Tag: punch-and-judy

Ch 1 — The Mapping We Teach

Part I, Ch 1 argues that the anatomical shorthand circulating in our teaching has drifted from the assignments Beer actually wrote in Brain of the Firm.

Ch 10 — Six Components

Part II chapter auditing the 1981 Select Bibliography of Beer's Brain of the Firm to argue that the VSM's six components were each reached independently by other literatures.

Ch 11 — The Nesting: Simon, Koestler, Jaques

Part II chapter following the independent routes to the nesting of systems within systems and finding that none delivered a ruler for where one level ends and the next begins.

Ch 12 — The Variety Logic: Galbraith

Part II chapter crediting Galbraith's independent rederivation of variety logic from Boeing field data and reading Friston's free-energy principle as Beer's ambition arriving with mathematics he never had.

Ch 13 — The Autonomy Design

Part II chapter setting the sociotechnical design rule and sociocracy's double link beside Beer's principle of autonomy, and finding that the setting of autonomy is claimed computable but never computed.

Ch 14 — The Evidence: Ostrom

Part II chapter reading Ostrom's commons program as a method the VSM never built, and reporting that her principle closest to recursion is the one her own literature supports least.

Ch 15 — The Thirty-Year Experiment

Part II chapter reading holonic manufacturing as a long, well-documented, largely negative experiment on architectures shaped like the VSM that organizational cybernetics never engaged.

Ch 16 — The Objections That Land

Part II chapter stating the three published objections that land — Ulrich, Hayek and Cooper — and finding them to be one wound about boundaries seen from three directions.

Ch 17 — The Market Test

Part III chapter arguing that the VSM community's strongest public warrant, that no failed case has ever been found, describes how the field records its work rather than the model itself.

Ch 18 — The Test That Could Not Lose

Part III chapter reading the two most recent quantitative tests of the VSM and arguing that neither was designed so that a negative result could cost the model its central claim.

Ch 19 — No Failure Condition

Part III chapter reading the host discipline's official self-description, cybernetics as a way of thinking rather than a body of facts, and asking what a way of thinking can be charged with.

Ch 2 — System Four Is Not a Pair of Eyes

Part I, Ch 2 argues that our teaching reduced System Four to environmental scanning, a pair of eyes, where Beer specified a modelling and anticipation capacity.

Ch 20 — Usefulness Instead of Truth

Part III chapter arguing that the tradition kept Beer's sentence that a model is more or less useful and dropped the prediction test he attached to it, while neighbours who reached the same sentence built test batteries.

Ch 21 — The Category Error as Shelter

Part III chapter arguing that the claim that testing the model is a category error is a shelter this tradition never declared, set beside two founders who paired an immunity with an exposure in print.

Ch 22 — The Enemies We Actually Have

Part III chapter sorting the VSM's supposed adversaries by what each costs and finding that the one that costs most is not a person but a silence.

Ch 23 — The Narrow Claim

Ch 23 of Punch and Judy v0.5.0 fixes the book's narrow claim for the VSM and names the four things that do not follow from it.

Ch 24 — Six Things Nothing Else Does

Ch 24 of Punch and Judy v0.5.0 tests whether the VSM assembly, as distinct from its parts, does anything nothing else does, stating each of six credits with its cost.

Ch 25 — The Transducer

Ch 25 of Punch and Judy v0.5.0 places regulatory loss at the crossing of a boundary rather than in the channel, and states a coding study as its cheapest test.

Ch 26 — Freedom as a Quantity

Ch 26 of Punch and Judy v0.5.0 recovers Beer's freedom as a quantity commensurable with the diagnosis, and traces how the tradition shelved it.

Ch 27 — What Might Replace the VSM

Ch 27 of Punch and Judy v0.5.0 hands each job the VSM claims to whoever does it better, then states the five-item residue that has no other home.

Ch 28 — What Would Count Against It?

Chapter 28 of Punch and Judy converts the book's charges into registered conditions of disconfirmation, claim by claim, with the smallest fair test named for each.

Ch 29 — The Two Cheapest Decisive Experiments

Chapter 29 of Punch and Judy proposes two decisive experiments and a cheaper re-analysis of existing data, none of them yet run.

Ch 3 — The Law We Quote

Part I, Ch 3 argues that the law we quote under Ashby's name is Beer's compression, and that the good regulator theorem does not prove what we cite it for.

Ch 30 — The Bill

Chapter 30 of Punch and Judy prices the research program in cost bands, names who could run each item, and argues for a maintained live register instead of a printed list.

Ch 4 — Channels Without Owners

Part I, Ch 4 argues that Beer specified the channels between recursion levels as mechanisms and never as institutions with owners the regulated could name.

Ch 5 — The Ladder Without a Ruler

Part I, Ch 5 argues that Beer's criterion for identifying recursion levels, which he called precise, resolves under pressure to a judgment call with no ruler.

Ch 6 — The Brain in the Vat

Part I, Ch 6 argues that the notation is drawn as a nervous system stopped at the neck, leaving out by design the people who staff it and the interpretation Beer names in principle.

Ch 7 — A Machine That Never Became One

Part I, Ch 7 argues that the model describes a viable system already assembled and has no account of becoming, or of a change of kind.

Ch 8 — The Loop That Stayed an Intention

Part I, Ch 8 argues that Project Cybersyn's participation loop was documented as intention and procedure and never built as a channel with standing the workers could use.

Ch 9 — Why None of This Ever Cost Us Anything

Part I, Ch 9 asks why none of the eight defects has ever cost the model anything, and answers that its empirical core is stated so that nothing can count against it.

Coda: Judy

The coda of Punch and Judy: a cartel can be viable, the model is viable for someone, and the standing test asks whose room to act an intervention was for.

Part I — Inside the model

Part I of the Punch and Judy stress test — the model we did not read — with its nine chapter pages. Draft, not canon.

Part II — Outside the model

Part II of the Punch and Judy stress test — the people who found it without us — with its seven chapter pages. Draft, not canon.

Part III — False friends and enemies

Part III of the Punch and Judy stress test — false friends and enemies — with its six chapter pages. Draft, not canon.

Part IV — What we lose

Part IV of the Punch and Judy stress test — what we lose — with its five chapter pages. Draft, not canon.

Part V — What's at Risk in the VSM

Part V of the Punch and Judy stress test — what's at risk in the VSM — with its three chapter pages. Draft, not canon.

Punch and Judy

The Punch and Judy stress-test manuscript (v0.5.0) as ingested into this wiki — a chapter-by-chapter stress test of the Viable System Model by Krishan Mathis and Margeret Heath.

Punch and Judy — Contents

Punch and Judy — the second imported source set: a stress test for the Viable System Model (v0.5.0), part by part, with its thirty chapter pages and the coda. Draft, not project canon.

Punch and Judy — Overview

Punch and Judy — a stress test of the Viable System Model by two of its own practitioners: what the model says, what the tradition added, and what would count against it.