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by momerath 3541 days ago
Cyberneticists are not ignorant of your viewpoint. You may be right 'ultimately', but you might find your views refined if you actually dug into the arguments. Stafford Beer addresses "variety reduction" in the first of these lectures:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-d...

Edit: as a quick software-design analogy, I think Cybernetics gets labeled "top down" design, by people who think there are only top-down and bottom-up to choose from. It's more of a middle-out strategy.
2 comments
norea-armozel 3541 days ago
I mostly come from the POV that the last two centuries of industrialization has polluted our thought processes about how production should be handled. Specifically, that we should produce certain goods at all. Like how many smart phone brands should even exist? I know some will say whatever the market will bare but the reality is that the market as it stands is highly subsidized in one form or another. Especially when you consider the price to transport goods is ridiculously low. And I'm not talking about taking bauxite from South America to Vancouver to refine it since they got cheap hydroelectric power. I'm talking making iPhones and other assorted junk to excess. The fact we overproduce clothes and dump them on Haiti and other countries proves my point about top-down centralized industrial efforts (I don't think all top-down is bad, tbf). They can only do that because transportation is artificially low, trade treaties favor the 'Great Powers', and poor countries don't really have a means to defend their markets from predation. Ultimately, it's not that we shouldn't try to automate markets and production but that we should ask ourselves do we need consumerism? I think the answer is no for me. I'd rather have a few good products well made than have the latest LED infested bauble. Get me one good smart phone that I can use for the next twenty years, not many Okay/meh smart phones every other year. I guess that's what I'm getting at.
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norea-armozel 3541 days ago
To give you an idea where I'm coming from, I should state that my political leanings are towards Mutualism and some form of anarcho-syndicalism. I hope that helps to give light to the disagreement.
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