For God’s Sake, Margaret (1976) | Hacker News Reader

For God’s Sake, Margaret (1976)

oikos.org

84 pointsbenbreen23 comments

This is an astounding record of an astounding conversation.

So much died with them. We use control systems everywhere, but we should be seeing them everywhere, including the accidental ones, and fixing the ones that don't produce good results. Instead, control systems are boxed and understood only by specialists who only think of the box.

I think we need to revisit "Software is eating the world."

There's a certain antipathy that's inherent to the current formula and it shows up in your 'specialists who only think of the box' comment.

In a way it relates to work-life balance. We should be able to have developers in their 30's who are specialists in several unrelated fields. Dive back into something you did before you went into the CS program, or something you found along the way.

Instead we blow right past our 10,000 hours toward 20,000 and a lot of us never take a detour. There are diminishing returns here. Other skills are also important (even more effective) once you know basically how to do your primary duties without having to stop and think about it.

To really eat the world, we need to participate in the world. 'Disruptors' usually think everyone else's problems are simple, due to pig ignorance. I'm not sure when the backlash is coming but I'm sure it's out there.

I watched a 'household name' in one of my hobbies do a kickstarter to create a public website with detailed information for that hobby. He got what sounded like a bunch of money but ended up having to make most of it subscription based. Guess what? Programmers are really fucking expensive. Especially if they work on the wrong things.

If I can get my ducks in a row, my side hustle will basically be replacing his bad execution of a good idea with one that works. I can charge myself 'wholesale' prices for labor instead of retail. I need fewer user studies. Hell I know what a user study is. And I can care better about things like privacy and scalability and reliability. For me it won't be a dancing bear. I can bring in some of my expectations from my day job.

My two biggest regrets in my education are (1) taking the 'college prep' classes in high-school instead of the welding and small engine repair style classes and (2) majoring in CS instead of minoring while studying a field like biology or chemistry that's full of things that need programs written about them (and looking down on the kids who did, because I was the superior math/CS student).

I mean, I don't think I have a bad life, but it's kind of a regret that when I sit down and think about things to program for fun, I think about theorem provers and compilers, which there are already bunches of.

In junior high I took wood shop. I used a router to make a birthday plaque for my dad. He didn’t smoke so the stereotypical ashtray wouldn’t do him any good. I also learned how to work with acrylics.

In high school I took an auto tech class from my local community college where I rebuilt an automatic transmission. It still amazes me those devices work at all.

In college I took a welding class from the agriculture school for elective credit. Everyone should have the experience of cutting metal with fire.

Those experiences have been priceless to me in my day job at $megacorp. I work with a lot of people who have only had one job. Their thinking is very rigid.

I encourage you to find a community college course in any kind of trade discipline. It’s extremely rewarding to apply the lessons conceptually to your day job and life.

Electrical Engineering, its very cool to be able to calculate and invent anything.

At University I asked if I could take a control theory class, and was told, "No, that's a dead field." Foolishly, I didn't. I learned more control theory from this one interview than anything in the last 40 years.

Funny. Control theory is vastly more necessary now than ever before. And there are people doing it; most of them just do it badly and call it AI.

It really does seem to have been a victim of (ironically) "schismogenesis" between the disciplines. The elephant has become so large people are only seeing parts of it. Off the top of my head I can see the following fragments:

A) cybernetics, in the machine sense: this is all op-amps and servoes, poles and zeroes. Taught as "control systems" in engineering courses.

B) organisational cybernetics: theory of management. If theoretical, this belongs in anthropology. Otherwise it's ended up in a cargo-cult form in MBA courses.

C) economic systems. Left to those economists who actually bother to do some differential equations rather than just writing thousand-word sponsored posts on why inequality is natural, or making catastrophic mistakes in Excel. Nobody's trying gigantic Stafford Beer systems any more.

D) Psychology and psychiatry: control and regulation seems to have become deeply unfashionable to talk about here, possibly due to replacing talk with drugs.

E) The literary wing: cyberpunk. Started as social commentary, but has faded into an aesthetic; nonetheless this is potentially the most powerful one for getting cybernetic thought into general circulation.

G) Environmental control systems: both the dull and dreadful world of IPCC reports on "forcings" and the more fanciful Gaia hypothesis inform us of how we change the environment and the environment changes us.

H) Advertising, gamification, and "dark UX": how can we use control systems and feedback loops through the human brain and emotional system to get people to put the maximum amount of coins in the slot?

The one thing these all have in common to me is the revelation of uncomfortable truths about ourselves, which probably accounts for their unpopularity. The original article talks about B and D with a bit of A and C, mostly pre-dating the others.

Come for the incredibly lucid conversation on cybernetics, stay for the humor.

Bateson: Yes, yes. All cybernetic entities are displaced small boys.

Mead: Displaced small what?

B: Boys. They’re jacks. You know what a jack is? A jack is an instrument to displace a small boy. A boot jack is a thing for pulling off boots ’cause you haven’t a small boy to pull it off for you.

M: I’ll remember that next time. This is an English joke that no one will understand

Can confirm: I'm not English and don't have a clue what that joke means.

Anyone who's interested in Mead and Bateson's relationship should check out the novel Euphoria by Lily King - it's narrated by a lightly fictionalized version of Bateson and is about how he and Mead fell in love, in New Guinea in the 30s. Great book and really captures their personalities. Both were truly exceptional people who deserve to be better known than they already are.

Couldn't agree more. It's a pity that Mead and Bateson's work, particularly Bateson's, seems to have never made it to the mainstream. If more techies and psychiatrists understood their kind of systems thinking, the world would be a better place IMO.

> If Gregory lives long enough he will get his Nobel for the Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia.

Also not sure who was the author of this bit at the top (probably Stewart Brand?) but I also agree 100%. Double bind theory is brilliant.

I've actually just started work on an academic book project that will involve Bateson (focusing more on his relationship with John C. Lilly and early psychedelic drug researchers). I went to the Library of Congress last month to look at his letters with Mead. One unexpected takeaway from that trip was that he was a bit of a war hero, albeit a secret one (undercover mission to Southeast Asia with OSS). I also liked this from a letter that Bateson wrote to a friend during WW2:

“M[argaret] says that you have ‘grown up.' I wonder - I suppose I would be said to have ‘grown up’ too - respectably working at a desk from 9 to 5:30, doing some teaching, married and with young, and so on. But is it in us really to alter after our 20s? I think not in fundamentals. I am sure that I shall go to my grave with my shoes untied, my trousers unpressed, my hair overdue for a cut, and probably imperfectly shaven. I shall still leave undone those things which I ought to have done — and shall still feel unhappy and guilty about it.”

I had no idea Bateson was connected to psychedelic drug research, in addition to being a war hero/secret agent, but I guess I'm not surprised given the interdisciplinary nature and general excellence of his work.

Interesting letter. For my own sake I really hope my hero Bateson is wrong about the whole not being able to change after your 20s thing, heh.

Good luck with the book project, sounds fascinating.

I'm in general an admirer of Bateson (and Stewart Brand), but the Double Bind theory is crap and not taken seriously any more. Schizophrenia is an organic brain disease with genetic and probably other material causes; it's not caused by bad family interactions or confusions around type theory.

Mead and Bateson's work in South East Asia was the basis for the title of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus[1].

I was curious and went through the footnotes of Anti-Oedipus and D&G say in Mead and Bateson's Balinese photographic survey that they describe a certain culture the mothers tease their sons when they are very young by pulling on their penises and then ignoring them, but I pulled the Mead and Bateson book out of the Brooklyn Public Library and could not for the life of me find evidence of what Deleuze and Guattari were talking about.

Why would you title your book based on a 30+ year old half-heard tale about a foreign culture?

I like Deleuze and Guattari, but the experience of trying to figure out the physical, material, biological, sociological source for the idea of 'Anti-Oedipus' itself left me disillusioned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus

> Mead and Bateson's work in South East Asia was the basis for the title of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus[1].

Being fairly familiar with Delueze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_, I don't think it's accurate to characterize the Mead-Bateson link as foundational. To that point, the title of the work is "Anti-Oedipus" and the subtitle is "Capitalism and Schizophrenia".

Indeed, the Wikipedia entry to which you link makes no mention of "Mead" and mentions "Gregory Bateson" in a sentence including twenty-three other names, which notably does not include "Sigmund Freud" against whom Deleuze and Guattari are writing and whose work is the (anti-)basis of the title Anti-Oedipus.

Anti-Oedipilization is the formative root of Delueze and Guattari's schizoanalysis whose method is informed in its opening pages by Georg Büchners novella Lenz [0]

Quoting (excerpt of Anti-Oedipus page 1):

> A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Buchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_(fragment)

[1] https://medium.com/@mdowns1611/commentary-on-d-gs-anti-oedip...

EDIT: fix citation

Thank you, this is very helpful!

http://www.wholeearth.com/back-issues.php

CoEvolutionary Quarterly back issues! <3

By the title, I jumped to the conclusion it was some article about Judy Blume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com