“Getting Started” Guide to Cybernetics

I was ready to jump in here with a dismissive comment, but then he mentioned Wiener close to the top, and I was disarmed. It's a pretty good collection of links. Unfortunately, the prefix "cyber" has rather jumped the shark, but the whole idea of biological and even social systems as exhibiting the same communication and control mechanisms we're familiar with from engineering is worth contemplating.

See also W. Ross Ashby (1956): "An Introduction to Cybernetics"

(PDF available from http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html)

This is great. I haven't delved into AI much yet, but what I've seen through 10 years as a language-learning specialist is that information and computational approaches to learning fail miserably in ESL, as does most schooling.

The brain is wetware. It's organic and grows into abilities through practice and use with proper modelling from an expert.

I get an itch to correct when I read AI discussions, as they usually assume information theory as fundamental to intelligence and mind.

Go try to learn something really hard, and pay attention to your internal process as youre doing it, then go and teach someone else that same skill and pay close attention to their process, while comparing it to what yoh went through to learn the skill you are now teaching. Then you'll have the substance necessary to theorize about the learning mind. Then again, me telling people who only deal in abstractions to go out and learn through concrete experiences is probably barking up the wrong tree.

Certainly interesting, but (just me?) reads like some kind of optimised/feedback-tested meme-vehicle for the authors’ ideas — repetition, restatement, phrasing means I feel like I’ve been “actively” programmed (rather than my normal experience of contemplation, integration, learning, etc.). Not necessarily a bad thing, mind.

My Bachelor Thesis on applying Sociocybernetics using Web-Technology. I should've really read this "Getting Started Guide" before :)

It's really a very interesting field and the most modern term I know describing it maybe a conflation of Mathematical Sociology & Psychology.