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  • Anthonyabucci@buc.ci
    Oct 19, 2026, 10:13 AM
    Hot take: POSIWID is wrongheaded in the sense that it lives in the same neighborhood as pronouncements that LLMs are conscious, sentient, alive, feel pain, and so on. Behaviorist thinking, which POSIWID is, yields prisons both metaphorical and actual. Cyberneticians, and management consultants (which this phrase's coiner, Stafford Beer, was), are not your friends. Intention and interiority matter, but POSIWID is all surface.

    #AI #LLM #POSIWID #cybernetics
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  • The Ludditetheluddite@assemblag.es
    Oct 19, 2026, 11:51 AM

    @hipsterelectron @abucci

    Yes, a scorching hot take, with which I disagree very much! I was even part of a Marxist cybernetic reading group that read modern business operations literature to learn if and how any lessons could be applied to a future, post-capitalist society, and I think, yes, a lot of it can be. The running joke of that group was that capitalists keep accidentally discovering the benefits of socialism, which is a bit of a tradition within cybernetics, starting with Beer.

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  • The Ludditetheluddite@assemblag.es
    Oct 19, 2026, 12:08 PM

    @hipsterelectron @abucci

    I'm almost positive that Beer never used the acronym himself, but I know that he uses the phrase at the beginning of "Heart of Enterprise" in a discussion about the innate subjectivity of the observer when diagnosing system behavior and drawing system boundaries. If anything, I'd say that people reading that passage would find their belief of LLM consciousness challenged, not supported. (1/2)

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  • The Ludditetheluddite@assemblag.es
    Oct 19, 2026, 12:15 PM

    @hipsterelectron @abucci

    The point he builds to is that, when bringing your own subjectivity into a system, you should challenge yourself to understand it on its own terms, which involves understanding its inputs and responses to those inputs, not your pre-conceived notions of its intent. Instead, we should "analyze a situation from the point of view of its regulatory phenomena," i.e., which inputs are ignored, prioritized etc. (2/2)

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  • Anthonyabucci@buc.ci
    Oct 19, 2026, 12:40 PM
    @theluddite@assemblag.es @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run You've read Tiqqun on cybernetics? The cybernetic view of the human is repaclaged behaviorism. In this view we are empty flesh vessels that emit data and respond to error signals. This is a dehumanizing conception, as there is no room for interiority that isn't about input/output. It works fine when discussing machinery.
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  • Anthonyabucci@buc.ci
    Oct 19, 2026, 1:01 PM
    @theluddite@assemblag.es @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run Yes. Which claim are you dubious of exactly? You said nearly the same things as I did in your thread (which I apologize for not having read before I responded), for instance: "when bringing your own subjectivity into a system, you should challenge yourself to understand it on its own terms, which involves understanding its inputs and responses to those inputs". Where I take issue is when the "system" involves people. Slightly more subtly, the challenge being issued here, taken in context, involves a person in the system and tasks them with putting their subjectivity to one side, mechanizing themselves. Otherwise it's a restatement of scientific objectivity, and does no extra work; one does something with the understanding gained aside from pursuing further understanding.
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  • The Ludditetheluddite@assemblag.es
    Oct 19, 2026, 1:27 PM

    @abucci

    The point of the passage I was quoting about "second order cybernetics" is that the observer is always part of the system. The challenge is not to find the outside, objective perspective, but that there isn't one.

    imo this is like critiquing pharmacology's view of humans as just a vessel for chemical reactions. It definitely can do that, and the critique has value in our current psycho-pharmacological context, but it can also be productive to view humans this way. (1/2)

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  • The Ludditetheluddite@assemblag.es
    Oct 19, 2026, 1:28 PM

    @abucci

    re:mechanization - One of Taiichi Ohno's huge triumphs in industrial engineering at Toyota was specifically against mechanizing humans, so against the Taylorist view of human beings as unthinking machines, and for designing systems around human individuality and innovation. Cybernetics gives us a framework for why this was a productive move, and this is the kind of things that my reading group looked at. I'm happy to pass along pretty niche lit if this is of interest.

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