Re: Some guys in a white van tried to sell me speakers today.

common sense were utterly insufficient as a guide to
* management. Mathematical precision was necessary, and operations
* research promised to supply that precision. [snip]
*
* It had not jumped from the management of particular, limited areas of
* warfare to the structuring of entire campaigns and wars. Operations
* research had not penetrated to the very marrow of conventional warfare,
* that is, not until an attempt was made in 1961 to revolutionize the idea
* of war. This was done by an industrialist named Robert McNamara, who had
* been president at Ford Motor Company.


Stafford Beer is a British cybernetician, and a 'research philosopher'.

In 1970, a Dr. Salvador Allende became president of Chile.

He was a democratically elected Marxist, with 37% of the vote.

Allende immediately embarked on a massive nationalization of
the banks and major companies/industries in Chile.

In 1971, Stafford Beer began a project for Allende
to put the Chilean economy under cybernetic control.

As far as I know, this is the only documented instance of someone
attempting this; deploying cybernetic controls nationwide.


* "Brain of the Firm", Stafford Beer, 1986, ISBN 0 471 27687 1
*
* All of this involved a massive and continuing exercise in (what I should
* call, in the original World War II sense) operational research. That is
* exactly what it was: research by highly qualified interdisciplinary teams,
* into operations, namely production companies, with the prospect of
* discovering models and sets of measures.
*
* We needed a group who understood the operational research techniques of
* data capture that were needed for project Cybersyn. As a Briton I knew
* whom I wanted --- they were a group of consultants within the London
* branch of the international firm of Arthur Anderson and Co.
*
* Project Cybercyn objective: To install a preliminary s


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