Why/use: I knew little of Chinese history of science (broadly speaking, knowledge making and using). I am starting to read the history and the social arbitrariness of it all to get more grains, more unflat perspectives. https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/10/17/the-genealogy-of-chinese-cybernetics/ Notes regarding Qian Xuesen:
- His work exemplifies the military research industrial complex, which is partly why immigration x science talent is complicated even now. I also had to do security clearance for a particle physics project.
- He believes cybernetics is already applicable to aerospace, though it’s fairly conceptual - “how missiles were guided: a controller receives information about velocity and pitch, sends information to servomechanisms to make changes, and then receives updated information in a feedback loop.”
- I like how he made use of his house arrest time to work on a book called “Engineering Cybernetics” (1954).
- The term “subsumed” means: To place (any one cognition) under another as belonging to it; to include or contain something else.
- In 1956, he helped create a 12-year program for scientific development:
- The ideology behind it was a technological Marxist utopianism of the Twelve-year Plan and faith in the potential of central industrial planning.
- I wonder how technological Marxist utopianism differs from Silicon Valley’s effective accelerationism of “progress”? (beyond the surface)
- “Advisory” refers to experts that suggest plans - something still happening now, including the use of graphic symbolism.
- The program focused on technology-driven science: ballistic missiles, computers, semiconductor technology, wireless control systems, automation, and atomic energy.
- During the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1958, Khrushchev paused nuclear support when Mao potentially considered dropping nuclear weapons on Taiwan.
- In 1966, there was a test site in Xinjiang. I wonder about any aftermath, similar to what the US experienced in the Bikini Islands. Regarding the Great Leap Forward:
- It involved mass mobilization for industrial progress and optimization of agricultural production based on Trofim Lysenko’s genetic theories, leading to animal husbandry experiments.
- Why didn’t it work? Cadres demanded unfeasible quotas, and there was chronic soil infertility.
- They developed “deep plowing” techniques.
- Qian wrote a 1958 prospective titled “Looking ahead ten years - after the agricultural development outline is realized,” which predicted artificial weather modification, industrial processes introduced to farming, biomass fuel solving energy shortages, a healthier diet via advances in algae farming, and a systemic understanding of solar energy boosting agricultural productivity.
- Why didn’t it work? Interestingly, while cybernetics was always central, couldn’t it have informed decentralization? Or was it just too abstract to be useful? “Control over agricultural policy was ceded to the pragmatists led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Their agricultural policy was one of decentralization, with farmers allowed to do what they liked once state quotas were filled—a policy not suited to central planning, cybernetic or otherwise.”
- The pragmatists were eventually kicked out. What happened after? “The pragmatists were tarred as ‘right-deviationists.’ Experimentation was out of fashion.” I have lingering questions.
- I wonder why the operations didn’t work for factories and farms. “Mathematician Hua Luogeng—who had attended lectures by Norbert Wiener when he visited Tsinghua in 1936—tried to introduce critical path organizational techniques to factories and farms as part of a short-lived Science of Operations Research and Linear Programming Movement.”
- What made it so that information wasn’t cascading properly? “From his place at the center, the political structure appeared to have a level of organization and capacity that simply did not play out in the rest of the country.”
- What happened with protests, wages, opinions? “Armed struggle broke out between technicians and scientists at the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, which served as the headquarters of the ballistic missile program.”
- Qian also wanted to do “updates” like “developments since 1954 in information theory, control theory, systems theory, operations research, and management science” (socialist cybernetics - colored and explicit - a comprehensive method to chart and optimize the relationship of elements within a complex system, once again for agricultural and industrial production at the national scale - did he learn from previous failures?) In 1979, Deng held a National Conference on Science that promoted scientism:
- Ideologically, the Gang of Four believed that “development of productive forces—labor, the machinery of production, and human expertise—was not desirable without changing the social structure created by production itself.” (Basically, you have to have a politically correct structure, not just optimal production.)
- Deng believed that “productive forces, including scientific inquiry and technological progress, were what drove society. The productive forces could be developed without concern about the relations of production, and scientific progress could be liberated from the constraints of ideology.” (Basically, separation from politics - a new theory.) How did they keep pace with foreign peers?
- There was a limitation: their research was restricted to the military and the space program, while Soviet, American, and British cyberneticists had been called on to apply their ideas to economic planning and organizational management.
- Was this because it was less urgent?