Talk:Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Making a start
I've made a start on this, and will be adding to it on a regular basis. I'm amazed that there hasn't already been anything on this book which is one of the most influential publications of the 20th century DaveApter (talk) 09:03, 25 September 2013 (UTC)


 * There is no information in this article to allow it to stand alone for the time being. I suggest you work on a full draft in userspace and then move the finished product over the redirect to Cybernetics. If there is a technical reason why the move cannot take place, ask for admin help.
 * Even though you noted it to be a stub article we still need citations and a full assertion of notability within the article, so it is safest to have it redirected for now rather than deleted, and to work in peace and quiet until it is ready to be released into the wild. Fiddle   Faddle  09:23, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comment, but it occurs to me as a bit premature a mere 20 minutes after the article was created, and I would suggest that there are plenty of stub articles with less content than this many of them on far less notable topics. There is no serious doubt about the importance of the subject, and I "released it into the wild" to give other editors in addition to myself the opportunity to improve it.  As to the suggestion that I move a more fully worked out version of the article to the redirect to Cybernetics, this seems to me to miss the point - I would have thought it obvious that both Cybernetics, the discipline and Cybernetics, the book fully deserve their respective articles here. DaveApter (talk) 09:42, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I am not going to revert any reversion of my redirect, if you choose to do so. My action was to seek to protect the page from deletion rather than to hamper your work. As it stood it appeared to me to be a prime candidate for speedy deletion, an action which you would have found less helpful still. I think it needed more flesh prior to release, but my opinion os one editor's opinion. Yours is as valid as is mine. Fiddle   Faddle  09:46, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you - I will undo your redirect, especially as it has created the slightly absurd situation where two of the four lines on the disabiguation page point to the same article! I do have a copy saved in my sandbox, should your prediction of a speedy delete turn out to be justified. DaveApter (talk) 10:07, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Go to it with a will. Most importantly, get some citations in. This act is the most likely to prevent nomination for deletion. Fiddle   Faddle  10:32, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Too strong emphasis
The article currently attributes the development of cybernetics to N.Wiener who is without a doubt an important thinker and a prominent technical member of the community as a mathematician as he was in other fields. However he has not laid any foundations of the field as described in the article. 1948 for example is around the time when control and comms were almost matured as a technical field. We had Sputnik on 1957 in orbit, mind you. So the article maybe meant it philosophically in some sense. However, Claude Shannon's contributions on information theory laid more foundation in that sense anyways. In any case I think the claims should be straightened towards a watered down and more factual versions. The book is inspiring for sure indeed but not that much as advertised. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.249.187.103 (talk) 11:19, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * By all means make some edits, or raise suggestions on this page. DaveApter (talk) 12:03, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Origins
The following has been edited out from the main cybernetics page, as its too detailed for there. But it might be interesting here:

"In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy organized by the Bourbaki and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt. During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics, coined to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms", into his scientific theory: it was popularized through his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine."

Hinterlander1 (talk) 08:56, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It is interesting and worth including if you have a reliable source for this story.RegentsPark (comment) 12:59, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid I don't, it was unsourced in the cybernetics article. Perhaps 'Dark Hero' would cover it, but I don't have a copy to hand. Hinterlander1 (talk) 13:07, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
 * No worries. I'll see if I can dig something up. RegentsPark (comment) 14:00, 24 April 2023 (UTC)