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This whole topic really makes me want to re-read all my Project Cybersyn stuff, particularly~Cybernetic Revolutionaries, although it is somewhat didactic. I believe I first heard about it on these forums. It was misunderstood as a way of centrally managing the economy from Santiago, but really the purpose was to facilitate better working of the economy in a kind of biological structure, where the head office would only deal with emergencies that can't be handled at lower levels. Unfortunately, its implementation was doomed because for it to work you had to have buy-in all the way from the factory worker up to senior management, and class antagonism even between workers and the engineers training them in the factory-level equipment was just too large. The one real achievement (at least as far as the Allende administration is concerned) of the program was the use of Telex machines to alleviate the effects of the 1972 transport strike. (The wikipedia description fails to mention these facts, but they do appear in Cybernetic Revolutionaries, and I think in Beer's account in his Brain of the Firm, one of the main books in which he proposed his Viable System Model for business/government/social distributed regulation and control.) The story of Project Cybersyn is very interesting in how it interacts with what the UP were trying to do, and how the failure reflects problems with implementing computational solutions to social problems. A book about a similar attempt in the Soviet Union under Khruschev is From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, again, recommended on these forums. A more whimsical account can be found in Red Plenty, a fairy tale with citations and notes of more or less the same era.
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Jul 25, 2014 04:48
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wateroverfire posted:Cybersyn was doomed because in order to be embraced by the Chilean bureaucracy every step of every calculation would have to be printed out in triplicate, taken by hand to the ministry to be stamped/validated, then returned by hand to the appropriate official's desk where it would sit for weeks before being punted to the next official in the process. =(
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Jul 25, 2014 17:07
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wateroverfire posted:It was just a cynical comment based on my frustration dealing with Chilean bureaucracy. =) quote:More seriously, I think you would have a hard time implementing a Cybrsyn-like system in Chile even today. It's hard enough to find workers who have had exposure to and feel comfortable using database products like simple ERP systems. I can't imagine what it would have been like in the early 70's. That's separate from the mathematical intractability of the modeling problems. This came up a couple of times, I think, in the Marxism thread when some of the economists who post occasionally in D&D got involved. Well, the idea was that workers wouldn't need to learn anything complicated. I think it came down to basically "upvoting" or "downvoting" how they were doing, dealing with whatever they could themselves, and it only involving people higher in the hierarchy if things went horribly wrong; and each level at the hierarchy had a mostly tractable problem at their scale. It was tractable because the effort was distributed and recursive, and the idea wasn't to be optimal, just to respond better than without the right communications. On some level, he was trying to simply mirror and improve existing hierarchical structure that he'd found in the British military, and a variety of businesses as an operations researcher. I'm not going to lie, while cybernetics is really interesting for me, and I've read a lot about its history, and while I do have a background in computer science, I have not really researched this topic enough, other than to know that the whole "perfect market" thing is rubbish. But approximating NP-hard problems with polynomial-complexity algorithms is a an active field of research, and you don't really need to have an exact solution to have something that works better than the status quo. Beer's specific solution may or may not have worked; but with all of these issues, it seems to me that questions of politics, power, and cultural inertia come in much earlier than any kind of computational limit. Anyway, beyond my particular fixation, you mentioned repeatedly that there is a dearth of good coverage in English. If you are up to it, I would personally appreciate rough translations if you think they would enlighten us. I can probably give rough translations of short pieces in French, if there is any such you could recommend, but I imagine Spanish-literate posters would be more relevant generally.
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Jul 25, 2014 17:58
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wateroverfire posted:Oh my, yes. Chile is a very bureaucratic place and that expresses itself in some ridiculous ways sometimes. For instance, the following happened to someone I know:  quote:I don't know good french sources. When I come across interesting spanish sources I can link them and do some translating or at least paraphrasing. Are there topics you're in particular interested in? What do you think about Michelle Bachelet? Any good critiques of her current plans? Baronjutter posted:drat now I want to read about "cybernetics". I heard references to cybernetics reading about the soviet union but I was always like "they wanted to make cyborg super-soldier bureaucrats to run things????" It's been a while since I read it, but the ideas went like this: we want a planned economy, so we should use computer science/cybernetics/algorithms to plan it, hey hold on if we use linear optimization we find that we get "prices" like in capitalism, meaning it doesn't have to be centralized after all, then people get spooked, especially after Khrushchev gets deposed, and to it in a centralized manner anyway, but with paperwork and getting nowhere. Did that make sense? Probably better for another thread and for someone more knowledgeable than me, frankly. Anyway, it's the history of those kinds of plans which make me so wary of Marblebux, and other Eripsa software solutions to human problems. Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jul 25, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 21:20
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Por supuesto señor, I just need the diploma that shows you graduated 8th grade.
But..
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joepinetree posted:It was Nixon who spoke that line:  quote:Now, as far as original contributions go, here's one thing that generally doesn't get the attention it should: I don't think I knew about this at all! In case someone takes issue with Haslam, I found another source for this: The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976, by Paul E. Sigmund. It seems that this was a point of contention within UP, but that Allende's pro-plebiscite opinion prevailed shortly before the coup. Is this commonly known, at least in Chile?
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Jul 26, 2014 21:24
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joepinetree posted:I used Haslam because it was the easiest English source you can find. But the note he quotes there, for example, comes from Jose Toribio Merino Castro's own memoir. Merino was one of the leaders of the coup, for the record. Oh, that is damning.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:33
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wateroverfire posted:Working on this. Don't have a ton of time. quote:[Bachelet] is committed to education reforms that, partly because of the tax compromise and partly because the original tax proposal was total fantasy anyway, there is no way to pay for. Free higher education for all Chilean students would cost approximately 9 billion dollars, or about 3% of Chilean GDP. Her education minister had talked about buying all the hybrid public-private institutions and making them fully public. Depending on whose estimates you take on the value of those concerns the cost could be 5 billion or 17 billion. Either way the money isn't there. Education is a big sexy issue competing right now with issues like public health spending (very underfunded) and Chile's growing energy needs. When you get to the bigger piece, I would be interested in what competing proposals there are for education reform; and, well, to start with, what is perceived as being deficient in the status quo.
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Jul 28, 2014 18:17
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wateroverfire posted:On the topic of the "economic blockade", Paul Sigmund wrote an essay for the January edition of Foreign Affairs that investigates the question of Washington's roll in the disappearance of credit toward Chile by looking at the timing of credit decisions, notes from the senate hearings after the coup, corporate memos from ITT (AT&T) and interviews with sources at various foreign institutions. Whole article reproduced below because it's worth reading in full and because at FA you have to register (though it's free). This article did, indeed, come out in January; but this is January of 1974. Keep in mind that this is before the Church Committee, before a lot of the documents we've seen here were declassified, etc. It is much easier now to ascribe motive to certain actors, and it was, indeed, malicious. For example, the statement "make the economy scream" seems pretty indicative of motive of a very important actor.
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Jul 30, 2014 15:56
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wateroverfire posted:I mean, let me ask the question in another way. There's a record of how economic and political crisis were going down in Chile, of how businesses were being expropriated, of how Chile burned through its forex and racked up debts that it then walked away from. There's a record of what financing decisions were on the table and when they were made, their magnitudes, and ostensibly their motivations. How much of that should we discount based on later documents, and which documents and why? This article includes a lot of arguments that hinge on testimony from members of the Nixon Administration. At the time the level of mendacity of that administration was not widely known. I would be a lot more interested in seeing something that came out after the Nixon Tapes had been published. For example, from a collection about Chile: --- 022-006 3/23/72 P, RLZ clip1 (1.1m; 1:07) The Administration was forced into damage-control mode following revelations of collusion between the CIA and International Telephone & Telegraph (IT&T) Company to prevent the election of Allende in 1970.[xiii] Over the course of brief telephone conversation with Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, Nixon confirmed that Ambassador Korry “had received instructions to do anything short of a Dominican-type [intervention].”[xiv] Korry’s great sin, in Nixon’s mind, was that, “he just failed, the son-of-a-bitch. That’s his main problem; he should have kept Allende from getting in.” --- So, for example the section where this FA articles says: 'When questioned by the Senators, Charles Meyer, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs at the time, insisted that U.S. policy had been strict nonintervention and described the Broe conversations as merely an exploration of "the possibility or a series of possibilities which might have been inputs to changed policy but were not." The only contrary evidence in the papers and hearings is a report on October 15 to the ITT Washington office by its Chilean representative that the American ambassador, Edward Korry, had indicated that he was reducing the amount of U.S. aid "already in the pipeline" as much as he could. The report added: "The ambassador said that he had difficulty in convincing Washington of the need to cut off every possible assistance to Chile."' is an example of lies by the Nixon administration and at least one company closely involved with it, which would not be easy to ascertain at the time. They paint a false picture of Amb. Korry as a maverick working his own agenda, and ITT acting on their interests and getting rebuffed by a responsible Executive. This is why the tapes are essential. There is no reason to ignore the fact that we have so much more relevant information than anyone outside the government would in 1974.
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Jul 30, 2014 17:41
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