The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
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The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#2The tragedy of a declining impact from operations research continues to annoy me and I mention it whenever I think contextually, it makes sense. Usually when people trivialise complex decision points across non related competing pressures and goals but talk as if some (false) dichotomous choice exist.
I didn't do O/R but family members did at Royal Holloway and some friends I met online, from Cardiff. I have used some of the online decision support tools as a rank amateur. It feels like a specialisation joining stats over computer science and information management, with links to process design, process control, systems description and structural understanding of complex systems and processes.
The intersection of O/R, computing and socialism (state planning) is fascinating. I don't personally see Beer as a tragic figure. He made conscious choices. Allende and all of Chile suffered the consequences of violent opposition to the planning.
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#3[deleted]
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#4Re the viable system model, I can recommend Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, which also touches on the Allende story, and Patrick Hoverstadt, The Fractal Organisation. My own VSM-inspired book with a modern complexity lens will be published next year.
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#5Fascinating how Beer's radical vision was both so ahead of its time and fundamentally constrained by the technological limitations of the 1970s. Imagine what he could have done with today's distributed systems and real-time data processing. The tragedy isn't that Cybersyn failed, but that we're still catching up to his core insights about organizational complexity.
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#6Re the viable system model, I can recommend Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, which also touches on the Allende story, and Patrick Hoverstadt, The Fractal Organisation. My own VSM-inspired book with a modern complexity lens will be published next year.
Seconding the recommendation of The Unaccountability Machine; if anyone wants a taster of the book, patio11 did a great episode of his Complex Systems podcast where he interviews the author about it: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#7Re the viable system model, I can recommend Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, which also touches on the Allende story, and Patrick Hoverstadt, The Fractal Organisation. My own VSM-inspired book with a modern complexity lens will be published next year.
Seconding the recommendation of The Unaccountability Machine ; if anyone wants a taster of the book, patio11 did a great episode of his Complex Systems podcast where he interviews the author about it: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
Apparently included in spotify premium too, I'll add that to my list, thank you.
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#8Re the viable system model, I can recommend Dan Davis, The Unaccountability Machine, which also touches on the Allende story, and Patrick Hoverstadt, The Fractal Organisation. My own VSM-inspired book with a modern complexity lens will be published next year.
can one preorder your book?
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#9I agree, this guy gets it
Re: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer (2023)
#10I tried to read many papers of Stafford Beer and cybernetics to parse some insights on complex systems to use in modern days but failed.
Project Cybersyn was just a dashboard (which was revolutionary back then of course).
Viable System Model was just another systems engineering diagram, which only has meaning to those who are deep into that field.
At least I got 'The purpose of a system is what it does' stuck in my head.