
Project Cybersyn (1971) - pavlov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
======
thanatropism
This keeps coming up. I read pretty much everything Stafford Beer put up about
the functioning of the system, but we never really saw a specification of the
system dynamics-based model of the chilean economy it was supposed to be based
on.

Now, if you've ever played with how a sys-dyn model is built... timing your
delays is crucial. "Real-time control" is a super cool idea, but there are
stochastic deferrals between actions by policy-makers or decentralized agents
and their systemic consequences. Mis-time these and you'll just be inducing
cycles.

That's a reason why modern economic planning is all based on watching response
signals. We watch inflation and unemployment not because the relatively low
thresholds that trigger action are catastrophic, but because inflation is a
symptom of an overheated economy. We can't track demand and supply at the
level of every commodity, and if we did, we wouldn't know how capacity
expansion relates to effective availability to the consumer (this is a mistake
countries that try to deal with hyperinflation with heavy intervention keep
making, with the inevitable shortages in supply).

TL;DR: Zomg tech

~~~
shubb
This is cool but... given the moden economy is built on automated statistical
models, couldn't we look at advanced capitalism as a sort of highly
supervised, decentralized version of this?

The problem for me with the way we do things currently, is that the criteria
the model is optimising (arguably economic growth) for don't seem to
completely describe what most people would want the economy to do (improve
living standards, individual freedom, 'happiness')...

~~~
_delirium
In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of
"Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a
view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big
capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting
in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics,
supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete,
and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally
integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments
used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust
legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based
on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific,
centralized industrial sector.

A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all
that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the
economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production
machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just
knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the
workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of
socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds
of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better.
Many did agree that _some_ kind of redistribution was necessary so that all
society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly
capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would
be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's _The Gospel of Wealth_ is
representative of this view).

------
motters
For anyone interested in this the Eden Medina book provides some historical
background. I think eventually that Cybersyn will be viewed as an early
attempt at post-capitalist economics in which resources are efficiently
managed in real time and there is feedback at every level.

~~~
netcan
From the Marxist perspective, isn't communism post-socialism?

IMO, as an idea, this isn't post-anything. It fits very nicely (almost to the
point of cliche) into the "modernist" family of ideas. Socialism was the most
prominent political and economic philosophy of modernism. Objectivism is
another example. Anti-socialists of the modernist period (who often objected
to modernism as a whole) kind of parodied modernism in a way that is similar
to this. Super efficient computers that calculate truth and can run everything
optimally.

Fredrick Hayek (an early postmodernist) parodied social "scientism" and
socialism in just this way. He argued that this kind of planning is doomed no
matter how big your computer is because the requisite information is
unknowable, not just unknown.

I see this as something like a 1950s science fiction work. But I'm biased. I
don't think this will ever work and I hope it won't either.

~~~
hxa7241
That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make
sense.

If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically.
If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea
lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and
it is a contradiction in terms.

Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' \-- is really this:
an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires
networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and
share information.

Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that
money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on
information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.

Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc.
-- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually
possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a
computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it
and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information
around. Indeed, with enough power you could process _more_ information than
the money-market system.

And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked
computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that
we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market
system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from
it.

~~~
Houshalter
The information is expressed through demand. People spend money according to
their values. If people don't have money, then it's very difficult to
determine their actual preferences. That is how I always understood the
argument anyways. Likewise producers need to express their values for the
materials they need, and those producers have values for the materials they
need, etc.

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sjclemmy
I love this kind of modernist, socialist utopian ideal. It's gratifying to
think that whilst the idealogical battles of the 20th century were still
playing out, the idea of marshalling effort and resources toward the common
good without capitalism was viewed positively.

And the chairs, I love the chairs.

It reminds me very much of the Dharma Initiative from the TV series Lost.

~~~
dabrowski
And now think that quite the opposite idea, the post Pinochet free market
economy, was what made Chile the richest country in South America.

As a rule of thumb, good intentions bring very bad results if you need
government violence to implement them.

~~~
hdevalence
Whereas Pinochet implemented his "good intentions" without violence? Reality
check, please.

~~~
dabrowski
He obviously did use violence. However, are you suggesting that you need
government violence to minimize goverment's involvement in economy?

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veganarchocap
Millions wasted on expensive systems and software to manage and negate the
damage caused by an inherently inefficient method of running an economy. One
size does not fit all, no matter how much state software you create to make it
so.

If you combine this level of technology at a micro level, combined with the
incomparable efficiency of the market, THAT is when you start to see
incredible things starting to happen.

From small businesses monitoring their sales and orders in real-time, sharing
their data with their marketing agency via api's. To construction companies
using internet of things to monitor structural wear to alert them of
replacements needed. It's at this market oriented macro-level that you will
see the greatest advantages.

Creating and making the technology to power that is most important. And that's
where we come in!

------
szpak
Stafford Beer's Chilean Cybersyn project was one of the inspirations for the
Community Memory
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory))
project in the Bay Area in the early seventies, which, being the first public
computerized bulletin board system (and flea market), helped lead to today's
World Wide Web and related.

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frabcus
If you want a 5 minute video digestion of this, including who Stafford Beer
is, I gave a lightning talk at Liverpool Ignite.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkxvVOm01g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkxvVOm01g)

------
rbc
There is a software implementation of Beer's Viable System Model in Smalltalk.
The VSM was part of the basis for Cybersyn. See:

[http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/VSA.html](http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/VSA.html)

------
nnq
...but it was not even _let to_ to either _work_ OR _fail_ on its own, so
we'll never know if some of the ideas could have worked.

...like it happens with all attempts of any kind of technocratic government:
sooner or later some groups of power totally freak out contemplating god knows
what imaginary consequences of its future development and pull the plug on it
and paint it as another "failed experiment".

When will we actually become mature enough to be able to truly run social-
engineering experiments in a scientific way and asses their results?
(repeatedly and periodically, because with time people's mentalities change,
so what didn't work in the past might work in the future and viceversa). When
will we accept that "political 'science'" can only be an experimental
'science', so we have to at least try and run unbiased experiments from time
to time and see what works better, instead of just letting the blind
watchmaker of evolution run its inefficient search of the problem space?

As an analogy [EDIT+ to clarify] of how wrong I think we do politics and
social engineering now [/EDIT]: Imagine that in medicine you'd run 10% of a
drug trial, then stop/pause it and make an "educated guess" based on this 10%,
and based on this published guess have people vote whether to put the drug on
the market or not. Sounds reasonable to anyone? :)

~~~
dnautics
To run with your analogy. Let's take the case of vioxx, which was voluntarily
withdrawn by merck after post-approval experiments showed statistically
significant increases in heart attacks - never mind that this is exactly
biasing the 'experiment' against vioxx ([http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-
run-an-ab-test.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-
test.html)).

The people vote to withdraw vioxx from the market. Because, heart attacks!
Well, what of the plenty of people who decide that they'd rather have a
slightly increased risk of heart attack instead of debilitating, quality-of-
life-shattering daily pain?

To take it further, what about conditions that specifically only address a
minority of people, let's say that we made a drug that cures sickle-cell
anemia, but gives a 100% chance of getting cancer by age 70. Who should make
these decisions?

Also: Who gets to be the person deciding on the 'educated guess'? And how can
I be this person so that I can pick my pharmaceutical stocks ahead of time?

~~~
kingkawn
The era of evidence-based medicine will be remembered for trying to apply
population-level analyses to individual cases, which as I've understood it is
not really the point of population level analyses.

~~~
nnq
well, in medicine we'll soon have personalized/individualized-medicine.

but you can't really have personalized/individualized societies, unless we all
isolate ourselves from each other and leave as ascets in caves :)

~~~
kingkawn
You can do population analysis, but thats valuable in terms of making
population level decisions. Not decisions about individual care. An example
being; where do we build a hospital. Not; which medication should we give this
person. Right now we have universalized standards of care for things like
hypertension that clearly do not work for the entire population yet we have
accepted that x% improvement overall is the best. I think the future will
involve identifying the subtleties of genetic and microbiome impact on all
medications, and tailoring regimens based on those indicators rather than the
EBM-based standards of care.

