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

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

#31

Post by sudosysgen »

qsort wrote: post #22
cardanome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> The free market itself is a giant computation engine that solves the problem of economic planning No. This is the issue. Markets solve a different problem. If I like A better than B and you like B better than A, this has to be taken into account for the eventual solution to be Pareto-optimal. You would need to set prices for all of the hundreds of thousands of goods and services a modern economy produces, which req…

>No. This is the issue. Markets solve a different problem. If I like A better than B and you like B better than A, this has to be taken into account for the eventual solution to be Pareto-optimal.

>You would need to set prices for all of the hundreds of thousands of goods and services a modern economy produces, which requires access to an amount of information that no entity can possibly handle. It's not just computational power, it's a fundamentally intractable problem that is only solvable if you make wild assumptions.

That just isn't how cybernetic planning was ever designed to work, so I agree with who you responded to that it's a case of only considering a naïve approach.

Almost all proposals have a consumer goods market - others have a functional equivalent. You let consumers compete to buy products, and in doing so you don't have to set the prices and predict what people like more - you just let them choose.

Markets under a capitalist system attempt to use prices on the other hand, by having the capitalist decide where to invest his capital for maximum return, to decide how things should be produced. This is a terribly inefficient solution computationally because you are going through hundreds of layers of indirection and noise, and actively hiding a lot of the relevant information. In doing so, most of the necessary information for production is constrained into low information price signals, which causes endless issues.

> Come on, this is a total charade. Don't want to compare it to the US? How about Japan? Or any other first-world country of your choice? Or how about West and East Berlin?

Firstly, you have to realize that the Soviets did not do cybernetic planning. They didn't continuously integrate realtime information or production and demand. They did their central planning in yearly increments using pen and paper. The USSR started off much worse than any first world country, even Japan

The fact that even though it was planned so poorly using such inefficient techniques and with such low responsitivity, and still managed to perform better than most of the world and compete with the best capitalist economies, is in my opinion a good signal that the advantages of central planning are considerable, even if with the horrible implementation of the Soviets, they were ultimately outbalanced by their issues.

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

#32

Post by sudosysgen »

29athrowaway wrote: post #12

Do you truly believe that some bayesian economic simulator on a IBM System/360 Model 50 was going to be better than the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition? And that 7 people were going to be able to effectively manage the production of every sector of the economy?

Cybersyn was a pilot project. The idea wasn't to manage the economy, but to have a first proof of concept that could manage some parts of the economy, with the help of people directly involved.

That being said, the free market "regulating itself" is pretty bad at it. First of all, it only has one cost function to optimize, which is never going to be what humans want to optimize. Then, it forces production information largely through low fidelity price signals. Finally, these signals are very much delayed, and by the time you answer the price signal, it may have changed wildly, which means that in some cases straightforward organisation that anyone with the relevant information could rapidly approximate can take years to come because the signal changes more rapidly and with considerable delay leading to dysfunction as other prices signals attempt to respond to it. There are many other issues with it.

Of course, an IBM System/360 and 7 people couldn't do it. It's just an attempt to see where the system had to improve. If it did work out it would have ended up with a staff of thousands of people, direct connections to much of the machinery and to people in the production lines, specially built supercomputers with linear and non-linear optimisations accelerators, etc..., while still allowing many markets where it made sense and use them as information.

As it was, a bunch of old crusty bureaucrats in the Soviet Union managed to get within the order of magnitude of the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition with data manually collated and corrupted every step of the way and refresh cycles on the order of months if not years, with the computation itself being in large part done manually. So it was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

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

#33

Post by vidarh »

sudosysgen wrote: post #29
vidarh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that instead of trying to plan and control details that requires all kinds of complex contingencies to even try to keep things under control, look at whether or not you need to control them or can avoid the need to exercise control wherever possible. E.g. I get the desire to control prices - it's a way of feeling that one has control over important social goals. If you genuinely want to address poverty…

I don't think we can actually attribute the refusal of markets as a Bolshevik position. Lenin was very favourable to the use of markets, while Stalin later was opposed it to it in no small part because he felt it wasn't developing heavy industry rapidly enough, which turned out to be crucial to winning WW2. The post-Stalin dogma as well as the calcification of the Soviet economy was an impediment to the trials of suc…

I halfway agree with this. NEP certainly shows that Lenin at least in theory was open to it, though NEP was a climb-down. It's of course impossible to see what Lenin would have done if he'd stayed alive, but I guess the closest parallel would be Deng's reforms in China and Đổi Mới in Vietnam, both of which certainly either improved growth or coincided with it (the one caution is that you can see Chinese growth starting before the reforms - China's GDP growth was punctuated through Mao's reign and into Deng's by every political upheaval Mao caused, and as such the period of stability Deng brought clearly is at least part of the reason).

I don't think I'd agree Lenin was all that favourable to markets initially though. It seemed to me to be more of a pragmatic attitude and acceptance that things couldn't continue the way they did prior to NEP, and it being short enough after the civil war created a very convenient way of drawing a line under the old policies as driven by the war.

Stalins role in dismantling it is certainly critical.

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

#34

Post by sudosysgen »

Aloha wrote: post #21
Barrin92 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reserve…

I've expensively studied Soviet central planning, and I'm hard pressed to tell a difference here. But I'll go read that book you've liked. Ironically, it's the tankies (neostalinists) who seem to be the loudest defenders of it. If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience.

I don't think your comparison to Soviet central planning really works. As far as I understand it, Soviet central planning worked in long term plans and quotas, with orders given from GOSPLAN all the way down, and if factory owners disagreed they'd have to go send the information all the way up and back down the ladder, while the actual information on production would be manipulated to look good and sent manually by bureaucrats.

On the other hand, cybersyn had no quotas, and no long term rigid plans. Informational exchange did not have to go through bureaucrats, and could be done directly from the factory, eventually automatically by the equipment, and update a digital model that would do a large part of what the bureaucrats at GOSPLAN would do, but automatically and verifiably.

So it seems very, very different to me.

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

#35

Post by bencollier49 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #30
bencollier49 wrote: post #24

I've come to the conclusion that people only still talk about Project Cybersyn today because it was visually arresting. There's no clear lineage to modern data systems, but it's cool in certain circles for various reasons including the funky 1970s data seats.

I don't think I agree. The idea to have a networked control system with both direct ways to measure the behaviour of the real system as well as a model was quite novel to Cybersyn. Directly as a result of it and the work Stafford Beer did on it, we got the whole field of system dynamics. Also, Cybersyn was a pioneer in the idea of complex control systems with multiple humans in the loop.

The Wikipedia article on System Dynamics says it arose in the 1950s as a result of the work of Jay Forrester. It doesn't mention Stafford Beer. Should it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics

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

#36

Post by Barrin92 »

Aloha wrote: post #21
Barrin92 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reserve…

I've expensively studied Soviet central planning, and I'm hard pressed to tell a difference here. But I'll go read that book you've liked. Ironically, it's the tankies (neostalinists) who seem to be the loudest defenders of it. If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience.

> If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience

Not uncommon though, right? The tankies have also adopted the narrative of China as a Communist threat, or in Latin America you end up with the paradoxical situation of most opposition parties in Venezuela belonging to the Socialist International, yet you find feverish and uncritical Maduro support among young radicalized left-wing Americans.

We have the same phenomenon in Germany where ironically the formerly West-German members of Die Linke have a much more cartoonish, ideological view compared to their actually ex-socialist former East-German counterparts.

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

#37

Post by sudosysgen »

bencollier49 wrote: post #35
sudosysgen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree. The idea to have a networked control system with both direct ways to measure the behaviour of the real system as well as a model was quite novel to Cybersyn. Directly as a result of it and the work Stafford Beer did on it, we got the whole field of system dynamics. Also, Cybersyn was a pioneer in the idea of complex control systems with multiple humans in the loop.

The Wikipedia article on System Dynamics says it arose in the 1950s as a result of the work of Jay Forrester. It doesn't mention Stafford Beer. Should it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics

It probably should - both Stafford Beer and Jay Forrester came up with very similar solutions to the same problems, but AFAIK Beer applied them in a dynamic way earlier. If you want to be absolutely pedantic however, technically systems dynamics typically refers to Jay Forrester's lineage.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, operational research applied to organizations?

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

#38

Post by Aloha »

Barrin92 wrote: post #36
Aloha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've expensively studied Soviet central planning, and I'm hard pressed to tell a difference here. But I'll go read that book you've liked. Ironically, it's the tankies (neostalinists) who seem to be the loudest defenders of it. If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience.

> If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience Not uncommon though, right? The tankies have also adopted the narrative of China as a Communist threat, or in Latin America you end up with the paradoxical situation of most opposition parties in Venezuela belonging to the Socialist International, yet you find feverish and uncritical Maduro support among young radicalized left-wing Americans. We have the…

Honestly, the fact that tankies exist in 2022, still bewilders me.

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

#39

Post by 29athrowaway »

cardanome wrote: post #15
29athrowaway wrote: post #12

Do you truly believe that some bayesian economic simulator on a IBM System/360 Model 50 was going to be better than the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition? And that 7 people were going to be able to effectively manage the production of every sector of the economy?

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 regulati…

They wanted to achieve supply chain optimization at a scale similar to what Amazon does, but with IBM computers from the 70s, and instead of the Internet they wanted to use Telex machines.

Good luck with that! I am telling you, it was guaranteed to fail. We never saw it fail because it got dismantled.

People still fantasize about sitting on that control room and those unergonomic chairs, controlling the economy using 8 buttons at a time.

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

#40

Post by nahuel0x »

29athrowaway wrote: post #39
cardanome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regulati…

They wanted to achieve supply chain optimization at a scale similar to what Amazon does, but with IBM computers from the 70s, and instead of the Internet they wanted to use Telex machines. Good luck with that! I am telling you, it was guaranteed to fail. We never saw it fail because it got dismantled. People still fantasize about sitting on that control room and those unergonomic chairs, controlling the economy using…

It seems it worked in some way:

The programme was initially viewed with traditionalist scepticism by Allende’s Socialist Party. But Project Cybersyn’s hour arrived in October 1972 during a strike of 40,000 truck drivers led by the hard-right Confederación Nacional del Transporte. As Allende’s opponents sought to wreck the economy by preventing the transport of food and raw materials, Cybersyn was deployed to underwrite the resistance. Through the electronic network, the government was able to coordinate deliveries by active trucks and to evade blockades. “We felt that we were in the centre of the universe,” Espejo remarked.

After 24 days, the strike was defeated. Ministers then became “much more interested” in Cybersyn, Espejo told me. Allende even proposed transferring the operations room to La Moneda, the presidential palace.

On 10 September 1973, the government finally prepared to install an upgraded version of the system. But the following day, with the connivance of the CIA, Pinochet’s forces stormed the palace and bombed it from the air

From: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/08/pr...

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