The Coalescence of Cybernetics
"Cybernetics had its origins in the early 1940s, when a group of distinguished scientists was gathered together in Mexico to deal with various assignments associated with the second world war. It is well-documented how they discovered that -- precisely because of their eminence in different fields -- they found it difficult to talk to each other about anything serious. So they decided to choose a topic that was nobody's speciality, but of interest to everyone. And their eminence was really important for another reason: they had nothing to prove. They decided to discuss the nature of control."
American Society of Cybernetics – Timeline – History of Cybernetics
ascybernetics
American Society of Cybernetics
Excerpt below from my comment on the Invisible Serfs Collar blog of August 3, 2019. (Previously referenced herein)
An example of just how much we’ve been acculturated is captured in these quotes I stumbled upon while reading from the late Howard Raiffa’s entry at the Wikipedia website, in References.
“I think of myself as a decision analyst who believes in using subjective probabilities. I would prefer being called a “subjectivist” than a “Bayesian.””
“I got an idea: call it applied systems analysis, because nobody will know what it means. We had a clean slate*.”
*ta·bu·la ra·sa
/ˈtäbyo͝olə ˈräsə,ˈräzə/
Noun
an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate.
"the team did not have complete freedom and a tabula rasa from which to work"
a. the human mind, especially at birth, viewed as having no innate ideas
(Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”) in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and psychology, a supposed condition that empiricists attribute to the human mind before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the external world of objects.
English speakers have called that initial state of mental blankness "tabula rasa" (a term taken from a Latin phrase that translates as "smooth or erased tablet") since the 16th century, but it wasn't until British philosopher John Locke championed the concept in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 that the…
In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that at birth the (human) mind is a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), by Norbert Weiner
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950;1954), by Norbert Weiner
Psycho-Cybernetics (1960), by Maxwell Maltz
Cybernetics
André-Marie Ampère