Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation (2014)

The notion that Cybersyn was a central planning system is common but untrue. That's not what cybernetics, which drew primarily from systems theory approaches, was ever about.

The so called 'cybernetic factory' at the heart of the project was about making real time information exchange between several levels of hierarchy possible, with much delegated to the factories themselves. Centralized decision-making was reserved for high-level planning akin to Auftragstaktik in the German army (I believe it's called mission command in the UK and US).

Friedrich Hayek of all people, who met Beer at a conference in 1960 in Illinois was actually very sympathetic to Cybersyn. The frequent comparisons between Cybersyn and Soviet Planning are pretty much the result of a political campaign against Allende, it doesn't have much to do with the scientific ideas behind the project.

If you have heard people talk about 'smart factories', 'industry 4.0', IoT devices gathering data in real time and relaying them to big computers where they can be analysed and quickly sent back to the workers you have in reality stumbled upon people who are trying to build CyberSyn 2.0, probably without knowing it and less socialist branding.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile by Eden Medina is a good, in depth book on the topic.

Just saw this, after writing my lengthy reply to you elsewhere (plus a couple of edits), and I think we agree on quite a bit. Cybersyn certainly was a substantial improvement in thinking over strict central planning. At the same time I think it still it aimed for unnecessary levels of complexity vs. using market mechanisms as a large part of both the input and control mechanisms, and trying to assert too much control.

Yes.

To speak metaphorically, decentralized market regulation by supply and demand is the Bitcoin style of solving the problem. That is extremely inefficient, wasting lots of resources, being very slow but avoiding a single point of failure.

If you are surprised by the comparison, consider that you are avoiding the calculation problem with "the market regulating itself" phrase which falsely implies that this regulation would happen for free. It is equivalent to saying "Bitcoin approves transactions itself". That is true but there is still huge processing power employed to do so, as the huge mining farms show. In a free market calculations are performed by every individual actor in the market. In fact companies spent huge amounts of resources on market research to find out what and how much they should produce.

Central planning does naturally require far less processing power and can be more efficient (it has a much better best case but, to be fair, also a much worse worst case).

Even primitive, paper based, Soviet style planning has been proven to be quite adequate for early 20th century economies (don't be tempted to move the goalpost here, yes there were inefficiencies and it sometimes did perform worse that free markets, the point is it was already good enough to keep a country running for decades)

Now cybersyn was the right idea to go a step further. Make the central planning faster, more flexible and more democratic. To answer your question a little bit less simplistic, it depends. Obviously cybersyn was an early experiment and would surely not sufficed but would have Chile been better off with it than with the bloody CIA backed dictatorship that was put in power instead? Yeah, I am quite sure. We have now strong empirical evidence that neoliberalism does not work as promised.

No.

Central planning works horribly and there's wide evidence of that.

> decentralized market regulation by supply and demand is the Bitcoin style of solving the problem.

This is word salad. The criticism of bitcoin - that I would absolutely agree with - is that it wastes resources to solve the same problem that a SQL database solves, just more inefficiently.

In order to solve the same problem a market solves you would need to take into account the preferences of millions of independent actors and mash them together into a Frankenstein solution, which is clearly beyond the capabilities of any government, with or without computers.

> Even primitive, paper based, Soviet style planning has been proven to be quite adequate for early 20th century economies

This claim is complete insanity. At no point in history the USSR has performed better than the first world in any sector, with the exception of a few propaganda stunts (like the space race) that came at costs so enormous that could only be borne by a brutal dictatorship, and that were promptly and easily matched and surpassed by the US.

Frankly, if your argument for central planning is to point at how well it worked out for the Soviets, I don't need to argue any further.

> it was already good enough to keep a country running for decades

Anything is good enough to keep a country running for decades, that's not a reasonable indicator of any kind of success whatsoever. The alternative to central planning is to stop doing it, not to go back to the 19th century.

> would have Chile been better off with it than with the bloody CIA backed dictatorship

A comment that contains a literal invitation to not move the goalposts ends with an irrelevant tangent. How ironic.

Yes, the OG 9/11 was bad, you get a gold star.

Cybersyn is interesting as an information system for the technology it employed, and is for sure a great display of ingenuity.

But come on, let's stop beating this dead horse. Central planning is a pipe dream.

> In order to solve the same problem a market solves you would need to take into account the preferences of millions of independent actors and mash them together into a Frankenstein solution, which is clearly beyond the capabilities of any government, with or without computers.

That is like trying to model the exponential growth of laternfish[1] by emulating the behavior of each individual fish and then claiming it impossible to compute on consumer hardware. (The reference might sound like "word salad" if you have not participated in the last advent of code, it was just the first example that came to my mind. The point is, just because some naive approach at computing something is not realistic, does not prove the problem to be impossible to solve.)

For example here is a modern piece of software that can create a five years plan in reasonable time:

https://github.com/wc22m/NewHarmonywithJulia

But anyway, you missed the point of my "word salad". People have to obviously plan in a free market. I will not be successful if I just produce things blindly, or at least it will be pure luck. Would you say that success in the free market is purely based on luck? Maybe part of it, for sure, but obviously it is possible to plan ahead, to determine and model demand and so on. While overproduction is impossible to avoid in a free market economy, most companies at least hilt the general ballpark, they will produce a bit too much but not hundreds times too much or they wont stay in business. So obviously planning does happen by the individual actors, they do calculation. They do the work that individual miners in a bitcoin network do, hence the metaphor. The free market itself is a giant computation engine, that solves the problem of economic planning through the interactions of the individual actors of the economy. A very crude machine but it solves it. From this it follows that economic planning is obviously possible and can be solved.

> This claim is complete insanity. At no point in history the USSR has performed better than the first world in any sector, with the exception of a few propaganda stunts (like the space race) that came at costs so enormous that could only be borne by a brutal dictatorship, and that were promptly and easily matched and surpassed by the US.

The comparison is meaningless, as the Soviet Union and the US had vastly different starting conditions. If one country is economically stronger than another, it does not follow that the economic system is better or worse as many factors influence performance. If we run a 10k race against each other and you start from the beginning while I have a 5k lead before the run starts, it does not follow that I am the better runner.

The Soviet Union started as one of the least developed areas of this planet, literally still using the wooden plow and was devastated by two world wars and one civil war in a short period of time. It even being considered a competitor to the US is more that a miracle.

Could it be that your views on the efficiency of central planing are more based on prejudices that looking at actual empirical data? And again, we are looking at the most naive implementation of central planning. This is like judging the speed of garbage collected languages on some weekend project.

[1] https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/6