Stafford Beer > Quotes

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
― Stafford Beer

“IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.”
― Stafford Beer

“Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.”
― Stafford Beer

“The the purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
― Stafford Beer

“Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose.

"... the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”
― Stafford Beer

“To people reared in the good liberal tradition, man is in principle infinitely wise;he pursues knowledge to its ultimate...To the cybernetician, man is part of a control system. His input is grossly inadequate to the task of perceiving the universe...there is no question of ‘ultimate’ understanding...[I]t is part of the cultural tradition that man’s language expresses his thoughts. To the cybernetician, language is a limiting code in which everything has to be expressed—more’s the pity, for the code is not nearly rich enough to cope (pp. 294–295)...Will you tell me that science is going to deal with this mystery [of existence] in due course? I reply that it cannot. The scientific reference frame is incompetent to provide an existence theorem for existence. The layman may believe that science will one day ‘explain everything away’; the scientist himself ought to know better (p. 298).”
― Stafford Beer

“This exquisite photograph of water in movement...has a very subtle message for us. It is that nature’s computers are that which they compute. If one were to take intricate details of wind and tide and so on, and use them...as ‘input’ to some computer simulating water—what computer would one use, and how express the ‘output’? Water itself: that answers both those questions.”
― Stafford Beer, Pebbles to Computers: The Thread

“Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose.

'... the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”
― Stafford Beer