Make money doing the work you believe in
This section to me was the key to Ashby’s work, pages 39-41:
"What is a “system”? In S.3/1 it was stated that every real determinate machine or dynamic system corresponds to a closed, single-valued transformation; and the intervening sections have illustrated the thesis with many examples. It does not, however, follow that the correspondence is always obvious; on the contrary, any attempt to apply the thesis generally will soon encounter certain difficulties, which must now be considered. Suppose we have before us a particular real dynamic system— a swinging pendulum, or a growing culture of bacteria, or an automatic pilot, or a native village, or a heart-lung preparation—and we want to discover the corresponding transformation, starting ,from the beginning and working from first principles. Suppose it is actually a simple pendulum, 40 cm long. We provide a suitable recorder, draw the pendulum through 30° to one side, let it go, and record its position every quarter-second. We find the successive deviations to be 30° (initially), 10°, and –24° (on the other side). So our first estimate of the transformation, under the given conditions, is Next, as good scientists, we check that transition from 10°: we draw the pendulum aside to 10°, let it go, and find that, a quarter-second later, it is at +3°! Evidently the change from 10° is not single-valued—the system is contradicting itself. What are we to do now? Our difficulty is typical in scientific investigation and is fundamental: we want the transformation to be single-valued but it will not come so. We cannot give up the demand for singleness, for to do so would be to give up the hope of making single-valued predictions. Fortunately, experience has long since shown what s to be done: the system must be re-defined. At this point we must be clear about how a “system” is to be defined. Our first impulse is to point at the pendulum and to “the system is that thing there”. This method, however, has a fundamental disadvantage: every material object contains no less than an infinity of variables and therefore of possible systems. The real pendulum, for instance, has not only length and position; it has also mass, temperature, electric conductivity, crystalline structure, chemical impurities, some radio-activity, velocity, reflecting power, tensile strength, a surface film of moisture, bacterial con-tamination, an optical absorption, elasticity, shape, specific gravity, and so on and on. Any suggestion that we should study “all” the facts is unrealistic, and actually the attempt is never made. What is try is that we should pick out and study the facts that are relevant to some main interest that is already given. The truth is that in the world around us only certain sets of facts are capable of yielding transformations that are closed and single. The discovery of these sets is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. The history of science, and even of any single investigation, abounds in examples. Usually the discovery involves the other method for the defining of a system, that of listing the variables that are to be taken into account. The system now means, not a but a list of variables. This list can be varied, and the experimenter’s commonest task is that of varying the list (“taking other variables into account”) until he finds a set of variables that he required singleness. Thus we first considered the pendulum as if it consisted solely of the variable “angular deviation from the vertical”; we found that the system so defined did not give singleness. If we were to go on we would next try other definitions, for instance the vector: (angular deviation, mass of bob), which would also be found to fail. Eventually we would try the (angular deviation, angular velocity) and then we would find that these states, defined in this way, would give the desired singleness (cf. Ex. 3/6/14). Some of these discoveries, of the missing variables, have been of major scientific importance, as when Newton discovered the importance of momentum, or when Gowland Hopkins discovered the importance of vitamins (the behaviour of rats on diets was not single-valued until they were identified). Sometimes the discovery is scientifically trivial, as when single-valued results are obtained only after an impurity has been removed from the water-supply, or a loose screw tightened; but the singleness is always essential. (Sometimes what is wanted is that certain probabilities shall be single-valued. This more subtle aim is referred to in S.7/4 and 9/ 2. It is not incompatible with what has just been said: it merely means that it is the probability that is the important variable, not the variable that is giving the probability. Thus, if I study a roulette-wheel scientifically I may be interested in the variable “probability of the next throw being Red”, which is a variable that has numerical values in the range between 0 and 1, rather than in the variable “colour of the next throw”, which is a variable that has only two values: Red and Black. A system that includes the latter variable is almost certainly not predictable, whereas one that includes the former (the probability) may well be predictable, for the probability has a constant value, of about a half.) The “absolute” system described and used in Design for a Brain is just such a set of variables. It is now clear why it can be said that every determinate dynamic system corresponds to a single-valued transformation (in spite of the fact that we dare not dogmatise about what the real world contains, for it is full of surprises). We can make the statement simply because science refuses to study the other types, such as the one-variable pendulum above, dismissing them as “chaotic” or “non-sensical”. It is we who decide, ultimately, what we will accept as “machine-like” and what we will reject. (The subject is resumed in S.6/3.)".
The problem is that the assembled map - what is chosen as to what can be quantified, with a focus on control architecture - becomes mistaken for the underlying reality, and then ends up warping in unexpected and deleterious ways that underlying reality. For example, the quantification of the world in the name of "profits" and control leading to an exhaustion of the environmental and natural resource substrate that allows for the structure in the first place, factors which are entirely excluded from the single-valued transformation structure (except to the extent they can be used as propaganda to further control). This connects to Ashby's Requisite Variety in a way he didn't follow through on: the variety of the excluded variables - the complexity of the natural substrate, the nonlinearity of ecological systems, the long-horizon feedback loops - vastly exceeds the variety of the regulatory model. By his own law, a regulator whose variety is lower than the system it's regulating cannot maintain control. The quantified economic model is a low-variety regulator attempting to govern a high-variety substrate, which means control failures are structural necessities. The model will work until it doesn't, and when it stops working the failure will be catastrophic rather than gradual precisely because the feedback that would have signaled the problem was excluded from the variable set.