Project Cybersyn: Chile's networked economy experiment, assessed
Project Cybersyn, Allende-era Chile's networked economic management system, was only useful as a telex network during a 1972 trucking strike, not as a planning tool. Its anomaly detection, simulation, and control room components were largely ineffective, with screens displaying hand-drawn slides.
What they achieved was remarkable enough to need no exaggeration.
- Hexayurt
https://archive.org/details/designingfreedom00beer Stafford Beer's book, written just after CyberSyn's unfortunate end.
There are a number of very subtle insights contained, in particular there's a tension between the "cybernetic" model he proposes, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions (Lorenz etc.) which as far as I know has yet to be resolved.
- dipanshuhappy
If anyone wants to dive into Cybernetic metaphysics. Checkout Nick Land earlier work during his Cybernetics club days. Mark Fisher was also part of it
- kingraoul
I think commentators here are missing what is really exciting about this. Back in the 70s it was impossible to calculate all the labour inputs to product, so socialist economies had to refer to capitalist economy pricing. This doomed Cybersyn and any other attempt to use the LTV to work backwards.
That problem is now solved.
- chermi
I will always upvote shalizi.
obligatory https://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
- Bratmon
This project is funny because the outcome was so inevitable:
1. Every large corporation in the world has tried a similar "Let's get a bunch of statisticians to quantify our business and we'll manage the company by looking at the graphs" experiment at least once, and it always explodes in a combination of manipulated metrics and Goodharts's Law
2. Every centrally-planned economy in the world that makes plans based on data from individual factories has been massively impacted by a combination of falsified metrics and Goodharts's Law
But because it was destroyed in a CIA-backed revolution, we don't actually know how it would have turned out, so modern Communists can convince themselves that it would have ushered in Utopia!