Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal[1] processes such as feedback and recursion, where the outcomes of actions return as inputs for subsequent actions.[2][3] It is concerned with general principles that are relevant across multiple contexts,[4] including engineering, ecological, economic, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in practical activities such as designing,[5] learning, and managing. Cybernetics' transdisciplinary[6] character means that it intersects with a number of other fields, resulting in a wide influence and diverse interpretations.

• Cybernetics has its origins in exchanges between numerous disciplines during the 1940s. Initial developments were consolidated through meetings such as the Macy conferences and the Ratio Club. Early focuses included purposeful behavior,[9] neural networks, heterarchy, information theory, and self-organizing systems.
• In steering a ship, the helmsperson maintains a steady course in a changing environment by adjusting their steering in continual response to the effect it is observed as having.[7].
  Other examples of circular causal feedback include: technological devices such as the thermostat, where the action of a heater responds to measured changes in temperature regulating the temperature of the room within a set range, and the centrifugal governor of a steam engine, which regulates the engine speed; biological examples such as the coordination of volitional movement through the nervous system and the homeostatic processes that regulate variables such as blood sugar; and processes of social interaction such as conversation.

Term coined by Norbert Wiener.

• Cosma Shalizi: He defined it as "the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine," and thought it was basically about Information Theory and FeedBack, and how animals and machines manage to do things; and he warned, as explicitly as possible, against using it for handwaving fluff in Social Science or philosophy. (This was, of course, ignored; but that is also another story.)

Management cybernetics

CyberSyn

Cosma Shalizi: A science which seems to have dissolved into the others. A lot of good science was done under this banner; it just doesn't seem to hold together. Cybernetics helped give rise to some new fields, like cognitive science; it disseminated about a dozen ideas and bits of applied math which have proved useful (in, e.g., neurobiology); but what else? As a study of abstract machines in general, it becomes identical with dynamics, or computation theory, or some amalgam of both; algebra, even. As a more limited science of "communication and control" it suffers from the fact that communication and control in animals is, when you get down to blood and guts, rather different from communication and control in machines, and neither resembles the mechanisms of C&C in society. This is not to say that there are no similarities; of course there are; but they're at the very general level of things like "feedback" and "you must have an information channel," and pretty much exhausted by ideas which are now common currency in many particular fields. And even then, animals have control without feedback. It may be that we haven't exhausted the potential of a science of communication and control, but I think at this point the burden of proof would be on the optimists.