#ashbyslaw — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ashbyslaw, aggregated by home.social.
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Most fields have only a few laws.
I've been diving into #StaffordBeer over the past few days, #cybernetics guru of the 1970s-90s. His concepts of #AshbysLaw of #RequisiteVariety, and of #ViableSystemsModel get toward this. Notably, a model should be as simple as possible, but no simpler (Einstein).
An overly complex model invites #overfitting
Breakthroughs in domains occur where an accumulation of many complex rules can be discarded for a small set of simpler ones. Physics: Newton on gravity, motion, and optics. Chemistry: Mendeleev on chemical elements (valance electrons and atomic masses), Biology: Darwin and evolution (and genetics and DNA). Geology: Wegener and plate tectonics. Information; Shannon. Computer science: Turing & Church.
The social sciences have been approached repeatedly by their core truth but to date have rejected it.
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