Invitation to Cybcom users to migrate to Club of Remy if you haven't done so

[Jason the Goodman]

Dear All,

Recent debates here about copyright issues and the possibility of Google shutting down this list prompted me to send this message to the current 138 members on this list.

Cybcom forum was initialized and managed by me as a Ph.D. student of Stuart Umpleby at George Washington University in 1993, as a successor of our internal computer conferencing system named Caucus running on a UNIX machine managed by me as well. Cybcom started as an IBM mainframe hosted Listserv, colleagues can freely signup. The first three months of Cybom was to discuss my manuscript "Introduction to Cybernetics", one chapter per week. Two years later I left GWU and Stuart (with another professor Phil Wirtz) managed Cybcom, supported by a number of assistants until the forum migrated to Google Groups platform in 2017. 

The Club of Remy group list started in early 2020 with more specific goals (discussing Important and Urgent Issues with knowledge of cybernetics and system thinking) than Cybcom (cybernetics related communications). Many of CoR's 160 members are also members of Cybcom.  Naturally, some CoR members used Cybcom to continue topic discussions after CoR video meetings. 

Previously we use CoR mailing list only for meeting reminders and call for discussants. Recently, CoR meeting schedules changed from intense weekly to more relaxed monthly, and some members suggested that we also open CoR mailing list for topic discussions. Therefore, here we have a chance to merge these two lists.

A good number of Cybcom users are already on the CoR list, if this includes you, you don't have to do anything.  This message is for the Cybcom list members who are not on the CoR list yet. If you would like to know more about CoR, or if Google really shuts down Cybcom as warned by Mike Lissack, then I invite you to join Club of Remy by sending me your name and your current email address, and even better a brief paragraph to introduce yourself. 

For more information about Club of Remy, please check URLs in my signature block below.

Best regards - Jason

------------------------------------

Jason Jixuan Hu, Ph.D.

Independent Research Scholar

Organizer: Club of REMY:  www.clubofremy.org 

General Partner: Wintop Group: www.wintopgroup.com 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJumBT3J15xhAoNs9CnrSVg/videos 

office: j...@wintopgroup.com

mobile: jasonth...@gmail.com

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[Michael Lissack]

Jason

Please be mindful of the same copyright issues.

Bernard had NO right to circulate the HvF book.

Paul to the best of my knowledge has NO right to host a freely download able copy of that book.

Your list (just like CYBCOM) has no right to host such copies, circulate such copies, nor post links thereto.

The issue here is copyright violations and intellectual property THEFT.

It must be avoided.

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[Stuart Umpleby]

Jason, thanks for providing this history of the cybcom list.  Thanks for managing the Club of Remy list.  And thanks to Joshua Madera for managing the cybcom list currently.

Stuart

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Michael,

You are right in principle, but in practice this may be a bit counterproductive. It seems to me tha Bernard apologized.

Furthermore: I learned in China that "To steal a book is an honorific offense."

 We should not wish to police one another.

Best,

Loet

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---

Loet Leydesdorff

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Visiting Professor, ISTIC, Beijing; Honorary Professor, SPRU, University of Sussex; http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en 

[Michael Lissack]

Loet

You are more generous about this than I.  I only saw an "I regret being caught."

I have no further tolerance for Bernard (and I suspect the reverse holds).

I think my appetite for this forum is ending as well.

It is time to move on.

Cliff and Bernard congrats you won

Michael Lissack 

14 Stratford Rd Marblehead MA 01945 phone 617-710-9565

http://lissack.com

Michael is the immediate past President of the American Society for Cybernetics (2014-2020), Executive Director Emeritus of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence and Professor of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, Shanghai.  Opinions expressed are my own and do not reflect the views of any of the institutions with which I have an affiliation.

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[Lucas Pawlik]

This is what I meant by "Not matter how far a donkey travels, it will never arrive as a horse" 

You can not understand consciousness if you see everything as a competition about winning and losing. The winner might take it all, but the possessor always becomes possessed. Consciousness cannot be understood in this way because it is not a thing that can be possessed. In the struggle for possessions, we lose our humanity because in trying to achieve the gain, we become blind to our transformation. We lose our consciousness and with it the possibility to understand what consciousness means at all. This problem is already dealt with in the Bible. "What does it profit a man to possess the world if he thereby loses his soul?"

Understanding the connection between goals and processes is what distinguishes digitalization and cybernetics. 

 

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[Bernard C E Scott]

This from someone who said he was not picking a fight. How sad ...

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[Jason the Goodman]

Dear Bernard, dear all:

After things (or the fight) cooling down, I would like to invite interested colleagues to reflect on this case of "conversation that terminates conversation", a good topic we had some discussions in Club of Remy sometime ago, triggered by the languaging behavior from another member of CoR as well. 

I can't help to note that Mike was in fact the president of ASC for (many) years, i.e., serving as the leader of the group. I am a lifetime member of ASC (and even a trustee), but interestingly I might also end up on Mike's "no respect list"(or no-email-contact-list) for reasons incomprehensible by me.  Now I'm aware that the list contains Cliff, Jaime, Bernard, and myself, perhaps more. 

I still appreciate many sharp and insightful points Mike made in our forum, especially I appreciate his concern that many of our academic attentions are detached from "the" reality for failed to present with languages of the audience. I share that concern as well.  But I'm very curious about who else is on Mike's list of "no respect" and more curious about how Mike defines that container and what makes him put us there?

After all, everyone here should be an epistemological constructivist and understand our slogan that "every individual constructs his/her reality." Theoretically, we should have much more tolerance towards each other than the average Joe and Jean. It would be nice if Mike would be willing to share with us how he generates his list and how come we got enrolled there?

But even more important if we could reflect on the validity/universality of the theory we preach, first applying to our own languaging. While I closely observe the two political parties and their follower groups, I've noted that one side has more conceptual containers or "labels" for the other side, with functions that effectively dividing people not uniting them. Bateson had taught us to pay attention to the actual effect of language/languaging, I would like to add "labels" and "labeling actions" to be more focused.

Thoughts?

Best regards - Jason

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[Bernard C E Scott]

Dear Jason,

I do not think I have anything to add to the topic 'conversations that end conversation'. As I say in my book, "Everyone has an agenda". Some of us aim to maintain comity whilst learning about others - "unity without uniformity", as Pask puts it. Some do not care about comity and end up sowing division.

As for ML, my perceptions were not just based on the recent exchanges. A few years ago, I spent five days in his company at an IFSR 'conversation' in Linz, Austria. He had convened a small group of cyberneticians who met together to carry out tasks. ML was the chair. Other groups of system thinkers were working in parallel. There were plenary session where groups reported back.

The IFSR provided a booklet of 10 pages or so to give guidance on how to conduct fruitful conversations. ML's first gesture was to say he was not even going to look at that guidance, let alone follow it. I looked at it. It seemed sound, very Paskian in flavour. I then witnessed 5 days of ML's behaviour. Much of it was appalling. I tried to befriend him for the sake of nurturing goodwill but my overtures were rejected. I assumed he regarded me as irrelevant. He seemed to be currying the favour of more influential ASC members who were also in the group.

Lest you think I am being paranoid or biased, I should say I have spent many years working in organisations and observing the internal 'politics'.

ML certainly has some gifts, as do most of us. The question is how do we use them. I was a bit shocked to find he had become the President of the ASC. I have read some of his articles and watched some of his presentations. I'm far from impressed. I see nothing new there. I still do not know what qualifies him to be a cybernetician, except, of course, his well-practiced manipulative behaviour.

I see no value in having further contact with him. I doubt you would get any straightforward answers from him. He seems to have an amoral approach when it comes to using 'facts' to support a case (think Donald Trump). His key skill, as I experienced it, is to set up double-binds. (I thank a friend - who wishes to remain anonymous - for that insight). I was in situations I couldn't easily exit; I was following accepted rules of etiquette. Meanwhile, I was being abused by an abuser who regularly broke those rules while denying that he was doing so. His interventions (trivial tropes about 'language' and so on) were supposedly for 'my benefit' but were designed to position himself as somehow superior. Why would he think that I, a scientist and cybernetician with a lifetime's interest in human communication, needed advice on how to communicate with a fellow scientist? When his tactic of sending a message to Anil Seth backfired, leaving ML with egg on his face, he immediately switched the topic to my 'crime' of violating copyright. (BTW< I was not copied into that message to Professor Seth. I only saw it when he included me in his reply. I presume ML wished to put me on the spot and embarrass me).

 

Finally, please recall, that, for health reasons,  I have stepped down from being involved in CoR conversations - as a presenter, at least. I am trying to live a quiet life :-))

Good luck with your projects!

Best wishes, 

Bernard

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Bernard (cc other colleagues),

Let us stop arguing ad hominem. Perhaps, Jason, you can moderate the list for a few weeks
 

. 

Some of the contributions are unacceptable. 

Best, 

Loet

Loet Leydesdorff

________________________________

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge" at

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-59951-5 (Open Access)

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030599508 (Hardcopy)

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

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[Michael Lissack]

I have left the list.

The honor code I adhere to says "I will not lie, cheat, nor steal and will not tolerate those who do."

This list is incommensurate with that code.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cybcom/emca52ddfc-7f35-4406-801c-5aace4d5cde2%40pc2014.

[Bernard C E Scott]

Yes, please, Loet. I agree.

I found myself in an intolerable position. Pathological contributors to conversations need to be called out or the whole forum suffers. I once spent 4 years trying to reason with someone whose underlying intent was to bring RC51 and its officers into disrepute. I do not enjoy this sort of encounter one bit. On the contrary, I find them stressful. 

Bernard

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[Jason the Goodman]

Dear Loet, don't worry, he said he left Cybcom. So we will have our (illusion of) peace back. I tried to communicate and tried to facilitate and my capacity is limited. This case shows how strong the fixed perceptions/judgments/closed logic are stopping what we call communication and mutual understanding. This is what's going in the city of Jerusalem as well as on all the surfaces of our planet.  Best - Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cybcom/emca52ddfc-7f35-4406-801c-5aace4d5cde2%40pc2014.

[Lucas Pawlik]

Dear Loet,

Dear Bernard,

I agree with you completely. That's why I've always written what I've written as a parable, in which it's about what form of cognition produces, which kind of observer through which processes.  Also, Jason mentioned an important point. The dangerous limitation of having to preserve and improve cybernetic theories in order for cybernetics to survive as a field.  This threatens to turn cybernetics into a mix of self-promotion and history lessons. We lose the originality, which made cybernetics special before it became its own discipline. It was precisely the modification and recombination of different scientific perspectives that was the virtue of the first generations of cyberneticists.  As Heinz in the Biological Computer Laboratory invited different people who had no place in their disciplines, cybernetics should be more a place of encounter, foregrounding how we can use science to guide collective action and strategies of communication. There should be more focus on doing exceptional science than on explaining to everyone why they need cybernetics.  

I had an interesting experience on this when I rewrote an article on the medical context of the Covid crisis because many new studies have come out.  The original article focused on physical inactivity has been published twice by Springer Verlag. The new article in which I showed the relationships between physical inactivity, obesity, depression, and suicide, and the problem that the relationships between these studies are not understood because each medical specialty focuses only on itself. Then suggested how to combine different fields to alleviate the health crisis. This article has been rejected by Springer Publishing as unscientific. But to me, that was exactly the strategy of original cybernetics, to combine scientific approaches to solve problems.


Best regards

Lucas

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[Cliff Joslyn]

Loet: I appreciate your intent, but with respect, this isn't ad hominem, which implies a logical fallacy of directing an argument against the person rather than their position. In this case, the content is Lissack's behavior, which was a violation of community standards and has created an unsafe environment. When he attacked me here last year, that experience suppressed my ability to participate in CYBCOM, knowing that he was still a member. We have to be able to enforce our standards, in this case with Joshua's help.

Jason: If Lissack is gone, how did he reply "I'm gone" to the list?

Joshua: Can you confirm that Lissack has unsubscribed?

But Loet's right that we need to move on: in closing, cyberneticians have extreme zeal to both be inclusive and tolerant, coupled with being highly abstract. Thus so many words about this man, trying to understand his motivations and process and our proper response, when it's evident that, his intellectual standing aside, he's simply unbalanced and behaves unacceptably. If anyone cares, his history is quite goggleable.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cybcom/CA%2BSRcks5DL5P-2EGqptjZt1Rzh79VE3bgDHb1iDWDkzwNA14iw%40mail.gmail.com.

-- 
O------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Cybernetician at Large
V cajo...@gmail.com

[Randall Whitaker]

Cliff Wrote:

Joshua: Can you confirm that Lissack has unsubscribed?

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For what it's worth ...   A quick check of this group's membership list indicates Lissack is no longer listed among the members.

- Randy (Whitaker)

[David Soul]

Excellent.

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[Cliff Joslyn]

Thank you, Randy, let's hope we can all just move on rapidly now. If I've learned anything from all this (including last year), it's:

*) Try to identify a troll before you fall into their trap (what happened to me);

*) Once identified, call them out clearly and explicitly within the community, even knowing that will make you all the more their target;

*) Enlist the community and any resources available (for us, Joshua).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cybcom/8579e4d3-db9d-4096-9d62-f54a6be16534n%40googlegroups.com.

[David Soul]

Re:
“It would be nice if Mike would be willing to share with us how he generates his list and how come we got enrolled there?”

I think not,  for I fear It would only be a welcoming for  him to attack yet more people for what ever reason it is that drives the behaviour.

There is a pattern. 

Having suffered that once, after listened to him tell members at ASC conference to deliberately mislead authorities so they could get travel permits,  was enough for me to invoke the “Groucho Mark Doctrine” with respect to ASC and only this year am I looking to rejoin with hope.

David Soul

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[Joshua Madara]

(Sorry; originally sent this reply to the wrong thread, then deleted it there and now adding it here.)

Hello, all,

I tend to take a light-handed approach to forum moderation, allowing folks to sort things out among themselves. But I was getting very close to intervening here. It seems perhaps the situation has been resolved, at least for now.

I have great admiration for many of you who participate in CybCom; that is why I made the effort to transport CybCom when GWU announced they were retiring it. I mean, c'mon, folks; many of you are just one or two degrees removed from the very first cyberneticians, and I think that is worth something, something worth preserving (speaking of, I would be delighted to help with a cybernetics museum, but have been too busy at work to participate in those conversations just now). I want to believe that the legacy of cybernetics, and the realization that CybCom is part of that legacy, is enough to lift us all out of petty squabbles and personal attacks, and even the desire to prove ourselves right so darned much. *Especially* us; we who talk so much about things such as 'control' and 'communication' and 'variety'.

I mean it very sincerely when I say I love this group of people, and it always hurts when people you love hurt each other, and, well, just knock it off, OK? We have too much cybernetics to do to allow all that nonsense. :)

Sincerely,

Joshua

[Cliff Joslyn]

Joshua: I so appreciate what you do for us, and your heartfelt sentiment below. I think we should feel better about ourselves now, not just because Lissack is gone, but because I don't actually think we were hurting "each other", as you say. Rather, I think we were all attacked by an unbalanced and unprincipled bad actor. We've done nothing wrong here. You certainly haven't. Nor did I last year, nor has Bernard this go-round (other thank posting copyrighted material, which in this case was a quite small issue, unlike what the ensuing hoopla would indicate, and which has been corrected). It's so easy for victims to invest responsibility in themselves, rather than the perpetrators. Let's avoid that error, and thanks again for the even keel you've shown here.

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