Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medicine is a science of control and should, one might imagine, be a subject that is particularly open to cybernetic investigation and enlightenment, for cybernetics, according to the subtitle in Wiener’s (1948) eponymous book, is concerned, at its heart, with control and communication. In contrast, I have reported, on several occasions, on cases that originate in the cybernetic literature and with the grand old men (yes, I’m afraid, men) of cybernetics, who have discussed systems that are in essence uncontrollable. And there is, in my opinion, a medical predicament that is best dealt with not by controlling it but by giving up all attempts at control—which is the new element I introduce in this paper. I will recapitulate the argument about the uncontrollable here (before discussing the medical condition), for it is powerful and interesting, and perhaps not as well known as it should be, giving, as it does a tremendous sense of scale. I have explored it more fully in “A (Cybernetic) Musing: Variety and Creativity ” (Glanville, R 1998), a paper published in Cybernetics and Human Knowing, an associated journal of the ASC, where the officially published version of this paper may also be found. 2 The reason to recapitulate is firstly to help those who are not familiar with the argument (whether made by earlier scholars, or with the twist that I add); secondly, the hope that a restatement, specially a brief one, will bring some greater clarity and terseness that may make the argument more memorable to those who have already read it in more extended form; and thirdly to more accurately reflect the keynote I delivered at the ASC meeting in Toronto, August 2004 (the slides of which are reproduced—without animations—on the ASC web site)!
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".