#Control theory

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

The Unaccountability Machine

Information Theory and The Machine of the Economy

"things went off the rails starting in about 1970 when everyone decided that the way they were going to deal with complexity was basically to ignore it and to assume that the free market would solve all the problems because people you know from Hayek onwards in the economics profession have always regarded the market as being a magic all-purpose computer..."

"it's really weird that a profession that's based on the idea that there's no such thing as a free lunch is always so happy to help itself to an informational version of exactly the same that thing ... that the market is this giant information processing and decision making machine"

"the great tragedy of our friend Hayek is that he was thinking in a very sophisticated way about information in the economy but he was doing it in the 1920s and 30s and the concept of information Theory did not exist then"

"you know all of Hayek's works on information in the economy were before Alan Turing they were before Kurt Godel... they were before Shannon you know the concept of information was not on a sound kind of rigorous mathematic basis when he was doing these things"

"unfortunately all the economists who came after Hayek presumed that information in the economy was a solved problem. It was a done deal. " "It was the Socialist calculation problem everything that was interesting to say about it had been said in 1928 and so they never really got to grips with the idea that information is a quantity and as equally as important as balancing supply and demand is the ability to balance the information generated by the environment."

"the kind of chaos and variety and variability you know of the world with the capacity of the system that's meant to be regulating and managing that environment to process it because if those if your information balance sheet isn't balancing then the system has become unregulated and then not only is it going to go out of control but also because it's unregulated you cannot assume that your actions to try to control it are going to push it back to a steady state"

"it's quite often the case that you'll be pushing it out of equilibrium and you'll be causing you know what they call what you'd recognize as oscillation if it happened in an engineering framework because you're working on a broken model of reality..."

"and you know that's kind of my diagnosis of a lot of the state that we've got to which is that we're just working on a broken or insufficient model of reality and as a result very often we're making policy interventions that are just pushing things further away from our desired State without us really knowing that we're doing that" "The way in which the economics profession ignored most of the work done in information theory is striking. It ignored its own traditions relating to uncertainty and decision-making, instead ploughing ahead with a frighteningly simplistic view of the world in which everything could be reduced to a single goal of shareholder value maximisation."

- Dan Davies - The Unaccountability Machine

[juh-wasnt-deactivated19691231]

is it time to RE this system identification suite to figure out the important bits and make them run in real time? probably not but who knows

[gudamor]

Just tell her it's

[wanderrealms]

Part of me is disappointed that Control Theory is about using feedback loops to prevent disruptions to manufacturing processes and not mind control.

Not mind controlling other people, that would be rude. I'd like to control my mind and make it stop opening Tumblr.

[rtw4e]

“The third party could be a paying sponsor that desires to persuade a user to buy a product or service, or to believe a piece of propaganda, ideology, or misinformation.”

[chickadeeee]

parents: what were you doing out all night?

me: learning about control theory 👁️👄👁️

[moonpaw]

save me deltarune save me

[realfruittaste]

“I think about that night, all the time. The night it came for you”

NOT, the night it took you.

NOT, the night you went missing.

THE NIGHT IT CAME FOR YOU!

Oh, I love being right. Vecna/the mind flayer targeted Will specifically.

Also, I think Will yelling “run” was definitely because vecna/the mind flayer taking over… (he's getting possessed, losing control) they have to run from will here. And I just know that this is going to drive Joyce and Mike insane because they'll refuse to give up on Will.

[clumsypuppy]

@heropartnerweek 2025 day 3 - recovery

dialga revived neptune using the last minutes before he disappears. because of this, he's sustaining the injuries from the fight when he reunites with marmalade.

[bixels]

As cameras becomes more normalized (Sarah Bernhardt encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use cameras because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by manufacturing companies. I paint not because I want a painting but because I love the process of painting. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

if i have to explain to you that using a camera to take a picture is not the same as using generative ai to generate an image then you are a fucking moron.

[sajdd]

why kris is going to lose their hand

so ive seen people talk about all the foreshadowing about kris potentially losing their hand such as:

[image link credit]

and for quite a while i was wondering WHY they would possibly lose their hand. toby wouldn't do it for no reason just to add #angst

and then it hit me.

the only way for kris to remove their soul is by using their hands. every single cutscene we've seen where they take the soul out has them violently digging into themselves and tearing it out. and we can see in the prophecy image that there is the soul and two hands. highlighting the only parts the prophecy deems important.

i think a potential reason for kris losing their hands is because someone would want to stop them from taking their soul out so they cant regain their autonomy and control. as to why or who would want to stop kris from doing this is extremely unclear to me (maybe someone like gaster if he is running this whole weird experiment on it??? idk) - but this is one of the only reasons i think that would make sense. you could argue that yes they technically could still take it out with their other hand but i dont think theyd want to risk losing BOTH hands in such a situation and it would at least prevent them taking it out for the time being

the other option ive thought about is actually that they remove it THEMSELVES in act of desperation or defiance against the player. this could potentially happen in good/neutral route but i think this would actually be much more appropriate for the weird route. kris already has a history of self-harm in relation to acting out against the player, and i can see them doing something so drastic in the weird route so that that player cant use their body, their hands, to hurt anyone they love anymore.

so that we don't have another repeat of this.

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

Time for some more Stafford Beer posting!

Today, the Viable Systems Model and the differences between reductionist and cybernetic paradigms.

[elliesgaymachete]

do you think they first met when agatha was supposed to be executed? that rio came to collect the dead and found her, sent to die by her own mother, weeping and terrified, because she lost control of her powers. but because rio is death, maybe she was the first person who wasn’t afraid of her

[novelconcepts]

Obviously next week could prove this all dead-wrong, but I don’t think the trial’s quite over. I don’t believe the end of that episode actually took place, because I’m pretty sure we’re still firmly in the “punish Agatha” phase. Rio’s suddenly gone. Alice seems to be dead by Agatha’s hand, and no one—including Teen, who has always been on her side—seems primed to believe she was out of control. The others have been sucked beneath the power of the surrogate son who not only just told Agatha to fuck off, but went full-Wanda to do it. It just all seems too tailored to cut up any of the character progress Agatha’s made on the Road thus far. Getting harassed by her ghost mother and hearing her son’s voice don’t feel like a complete tear-down. This does. It feels like more trial.

[mistressemmedi]

Penalties decided after the race? So they can decide the final result that's more convenient for them for the sake of entertainment and the WDC? Alrighty then.

[gudamor]

Could monitor the rate of change in the controller output compared to the point at which the control response saturates, e.g., a control valve is needing to open more and more, and the current position plus (rate of change times some time factor) indicates that the valve will soon be >90% open->generate an alarm.

Of course, "we added an alarm" has its own issues

In the event, the pilots were likely distracted trying to determine whether the fuel transfer was working, and did not notice that the autopilot was having to apply more and more right aileron to counter the left rudder trim and keep the plane on course. The displacement of their control columns would have slowly become larger, but this would have been harder to notice in the dark. For the pilots, the first sign of trouble was the plane abruptly departing controlled flight.

this seems like such a common and pernicious trigger for disaster: an automated system (or sometimes a person!) silently and invisibly compensating for a growing problem right up until the point that it becomes impossible to manage, then bowing out and dumping it in the laps of people totally unprepared to deal with it as they weren't even aware that it was happening.

and that's merely a more advanced version of a similar pattern of disaster, where control is manual with a warning system that activates when important parameters are exceeded, but again only once they are exceeded: there is no advance indication even if you are clearly on a trajectory that will exceed them.

for example a pilot making a controlled descent into terrain may remain ignorant of that fact until they are startled by a "TERRAIN, PULL UP!" warning that in the worst case triggers too late for them to react appropriately; similarly with "BANK ANGLE" and many other warnings that the aircraft state has been compromised.

obviously the solution can't be to make the system more restrictive and have warnings go off on a hair trigger any time anyone does anything at all, that would make them useless! what you want is to do a better job of accurately conveying the current situation to pilots as it develops and, ideally, confirming that it matches their understanding of how things should be.

but how to do this, when people are so easily distracted, confused, or labouring under misconceptions of how things work?