(2023-08-30) Davies The Statistical Heart Of The System

Dan Davies: the statistical heart of the system. This is now an occasional series of pieces related to what did and didn’t go on in Allende’s Chile when Stafford Beer was involved in the big experiment in running an economy on cybernetic principles. One thing I’ve tried to emphasise so far is that CYBERSYN really, really wasn’t a “planned economy”.

But anyway, Soviet cybernetics tended to be based on big linear programming models, as described in Francis Spufford’s book “Red Plenty”. Given the computing power of the day, these models absolutely weren’t up to the task

Quite interestingly, some people today (like Paul Cockshott) think that poor old Kantorovich might not have been given a fair go, and that fully automated democratic planning could be possible today. Partly because of much faster computers, but mainly because of better algorithms

since companies the size of WalMart do in fact run computer models to forecast demand and optimise supply, I don’t think it can be ruled out.

But in any case, the piece of computer software that Stafford Beer commissioned for Chile (Cyberstride) was not at all like that. It was basically a Bayesian classifier

Based on this classification, it would raise flags with the basic semantic content “something’s up at t’ mill”, for someone to investigate more fully. (Note here that the Chilean system was trying to respect the problem – rather than trying to use the data itself to guess what was happening, it would trigger analysis by a person or team who would start by establishing ground truth, and which had a better chance of delivering sufficient bandwidth to handle the complexity of what would happen).

Cyberstride was one component of the Chilean economic management project –

The other thing which Beer wanted to be designed into Cyberstride is that it was meant to be usable at any level of management

the idea of using data to throw up exceptions and focus management effort wasn’t intrinsically central – it was meant to be used as the fundamental method at every level of the economy.