# 20. Cybernetics and Feedback

## Central question

How do systems sense conditions, compare them with aims, act, and learn from consequences?

## Why it belongs here

Cybernetics supplies the clearest technical bridge between anthrocybernetics and living systems: a system is understood through relations, feedback, regulation, communication, and adaptation rather than through isolated components alone.

## Outline

1. **System and boundary** — define the system, environment, observer, purpose, and time horizon.
2. **Negative and positive feedback** — distinguish stabilizing correction from amplification; neither is automatically good or bad.
3. **Feedforward and prediction** — identify anticipatory action and its assumptions.
4. **Variety and requisite response** — ask whether the regulator can meet the complexity of the disturbance.
5. **Observer and reflexivity** — include the measuring system in the map when observation changes behavior.
6. **Five-Foci practice** — track phase, conditions, thresholds, persistent patterns, and pathways of correction.
7. **Bounded exercise** — diagram one personal or organizational loop, then change one variable and record the result.

## Evidence boundary

A feedback diagram is a model, not a discovery. Arrows show a proposed relation; they do not establish causation. Test timing, direction, magnitude, and alternative explanations.

## Deliverable

A one-page causal-loop map with named variables, delays, assumptions, intervention points, and failure conditions.