Cybernetics: a watching path
Some of the people on the map can still be heard: lectures, interviews, conversations filmed decades apart. These are the talks I am finding as I go, the well known ones and the overlooked ones, laid out in the order I would walk them.
It is the same path as the reading, in another medium. It began as a reading list; the papers were steep, so I drew a map under them, then primers under the map. The talks are people saying it out loud. Second-order cybernetics puts the observer back into what is observed, and this page is a small version of that: me learning it, in the open, leaving the map behind me as I go.
Every talk links to the creator’s own video, so their channel gets the view. The playlists are on The Steersman's Shelf (@kyvernetes). How they were found and chosen is open too: every search, everything found, and my marks.
How it started: the searches turned up far more than one person can watch, and the first talks on each shelf were seeded at random. This path shows only the ones I have actually watched. The rest wait on the playlists, and each one comes here once I have seen it, with a note on why.
Walk it with me
Tick a talk when you have watched it. The ticks stay in this browser, on this device, and go nowhere else. Printed, this page is a sheet with empty boxes.
- Founders one talk
- Second order one talk
- Today one talk
- Systems thinking and dynamics one talk
- Around it · Learning across fields one talk
Founders
On the map: A Mathematical Theory of Communication
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The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything
Veritasium · 32 min
On the map: A Mathematical Theory of Communication
I’ve watched it. “Interesting all the way through. It left me more curious about Markov chains, and how they relate to neural networks and to systems.”
Second order
On the map: Von Foerster, the observer inside · Autopoiesis
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Truth and Trust: Maturana and Von Foerster
Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster · American Society for Cybernetics - ASC · 25 min
Opens onto On Constructing a Reality, Heinz von Foerster 1973
On the map: Von Foerster, the observer inside, Autopoiesis
I’ve watched it. “On YouTube (@kyvernetes): At 19:47 von Foerster asks Maturana, "You mean the searching procedure has the finding already included?" Maturana says yes, and von Foerster calls it a lovely idea. It made me rethink how every measurement I use shapes what it can find. And at 9:00, the difference between truth as something you check and trust as something you share, which Maturana puts as what we can do together without doubting. Two old friends doing what they describe. Thank you to the ASC and Pille Bunnell for keeping this conversation. Two things stayed with me. First, von Foerster's point that the English truth comes from trust: verifying means checking the world, trusting means not having to, and Maturana answers that trust is what we can do together without doubting. Second, the moment at 19:47 when the two agree that the searching procedure already contains the finding, like a net that decides which fish exist. It joined something I had just worked out in calculus: the derivative never sets the step to zero, yet names the limit exactly. Observation never leaves the observer, and still converges on what is so.”
Today
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The Future of Cybernetics | Paul Pangaro
Paul Pangaro · Worlds Fair Nano · 21 min
Opens onto Questions for Conversation Theory, Paul Pangaro 2017
I’ve watched it. “On YouTube (@kyvernetes): The social graph of cybernetics at 15:12 gave me pause, enough to study it and take notes: Hugh Dubberly's and your map of who influenced whom, Macy to Google in one drawing. Stafford Beer on one side, Flores and Winograd in the middle, Brin and Page at the end. Then at 18:15, Pask bringing in consciousness, and his hand-drawn figures of conversation. This talk sent me to Pask, and to teachback: you have learned something when you can derive it rather than recite it, and teach it in a way that makes a difference in someone else. I'm rebuilding how I learn around that. Thank you, Dr. Pangaro. The graph connects three things I care about: Beer's Cybersyn and Flores, Flores and Winograd's work on computers and cognition, and the line from there to Google. And Christopher Alexander's pattern language, which reached software as design patterns. Pask's figure showed me why my own learning loop asks me to rebuild an idea from a new case: understanding is reaching the same topic by more than one road.”
Systems thinking and dynamics
On the map: Systems thinking
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In A World of Systems start here
Donella Meadows · 9 min
On the map: Systems thinking
I’ve watched it, and I go back to it. “I thought it was simple at first, a thermostat and a room. Then it quietly opened up into how much of everyday life is systems. I'm watching it a second time. I love how it starts small and takes you from one system to the next to another. It is the Russian nested dolls exactly, showing universe processes.”
Around it · Learning across fields
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Psychology of Polymaths: Why Having Multiple Interests Is an Unfair Advantage
PsychToons · 14 min
I’ve watched it. “I can identify with this”
Pass it on
If you walk some of it, or know a talk that belongs on it, write to me: hello@joshuaayson.com. The path grows from what I find and what people send. If you want to check my choices, or make a path of your own, here is how this one was made.
The other ways in: the reading path and the primers · how the path was made · the family tree · the reading shelf