# Cybernetic Feedback Loop A cybernetic feedback loop compares observed results with an objective or standard, then changes future action in response. The loop contains a signal, measurement, interpretation, adjustment, and another observation. Bryant's writing process used audience response as feedback: mark a sentence, publish it, observe resonance and failure modes, revise for clarity and philosophical coherence, expand it into a passage, and test again. AutoSites supplied the distribution and measurement surfaces; authorial judgment supplied the governing values. Related: [[wiki/Cybernetics|Cybernetics]], [[wiki/Memetic Engineering|Memetic Engineering]], [[wiki/Semantic Feedback Channel|Semantic Feedback Channel]], [[wiki/Reconciliation Loop|Reconciliation Loop]]. ## Relationships - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “W. Ross Ashby was a British cybernetician working in the 1950s who became interested in the phenomenon of homeostasis—the way in which complex systems operating in changing environments succeed in maintaining critical variables (for example, internal body temperature in biological systems) within tightly-defined limits. Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety stated that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.” > **— John Naughton**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety by John Naughton|Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety by John Naughton]] > “The hardest choice I had to make in my early scientific life was whether to give up the beautiful puzzles of quantum mechanics, nonlocality, and cosmology for something equally arresting: To work instead on reverse engineering the code that natural selection had built into the programs that made up our species' circuit architecture. In 1970, the surrounding cultural frenzy and geopolitics made first steps toward a nonideological and computational understanding of our evolved design, "human nature", seem urgent; the recent rise of computer science and cybernetics made it seem possible; the almost complete avoidance of and hostility to evolutionary biology by behavioral and social scientists had nearly neutered those fields, and so made it seem necessary.” > **— John Tooby**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Falling into Place Entropy, Galileo's Frames of Reference, and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life by John Tooby|Falling into Place Entropy, Galileo's Frames of Reference, and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life by John Tooby]] > “Complex systems can hardly be stable without at least some level of homeostasis. The earth’s biosphere is a prime example. Surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels are both affected by biological activities. Higher atmospheric CO2 partial pressure leads to increased plant growth, causing an increased consumption of CO2 and thus maintaining homeostasis. Higher temperatures cause increased phytoplankton growth in the oceans that produces airborne gases and organic matter seeding cloud droplets; more and denser clouds, in turn, lead to an increased reflection of sunlight back into space and thus contribute to temperature homeostasis. These systems also have their limits, though; like an E. coli bacterium with too much copper, our planet’s homeostasis systems on their own may be unable to overcome the current onslaught of human activities on global temperatures and CO2 levels.” > **— Martin Lercher**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Homeostasis Makes Complex Systems Stable by Martin Lercher|Homeostasis Makes Complex Systems Stable by Martin Lercher]] > “The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than blueprints. Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species defined by natural selection.” > **— Steven Pinker**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Natural Selection Constrains the Trajectories of Human Design by Steven Pinker|Natural Selection Constrains the Trajectories of Human Design by Steven Pinker]] > “Our ability to prioritize and process the news is in an autocatalytic, positive feedback loop in which we extend our brain both biologically and electronically. Surgery could extend our brain capacity from 1.2 kg to 50 kg (routine head loads of the Sherpas of Nepal). The rate of growth of neural systems could be as fast as the doubling time of human cells (about one day) with differentiation from generic stem cells to complex neural nets recently engineered to occur in four days.” > **— George Church**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Nootropic Neural News by George Church|Nootropic Neural News by George Church]] > “The only solution to this growing problem, it seems, is the redistribution of the wealth concentrating within a tiny elite using instruments such as aggressive progressive taxation (such as exists in some European countries that show a much better distribution of wealth), but the difficulty here is the obvious one that political policymaking is itself greatly affected by the level of inequality. This vicious positive-feedback loop makes things even worse. It is clearly the case now in the United States that not only can the rich hugely influence government policy directly but also that elite forces shape public opinion and affect election outcomes with large-scale propaganda efforts through media they own or control. This double-edged sword attacks and shreds democracy itself.” > **— S. Abbas Raza**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/R G Increasing Inequality of Wealth and Income Is a Runaway Process by S. Abbas Raza|R G Increasing Inequality of Wealth and Income Is a Runaway Process by S. Abbas Raza]] > “I expect that scientific productivity will always be very non-uniformly distributed, with disproportionate contributions from a small number of remarkable people, but the sample size for finding and fostering those people can be improved by a few billion or so. There's a grand feedback loop ready to be closed, between the content and organization of scientific invention. Many of today's most compelling new questions are still tackled with old institutional models; it's ironic that religion has had its Reformation but that the role of a research university would be recognizable to a medieval monk. The future that I'm optimistic about is one in which the creation as well as consumption of scientific knowledge is potentially accessible to anyone.” > **— Neil Gershenfeld**, *2007, Edge Annual Question, “What Are You Optimistic About?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/Science Can Close the Feedback Loop Between Ideas and Invention by Neil Gershenfeld|Science Can Close the Feedback Loop Between Ideas and Invention by Neil Gershenfeld]] > “By the sixties, cyberneticians were using models of negative feedback originally developed for the steam engine, and greatly expanded upon during the war of the forties for controlling the aiming of guns, to try develop models for the brain. But these soon ran out of steam, so to speak, and were supplanted in the general consciousness by metaphors of the brain as a digital computer. One started to hear claims of the brain as the hardware, and the mind as the software, a model that really did not end up helping our understanding of either the brain or the mind very much at all. Throughout the later parts of the twentieth century the brain became a massively parallel digital supercomputer, and now one can find claims that the brain and the world wide web are similar in how they work with webpages and neurons playing similar roles, while hyperlinks and synapses map to each other.” > **— Rodney A. Brooks**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/The Computational Metaphor Distorts How We Understand the Brain by Rodney A. Brooks|The Computational Metaphor Distorts How We Understand the Brain by Rodney A. Brooks]]