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Comment by MilStdJunkie | Hacker News Reader

Tanner is one of those people I might disagree politically with from time to time but who nevertheless convinces me of the alternative point of view regularly. I see he disses my man Herodotus right off, so now I need to read this to see why.

There is, of course, a margin of "losing" from which no history can return. Anyone know about Khazar history? What happened to those guys? The Mongols happened.

His series on the Soviet "cybernetics" movement was also fascinating.

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Why is cybernetics quoted?

Had a different shade of meaning in the Soviet context from the way we use the word today - more like "Computer Science" or "Automatic Theory", rather than robotic or human-robotic or "cyberpunky".

I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one. The robotics tie in isn't far off though, as some of the earliest autonomous mobile robots spawned from cybernetics research.

> I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one.

Just to clarify, do you mean that the Soviet context is the same as the modern context or that the modern context misuses the term in some way (or something else that I missed)?

Is the modern definition any different than the older one? It just means systems with feedback loops. A motion sensitive video camera is “cybernetic”. So is the Facebook feed algorithm and self-checkout at the grocery store.

Not in the technical meaning, no. But the general public thinks anything "cyber-" has to do with the Internet

If you read old cybernetics writing it’s hard not to see a striking analogy with the excitement around machine learning. They had all kinds of medical experiments showing the usage of feedback mechanisms on the body and brain and how they were just on the edge of unlocking artificial humans.

I read that as "the more stringent academic definition" (~= "the Soviet context") vs "the fashionable pop-culture cyberpunk-influenced understanding" of the term.

Take your pick which of those you mean by "the modern context".

I think that was the original idea of the term in the West as well, we just got it distorted via sci-fi over time

It had the same different meaning outside the Soviet context too. Check out, for example, Norbert Wiener, as American as they come and considered the inventor of "cybernetics" in that "old-school" sense.

https://bailiping.github.io/assets/docs/Books/Cybernetics,%2...

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