Steve Witham wrote: << [I wrote:] << [***comment expressing skepticism over whether the upcoming "Cybernetics" conference at RPI is actually connected to cybernetics, and wondering if cybernetics per se has any theorems.***]

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The hard results were and still are in control theory. I know Wiener's no slouch, I think what happened was people hoped to get traction by looking at feedback loops, loops controlling the parameters of loops, etc., in hierarchies... but didn't get anywhere. So it is cybernetics itself (not just this conference) that has kooks.

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The control theory I'm aware of is quite specific: It addresses the problem of how to steer most efficiently from one point to another in some phase space -- assumed locally Euclidean -- when the allowable steering options are subject to infinitesimal constraints. (Example: How do you best roll a sphere on a plane without slippage so its net motion is some prescribed rotation plus translation? Here "best" is defined by minimizing some cost function defined on all allowable itineraries.) << For instance people who want to manage economies with feedback systems, without really getting that economies already are multilayered feedback systems attempting to "route around damage" as the saying goes.

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Don't know much economics. Are there standard economics models as "multilayered feedback systems" ? << It's similar to how Complex Systems had some interesting results and then kooks.

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Despite having done research in differential dynamical systems, I never really understood what the field of "Complex Systems" or for that matter "Chaos Theory" were (and extend my skepticism to those fields as well). << The funny thing is, hierarchical feedback systems are making a comeback with people like Jeff Hawkins, only it turns out every little piece of knowledge is its own feedback loop,

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How so? << so (assuming they work) you don't get general high-level results, just general infrastructure designs and lots of specific stuff for a system to learn.

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I like the idea of hierarchical feedback systems (though maybe they can always be relabeled so as to be non-hierarchical?). In any case they're probably useful in a field I'd love to see more progress in -- causal inference. --Dan ________________________________________________________________________________________ "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." --Groucho Marx