Lessons tagged “cybernetics”
8 published lessons with this tag.
You cannot match the machine's variety
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety says a controller must match the variety of the system it controls. A machine that writes faster than you can read has more output variety than your attention can ever match — so the answer is never to read faster or try harder. The answer, from cybernetics, is variety engineering: staged attenuators that compress what each level must handle down to what that level can govern.
Feedback loops are circular relationships
When A affects B and B affects A you have a system that can amplify or stabilize itself.
Agent thinking is systems thinking applied to yourself
Designing agents for your own cognition is applying systems design to the most important system you manage.
Feedback loops are how systems learn
Any system that cannot observe its own output cannot improve.
The feedback loop has four parts
Action observation evaluation and adjustment form the basic feedback cycle.
Self-correcting systems are the ultimate goal
The best systems detect and correct their own errors without manual intervention.
Delegation and control
True control comes from building systems you trust to operate without your constant oversight.
Monitoring is the feedback loop for your agents
Monitoring completes the feedback loop — observation enables adjustment enables improvement.