“In this very special form, feedback became part of the jargon of Group Dynamics, which has also assumed many of the characteristics of a cult in the efforts made to conserve some of the rigor of procedure with which Kurt Lewin and the experimentalist, Alex Bavelas, had attempted to imbue it. In this case, far from serving as a catalyzing, high-level theoretical tool, the term feedback has become a jargon-catchall for any kind of report back to government, management, the subjects of an experiment, subjects during an experiment, and so on. Stripped of its intellectual potential, the term knocks about the corridors of Unesco and for the most part those who use it have no idea that this bit of enjoined, Group Dynamic-recommended behavior is in any way related to the forbidding cross-disciplinary integration known as cybernetics.”

— Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 273

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Margaret Mead 133

American anthropologist 1901–1978

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“In 1946, a Macy Foundation interdisciplinary conference was organized to use the model provided by "feedback systems," honorifically referred to in earlier conferences as "teleological mechanisms," and later as "cybernetics," with the expectation that this model would provide a group of sciences with useful mathematical tools and, simultaneously, would serve as a form of cross-disciplinary communication. Out of the deliberations of this group came a whole series of fruitful developments of a very high order. Kurt Lewin (who died in 1947) took away from the first meeting the term "feedback". He suggested ways in which group processes, which he and his students were studying in a highly disciplined, rigorous way, could be improved by a "feedback process," as when, for example, a group was periodically given a report on the success or failure of its particular operations.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 272-273

“The town is divided into various groups, which form so many little states, each with its own laws and customs, its jargon and its jokes.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Aphorism 4
Les Caractères (1688), De la ville
Context: The town is divided into various groups, which form so many little states, each with its own laws and customs, its jargon and its jokes. While the association holds and the fashion lasts, they admit nothing well said or well done except by one of themselves, and they are incapable of appeciating anything from another source, to the point of despising those who are not initiated into their mysteries.

“While studying antiaircraft fire control, Wiener may have conceived the idea of considering the operator as part of the steering mechanism and of applying to him such notions as feedback and stability, which had been devised for mechanical systems and electrical circuits. No doubt this kind of analogy had been operative in Wiener’s mathematical work from the beginning and sometimes had even been productive. As time passed, such flashes of insight were more consciously put to use in a sort of biological research for which Wiener consulted all kinds of people, except mathematicians, whether or not they had anything to do with it. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) is a rather eloquent report of these abortive attempts, in the sense that it shows there is not much to be reported. The value and influence of Cybernetics, and other publications of this kind, should not, however, be belittled. It has contributed to popularizing a way of thinking in communication theory terms, such as feedback, information, control, input, output, stability, homeostasis, prediction, and filtering. On the other hand, it also has contributed to spreading mistaken ideas of what mathematics really means”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Norbert Wiener (2008)

“In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Urban dynamics (1969), p. 9

“Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve. We try to pay a lot of attention to this by a combination of very rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback. But if you’re serving 1.2 billion people, it’s very hard.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

nytimes.com http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/can-facebook-innovate-a-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

“The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

“Nature has only a limited number of procedures at her disposal and that the kinds of procedure which Nature uses at one level of reality are bound to reappear at different levels.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 1 : The Meeting of Myth and Science

“The Founders also recognized, I think necessarily and certainly at the time, that people with Government service who had served in the legislative branch or served in the executive branch would become judges--Chief Justice Marshall, for example--would have backgrounds that involved Government service or political service. But they also had confidence in the ability of people in our system, once they became judges and put on the black robes, to decide cases fairly and impartially. And that's the way that system has worked for more than two centuries. And I know there has been some discussion about that, but that's the way the system has worked in terms of deciding cases fairly and impartially and not based on political of personal views.”

Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination OF Brett M. Kavanaugh to be Ciruit Judge for the District of Columbia Circuit https://www.congress.gov/108/chrg/shrg24853/CHRG-108shrg24853.htm (April 27, 2004)

“Conservatives were planning before the word entered the vocabulary of political jargon.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

About the Industrial Charter (Conservative Political Centre, 1947), pp. 6-7.

“In concept a feedback system is a closed system. Its dynamic behavior arises within its internal structure. Any action which is essential to the behavior of the mode being investigated must be included inside the system boundary.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Principles of Systems (1968), p. 4-1 as cited in: Richardson, George P. " Reflections on the foundations of system dynamics http://obssr.od.nih.gov/issh/2012/files/Richardson%202011.pdf." System Dynamics Review 27.3 (2011): 219-243.

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Margaret Mead 133

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