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Project Cybersyn
- asplake 6y agoRight now I’m 80% of my way through a 1,000-page Stafford Beer binge (Brain of the Firm - which includes Cybersyn as a case study, Diagnosing the System, and Heart of the Enterprise). Truly ahead of his time. Can recommend The Fractal Organisation by my friend Patrick Hoverstadt also
- merridew22 6y agoThank you for this recommendation! I’ve just come to the close of Heart of the Enterprise—I’m not a manager but I’ve sure been managed, and I think Beer comes closest to describing what a good manager is than anything else I’ve read about it.
- advisedwang 6y ago99 percent invisible had a great episode about this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/
- unhammer 6y ago> Each chair had an ashtray, a place for your whiskey glass and a set of buttons that controlled the display screens on the walls.
- young_unixer 6y agoThe political picture painted in the article is really biased and dishonest.
- kingbirdy 6y agoCould you substantiate that claim with specific ways it is biased or dishonest, rather than dismissing it without evidence?
- csb6 6y agoThe U.S. supported a military coup to overthrow Allende. This is a fact. That seems to be what the article is stating, no? Pinochet's abuses are well-documented, and he was not democratically elected.
- zingplex 6y agoThe CIA even admitted it [1] I'm willing to bet in 20 or so years they're going to admit to pulling the same shit in Venezuela right now. [1] https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/ https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/
- wazoox 6y agoAnd Bolivia, too. In fact, NYTimes even had an article stating that what happened was a coup against Evo Morales and that its previous articles were misrepresenting the situation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hoistbypetard 6y agoHow so? This is the main summary I take from the article of as regards the political picture, when the author was discussing Allende's successor, who took power during a military coup backed by the US CIA: > It is estimated that during Pinochet’s rule about 38,000 people were imprisoned and most of those prisoners were tortured. Close to 3000 people were executed, another 1200 people went missing, and around 200,000 people were exiled to other countries. and it seems to consist solely of well-corroborated facts. Can you specify what you read in the article that you consider "really biased and dishonest"?
- sjs382 6y agoAnd the accompanying HN tread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641425
- nahuel0x 6y agoSee also "Towards a new Socialism" by Cockshott and Cottrell: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/ http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
- masijo 6y agoI take this opportunity to point out Paul Cockshott's book "Towards a New Socialism" where he goes down to detail on how an entire economy could function with cybernetic economic planning. Even if you're not interested in socialism, it still has some great ideas and insights that could be implemented in some sort of social democracy. The complete book is available here: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_soci...
- noir_lord 6y agoRisky to suggest a book on socialism on here even if it's just an interesting read from an intellectual point of view.
- hoistbypetard 6y agoIn what sense is it risky?
- Conlectus 6y agoI'd assume the grandfather is talking about Hacker News' pretty noticeable libertarian / free-market leaning. Edit: as the karma now reflects.
- dluan 6y agoIt goes both ways - the radical left-libertarianism of FOSS from the 80's and 90's is still around and kicking, if not in corners of HN.
- int_19h 6y agoIt's alive and kicking on HN as well. I suspect that a lot of people here simply aren't aware that it's a thing, so unless somebody goes around telling people that they're left libertarian (and then explaining what this means), the corresponding specific policy positions don't necessarily get construed that way. While we're at it, a reminder that economic left/right distinction is not the same as command/free-market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_market_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_market_anarchism
- The_rationalist 6y agoI wonder how much this project could better work if it was made today, with modern technologies and without the CIA. I often wonder the same for symbolic AI especially if used in a hybrid fashion with ANNs
- p_l 6y agoThe real important bit was not the top end centralisation, but the local loops. Under cybersyn, as much as possible was handled as close to the ground as possible. The control room was for the grand strategy aspects that did require nationwide planning.
- solumos 6y agoOversimplifying somewhat, but isn't that basically what Palantir is?
- monocasa 6y agoI'm not sure how Palantir counts as "without the CIA".
- bmitc 6y agoThe CIA reference in the original comment was due to the CIA's involvement in staging a coup, overthrowing the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, who ended up committing suicide as the opposition moved in on his building. (Or at least that's what I thought they were referring to.)
- monocasa 6y agoI'd argue that technology like that has a habit of encoding ideological biases in a way to the point that a CIA-Thiel joint venture is probably not the best base for a socialist economic infrastructure.
- The_rationalist 6y agoI've read their front page and I couldn't understand if it would help solve real problems or be pure marketing BS :/ It's valued at 6billion though
- ilaksh 6y agoThere is a very strong modern technocratic movement. Personally I believe that it has some improved ideas and some outdated or invalid ideas. The ideas of integrating holistic information, planning, and acting as a government to succeed in goals make sense to me. However, I feel that it is crucial for the system to be able evolve with some freedom and flexibility in the parts. So my belief is basically that we need to update the technocratic ideas with our knowledge of distributed networks and human psychology. So the starting point for me is things like Ethereum and maybe IPFS, where the government, rather than trying to dictate a lot of things, is largely encoded as a set of distributed protocols that allow for large scale information collection and aggregation and multiple forms of implementation as well as fine-grained regulation where necessary. But it's not a monolithic pre-planned structure. It's more like a technology platform for working together that allows for new and better ideas to compete while sharing data and cooperating in core ways (such as ubiquitous markets). And let's individuals or companies have some degree of autonomy and reward.
- jes5199 6y agoI agree that distributed governance is more functional than centralized, but the problem with shared platforms like Etherium is that it is very hard to predict what the unintended side effects of a system will be when scaled up. Ideally the platform is neutral but in practice nothing is truly neutral. So you don’t actually get to opt for no pre-planned structure, to approach neutral requires even more planning. In the case of Etherium, right now, the platform is, for example, making it very easy to accidentally write contracts with flaws such that value can be extracted by bad actors, and the process of finding and fixing those flaws is technically difficult. (Contrast this with US fiat contracts which cannot encode automated security flaws, because the only mechanism of execution/enforcement is voluntary human action and/or lawsuits). I don’t think that was intentionally designed into Eth? Did anyone say “we’d like to replace formal conflict resolution with hacker battles”?
- lucian1900 6y agoRelated to this, there's an interesting series of podcasts [1] on Beer's work in general and also Cybersyn 1. http://generalintellectunit.net/e/018-the-cybernetic-brain-part-1-ontological-theatre/ http://generalintellectunit.net/e/018-the-cybernetic-brain-p...
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThe Allende administration intervened companies, and took on the task of managing production and logistics directly. It resulted in a large, cascading failure, with scarcity and shortages everywhere. So as a last resort they created this solution, which seemed better than the previous approach: manage the economy via government appointed people, usually union leaders and friends. Cybersyn was dismantled after the government was replaced through a coup.
- monocasa 6y agoAn alternative telling: Allende's form of socialism was distinct from the centrally planned soviet style economy, focusing on responding to problems and creating high level economic goals, but otherwise focusing on a self organizing, bottom up, worker led economy extremely distinct from the Soviet system. This idea started actually working, and the United States fearing, in the CIA's own words, "a successful socialist experiment" tried everything they could to remove Allende and push the country away from socialism. They even looked at the idea of invading the country, but couldn't because of the public opinion of how poorly Vietnam was going. The most successful intervention was, in the United States government's own words again, "making the economy scream". However despite this Allende still kept being elected clearly in elections that no one has disputed the validity of. So enough being enough, the US government backed one of the most brutal dictators ever, Pinochet, to illegitimately take over the government, killing Allende in cold blood and beginning a reign of terror. Theyd do stuff like rape your wife and children to death in front of you, so that when they took you out to sea on a "helicopter ride" to dump you at sea still alive, you welcomed death. We as the United States trained his staff in torture in the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, and provided an immense amount of funding. Over 10,000 people were killed. To rebuild the economy after the intervention, they brought in the Chicago Boys, a set of Chicago school economists, to "unleash the economy" from the socialist practices of Allende, but it didn't really work. Chile's growth trailed the rest of South America's until those practices were rolled back. And even now the scars of all this still exist in Chile, with the massive protests that have been going on for over a year focusing on demands to replace the terrible Pinochet era constitution, and state security forces openly killing protestors.
- nickdothutton 6y agoOne of the more famous attempts at what I call Strategic Software, a subject I’m putting together a few posts on some of you might enjoy. https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/ https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21673423 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487476 (1 comment) 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12641425 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417882 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7398245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7398245 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037276 (1 comment) 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682951 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639149 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190508
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoAnother interesting book is the People's Republic of Walmart which is a more layman version of Cockshott's book. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767710
- shadowgovt 6y agoWhether or not one thinks this is a viable model for a whole national economy, it's worth observing that it's, practically, the kind of information fusion that makes companies like Walmart and Amazon so competitive. Predictive logistics is a huge aspect of their business behind the scenes and a massive economic advantage over smaller operations with either less information or less geographic reach.
- jnmandal 6y agoTheres a great book about this called The Peoples Republic of Walmart
- ihumanable 6y agoOne of the strengths of capitalism is that it solves the "local knowledge problem" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_knowledge_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_knowledge_problem) by distributing the decision making to the consumers. Cybersyn also attempted to solve this not by distributing decision making but by distributing information capture, in the form of the 500 telex machines at various factories. Logistics networks show how this model can outperform the free market model, and anyone familiar with genetic algorithms should be able to recognize the local maxima problem. Each consumer might take the most rational action locally and result in a poor result overall. Think about how at the start of the pandemic it made sense for each consumer to attempt to secure food, medicine, toiletries, etc. Toilet paper became a punch line for a while, but the logic was simple. Toilet paper is shelf stable, it's low cost for a large amount, it has guaranteed demand as long as you are alive, and the cost of needing toilet paper and not having any is high (for a nation like the US where alternatives like bidets are less common). Each consumer runs the numbers, if they have sufficient storage, the cost of buying and storing additional toilet paper up front is low compared to the potential cost of needing but not having it later. This resulted in a run on toilet paper and widespread stock outs.
- larkeith 6y agoAnd that's in the best case. In reality, consumers don't get anywhere near a local maximum, as they are neither well-informed nor entirely rational.
- pram 6y agoI think I’ve said this before on hn but Cybersyn seems conceptually like an ERP system to me. Or in general, ERP seems to be applied cybernetics. It’s less fanciful and theoretical than some people imply.
- unixhero 6y agoCertainly it is. However maybe you'd agree that an ERP, although real time, does not seek to understand the triggers of new "transactions" (SAP language/ancient ERP language). This is where the Cybernetics management system come in.
- flobosg 6y agoI find amusing the fact that Fernando Flores, in charge of implementing this project, worked with Allende. Decades later he supported Sebastián Piñera's first presidential candidacy, obtaining a position under his conservative government. Talk about contrasts.
- database_lost 6y agoTom Scott had a laugh about this as well: https://youtu.be/1KzcZZ_3vL8 https://youtu.be/1KzcZZ_3vL8
- jedimastert 6y agoI was just checking to see if anyone had posted this. I really am going to miss Citation Needed. I've found it really interesting that, along with all of the other fin and interesting things he does, he seems to me a very competent game show designer and host!
- unixhero 6y agoThis is tagged on Wikipedia as socialism, but it most certainly is not. This was a highly experimental social science management theory which in a way actually worked in practice. The field is still alive, albeit quirky. I was exposed to it when at a cutting edge management theory research conference about 5 years ago. Today we absolutely do possess the technology which would make viable model possible. It is also likely that is would make managing a company much more efficient and competitive.
- flobosg 6y ago> This is tagged on Wikipedia as socialism, but it most certainly is not. Project Cybersyn itself is not, but it was developed under Allende's administration, whose policy was called La vía chilena al socialismo (The Chilean Way to Socialism).
- unixhero 6y agoI see. Yeah I stand corrected. I am more engulfed in the origins of Cybernetics as a management theory. It was designed by Stafford Beer as just that, a Management System (not software) for companies operating in a capitalist financial economical system.
- antiutopian 6y agoIt's disappointing when I talk about planning the economy, and many technologists who are otherwise quite excited about difficult engineering problems dismiss it as entirely impossible because of something they read once from the 1920s. Clearly, it is possible at some scales. Why are creative people not thinking about how to scale it up? It is a utopian discussion until we actually overcome the resistance of the 1% to such a project, but it would be good to have more programmers on the side of socialism.
- lthrow980 6y agoI think there's a great confusion, and maybe not just a little ideology, clouding things. On one level, command vs market is just about what kind of algorithm you use to get a goods allocation that makes the economy run. If the idealized market Turing machine can compute a local optimum to a nonconvex optimization problem in polytime given some inputs, there's nothing prohibiting an explicit algorithm that runs through the same steps from doing so. If finding an equilibrium is in some hard complexity class, then it's hard for the market and the command system both, given the same inputs. The market's computational capacity isn't magic. Most likely the market only finds an approximate optimum and a dedicated algorithm can do better, if it has the same inputs. That then gets confused with the problem of getting those inputs. Hayek makes a big deal of the local knowledge of the market in contrast to the hierarchical nature of the Soviet planned economy. But that should cut just as viciously against big corporations, and what it really means, I think, is that the system must be bottom-up in some fashion. You can have bottom-up systems running on top of the market, or on top of some explicit optimization algorithm. But the Austrians have managed to convince people that market = bottom-up and explicit algorithm = top-down. That's where the dismissal comes from.
- modeless 6y agoThat picture of the control room reminds me of so many ridiculous military contracts. If a project includes a Star Trek style control room like this, it's a sure sign that the project is mostly a fantasy role-playing game designed to impress PowerPoint-wielding "decision makers" while funneling tons of money to contractors. For example, these guys design lots of fantasy role-play centers for the US government: https://www.dbia.com/portfolio/us-army/ https://www.dbia.com/portfolio/us-army/ A real functional control room has no reason to look like anything but a pretty standard office setup, maybe with a few extra displays. An example of a modern one: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacex/wp-content/uploads/sites/227/2014/04/ksc-lcc-1.jpg https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacex/wp-content/uploads/sites/227/2...
- skndr 6y agoThe point of the control room in CyberSyn wasn't to make second-by-second or minute-by-minute decisions but rather on longer timescales like days or weeks. In Brain of the Firm, Beer argues specifically against overloading it with numbers and that it should be a "thinking room".
- modeless 6y agoThat doesn't change the fact that custom fiberglass Star Trek chairs are a boondoggle.
- DetroitThrow 6y ago...But it does change the functional purpose of the room layout? I suppose interior design decisions would be the most controversial part of any room for crowds of bike shedders
- defen 6y agoFrom wikipedia: > The futuristic operations room was designed by a team led by the interface designer Gui Bonsiepe. It was furnished with seven swivel chairs (considered the best for creativity) with buttons, which were designed to control several large screens that could project the data, and other panels with status information, although these were of limited functionality as they could only show pre-prepared graphs. This consisted of slides. I dunno, seems like instead of having an entire design team led by a famous designer, they could have just had a guy put some prefab chairs and slide projectors in a room, for a total cost of like $500. But then you're not living your power fantasy of controlling the entire economy from a war room. Of course, the power fantasy itself is why the project failed, not the room layout.
- dluan 6y agoI recommend General Intellect Unit pod which is basically if Stafford Beer had a podcast: http://generalintellectunit.net http://generalintellectunit.net.
- themodelplumber 6y agoAmong interface designer names, "Gui" just became my new favorite.
- carapace 6y agoScott Locklin has an interesting take on this, IIRC it was most crap? https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/cybersyn-and-allendes-semi-automated-luxury-socialism/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/cybersyn-and-a... I don't think he does justice to Cybernetics itself, but you should read e.g. "Introduction to Cybernetics" and make your own call. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html Information Theory is the attempt to make the real world act like symbols, Cybernetics is the attempt to make symbols act like the real world. In logic "A = not A" is a pointless contradiction, in Cybernetics it's an oscillator.
- aasasd 6y agoI vaguely wonder sometimes as to what happened to cybernetics. It seems to have been in vogue in the 70s, and sci-fi authors that were able to read stuff on it (like Lem) placed high hopes in it. Then, poof, gone. Though, to my uninformed self it seems that other more specific and down-to-earth disciplines just stepped up and remade the field into a dozen different specialized topics that are easier to reason about technically.
- Barrin92 6y agoI think a lot of good ideas out of cybernetics have silently been absorbed within disciplines, but culturally i think the politics and free-market disciples of the 80s onward largely killed it off in general public discourse. If you look at the application of systems thinking and cybernetics to ecology (Donella H. Meadows; limits to growth etc), or Russ Ackoff (stakeholdership and interdisciplinary management over specialisation and monolithic business goals) I think it's clear why it died off or maybe more accurately, killed off.
- nsajko 6y agoMedina's book seems to be available here in PDF (searchable): https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4874332/mod_resource/content/1/Medina%2C%20Eden-Cybernetic%20revolutionaries%20_%20technology%20and%20politics%20in%20Allendes%20Chile-The%20MIT%20Press%20%282011%29.pdf https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4874332/mod_resou...