, 1943 | 15 min | Sheet | Companion |
| Every Good Regulator of a System Must Be a Model of That SystemConant and Ashby, 1970 | 17 min | Sheet | Companion |
| Cybernetics, the introductionNorbert Wiener, 1948 | 12 min | Sheet | Companion |
| Conversation Theory in One HourPaul Pangaro, 2017 | 11 min | Sheet | Companion |
| Cybernetics and DesignDubberly and Pangaro, 2015 | 11 min | Sheet | Companion |
Put to work
- The Regulator Was Fed IntentsI built the smallest loop that could be wrong, to watch a law from Ashby do work. The loop was wrong twice before it was evidence, the law turned out not to apply, and the real cluster already knew the fix. All of it measured, and explained from the ground up.
- A Loop Is a Path That ClosesOne of my health checks stayed red for eleven weeks by reading its own failure. A loop is the special case of a trajectory, the path that happens to close, and a life does not.
- The Hacker Ethic Meets CyberneticsA fourteen-year-old's robot bug at the MIT AI lab pushed a wallet across a grimy floor while the grad students upstairs wrote theses on why it was hard. The hacker ethic, rewritten for cybernetics, humility and AI as a partner.
- The Right to ExploreThe hackers didn't understand the machine when they started. That was the point. So why is someone exploring with AI written off for not understanding yet? FORTRAN, the genetic fallacy and a loop.
Around it
- Culture Is the Oldest Information TechnologyI once wrote that our minds run on the same hardware as every other animal and that something rewrote the software. I think the software is culture, the oldest information technology we have.
- The Information by James Gleick: The Book That Sent Me Looking for MeaningJames Gleick's The Information is the clearest history we have of how the world learned to measure the signal. It is also the book that showed me, by drawing the boundary so cleanly, the one thing the science of information set aside on purpose: meaning. This review is the origin story of the work I have been doing since I closed it.
The series that holds the reading: Reading the Cybernetics Canon. Everything else on loops, maps and legibility: Complexity and systems, and the Atlas, where this whole site is drawn as one graph.
