Cybernetics as a Mental Model: Understanding Systems and Control Mechanisms

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Pieter Slegers discussed Cybernetics as a Mental Model: Understanding Systems and Control Mechanisms, here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Tobias: We’re at the top of the hour, JT. You want to give us some vegetables?

Jake: Yes, if you’re hungry for some vegetables. So, we’re going to be talking about cybernetics today. I’ve been learning about it, recently, starting at a complete zero literal knowledge. In fact, embarrassingly, I wrongly associated it with Scientology, which apparently Hubbard called that Dianetics. I had those two confused in my head for whatever reason. But really, I read this interesting book called The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. It introduces cybernetics, and it ties it into modern decision-making systems, like governments and corporations and committees. So, I feel rather foolish that I’m so late and have been ignoring this really interesting mental model, which is really it’s just the study of decision-making systems.

So, let’s do a little history lesson on cybernetics first to set the table. Norbert Wiener is the father of cybernetics. He was a child prodigy. He got a bachelor’s degree from Tufts at age 14. Did graduate work in zoology at Harvard and philosophy at Cornell, all before he was 17. Then he traveled to Europe, and learned from Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. And then he had a brief stint as a soldier in World War I. And then he eventually ended up teaching math at MIT.

He had this book called Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. It was a pop science hit in 1948. It was really an outgrowth of Wiener’s World War II research, where he worked on automation and feedback for anti-aircraft guns. So, he invented this automated gun site that could predict the movement of an enemy airplane and aimed sufficiently ahead to compensate for the flight of the bullet. So, his book was one of the first to put forth the ideas of thinking machines. And so, I think that’s probably where that Terminator cybernetic organism comes from. It’s like this thinking machines.

But it turns out that cybernetics and Wiener were inspired, actually, Claude Shannon’s information theory in a lot of ways. He also discussed the modeling of neurons with John von Neumann. He’s pretty legit, dude. As you know, Shannon laid the groundwork for understanding how information can be quantitatively measured, and efficiently communicated and bringing in concepts like entropy, like the loss of information.

Wiener integrated a lot of things from information theory as well to explain how systems use feedback and control to process information and maintain stability in a way fighting entropy. And so, it’s actually a very Mungarian adjacent concept. It’s interdisciplinary study of systems and control and communication in animals, machines, organizations and focusing on how they regulate and adapt to achieve goals. So, it’s like a legit mental model to have in your lattice work.

This has all been probably a little too theoretical. So, let’s give a practical example of what cybernetics looks like. It’s your home thermostat. So, the system’s goal is to maintain a desired temperature in your home. It uses sensors, like this thermostat, to measure the current temperature. And then there’s usually a feedback loop. So, if the temperature deviates from a set point, thermostat sends a signal. And from these feedback loops stems regulation and control, so the heating or cooling system comes on and adjusts the output to bring the temperature back to the desired level, shuts off when it reaches a set point.

This allows then adaptation from the system to continuously monitor and adjust to maintain this temperature, not regardless of what’s happening with the external environment. So, this process of sensing, feedback and control are the core principles of cybernetics, and it’s a decision-making system in that way.

So, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the cybernetics pool here. We have this guy. It’s called Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. All right, a lot of big words there. What does it really mean? It’s the first law of cybernetics. It states that only variety can absorb variety. In this context, variety refers to the number of possible states or the range of behaviors that a system can exhibit. So, higher variety means there’s more options or responses available to the system.

Said more simply, really, there has to be a matching of complexity between the system, the decision-making system, and its external environment. So, any organization or machine or biological entity, it has to have a range of responses that are at least as diverse as the range of challenges that it encounters from its environment. Otherwise, it’s unable to cope with all these possible disturbances and it leads to eventual failure.

All right. Let’s explore some actual real-world examples. Imagine traffic. A city’s traffic lights, they don’t have sensors. It’s not smart. There’s no real time, like tweaks that it can do. The variety of traffic patterns that can happen then due to rush hour accidents, road work are greater than the fixed responses of the traffic lights. The consequence then you get traffic congestion, increased travel times, gridlock.

All right. Next, let’s say education. Let’s say an educational system employs a one size fits all method without accommodating different learning styles of students or the changing demands of occupational skills from the real world. The variety of the students learning abilities and preferences then can exceed this uniform teaching approach. So, the system isn’t keeping up with reality, and the consequences that students struggle to learn, there’s disengagement, dropouts and probably a bunch of debt that’s incurred for skills that aren’t in demand in the real world, like sound, kind of familiar.

Now, let’s shift back to finance and talk about debt. Debt actually comes up in the cybernetic research as a control system for the corporate organism. It’s kind of interesting. So, it could be a forcing function on management to trim largess corporate perks in order to create the cash flow necessary to service the debt. In the 1980s, this was the argument commonly by private equity especially, was that–

They were probably a force for good at that point, acting against all this corporate lazy balance sheets and entrenched management, private jets, expensive art hanging in their offices. These corporate raiders came in and they used debt as a control mechanism really to rein in these coddled management teams. But of course, a good idea can be taken too far and too much debt, and you end up starving the company of needed resources to invest for the creation of tomorrow’s cash flows because you’re only servicing the interest expense of today.

So, beyond a certain point then debt really becomes a pure instrument of control. If a creditor isn’t paid, the bank or whoever it is, can take over, break up the company, fire management. It has a very drastic effect on the viability of the system, which is really what cybernetics is all about. And so, I hope you enjoyed this new little mental model possibly added to your arsenal that I didn’t have until recently.

When you think about it, you start to look around and you see all of the control systems around you, they’re trying to manage a system. And even just the idea that if the control mechanism is not sufficiently complex as the environment that it’s operating against, that’s what leads to failure. Once you have that concept in your head, you start to see it all around you.

Tobias: That’s a good one, JT. What was the gentleman’s name?

Jake: Norbert Wiener was the father, but Ashby was the guy who came up with that first law of cybernetics.

Tobias: That was an impressive CV that he had– the impressive academic record.

Jake: Yeah. No, he was legit. Yeah.

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