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A comment on A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics. Parent comment

Re:A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics by robocat on Sunday September 13, 2020 @10:14PM (#24466079)
From article: "Over time, cybernetics’s contributions were stripped away and reclassified as something else. Early work on feedback loops in cognition became AI. Models of the format of feedback loops became information theory. Work on feedback loops around production became part of economics. Work on mathematical representations of complex systems became system dynamics. Work on feedback loops in behavior moved over to sociology and psychology. Cybernetic theory practically founded anthropology and cognitive science."

Control theory is just one amongst many splinters, without any implied primacy of control theory.

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Re:A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics by amatic on Monday September 14, 2020 @01:05AM (#24466941)
Control theory certainly predates Wiener's cybernetics. He did not invent negative feedback analysis nor design of control systems. He did fail to cite previous work, so adherents of cybernetics think he did.
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Re:A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics by ethn on Monday September 14, 2020 @04:31PM (#24474794)
In Cybernetics, he does credit Maxwell, Pitts, etc. He goes through the entire history of science relevant to Cybernetics for the first and second chapters.

He did invent plenty of feedback analysis techniques and modern control systems before writing Cybernetics

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Re:A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics by amatic on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @03:53AM (#24478852)
There are many developments relevant for cybernetics that were not mentioned in the book Cybernetics, like discoveries of H.S. Black and other engineers in Bell labs, or early mechanical analog computers. Here is a short review of book on the history of control engineering before cybernetics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/acs.839

"[...] general reader could be forgiven for assuming that Wiener was the originator of the idea of feedback control. Significant though these war-time contributions were, they were not the whole story: as I and others have shown feedback control has had a much longer history"

That text includes more references to papers and books on the history of ideas relevant for control theory and control engineering.

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