Talk:Viable System Model
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| Systems rating: | B Class | High importance | Field: Cybernetics | ||
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[edit] Cleaning up
How about some references eg Brain of the Firm, Heart of Enterprise and Diagnosing the System for Organisations. e.g see Stafford Beer memorial page at the Cybernetics Society.--Nick Green 22:07, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
How about some diagrams?
[edit] How about some critique?
Beer does not exactly show how to measure variety and how to operationalize the concept as to make it a useful measure. The axioms do not really help in this. This goes along with critic voiced by others that Beer's work often does lack scientific rigor (compare e.g. Rivett, P.: The case for cybernetics. A critical appreciation. European Journal of Operational Research 1 (1977) 33-37). Although it is quite clear to me that variety is a subjective concept, we still need guidelines on how to measure it. otherwise, it will never be an inter-subjective measure, and as such, no measure at all.
The VSM as a cybernetic theory is so general that it will be hard to test it according to hypothetico-deductive logic (falsification), as it will always apply to a system if the observer tries to match observed system and VSM. As such, perhaps it is perhaps more an interpretive framework? (compare Harnden, R.J.: Outside and then: an interpretive approach to the VSM. In: Espejo, R., Harnden, R. (eds.): The Viable System Model. Interpretations and Applications of Stafford Beer's VSM. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK et al. (1989) 383-404)
Although the 'muddyness' and 'fuzziness' of the typical diagrammic convention of the VSM is reportedly intended by Beer (compare Beer, S.: Diagnosing the System for Organizations. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK et al. (1985)), others argue that a more formal specification and notation would help in applying the VSM in practice (e.g. Anderton, R.: The need for formal development of the VSM. In: Espejo, R., Harnden, R. (eds.): The Viable System Model, Chichester, UK et al. (1989) 39-50)
- note
The outbound comment is reporting 404 -- ( http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/edtech/ETEC606/viablesystem.html ) -Urgen 20:02, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Transduction
Should Beer's concept of transduction be linked to the engineering concept of Transducer or to the cell biology concept of Signal transduction or both? --RichardVeryard 03:09, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
- Think you made the right choice here, but let's keep it under review. Beer's use of Transducer may well be worth an article on its own e.g. Transducer (Cybernetics). Wiener, via von Neumann self-reproducing automata, says some fairly startling things in the 2nd ed. about non-linear transducers making white boxes out of black boxes. Does any one know of any other discussion of transducers in (pure) cybernetics? Pask, it should be said, regarded the normal state of any stable system as reproductive (of itself) and incidentally productive (if excited, of a new coherence) but he insisted that strictly cybernetics was conducted at an interface (boundary, or hard carapace) -itself a transducer. A foundation for a Molecular assembler or nanoassembly rears its pretty head--Nick Green (talk) 00:21, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
