This site is named after an idea that blew my mind a while back — The Law of Requisite Variety, which holds –
The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.
– W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956
Ashby defines ‘Variety’ as indistinguishable from ‘Information’.
Simply, more information = more flexibility, an increased number of options. Of course, you have the frames of mind to make the information useful, but this, too, comes down to having flexibility.
The observer and his powers of discrimination may have to be specified if the variety is to be well defined. (ibid)
I first encountered Ashby’s law through Neurolinguistic Programming, where it was adapted as, roughly, “The subsystem with the greatest flexibility controls the system”.
In the NLP context, the belief holds having more options generally works better than having fewer options, even if some of those options aren’t used. Either/Or isn’t really a choice. You don’t start playing the choice game until you have three or more options, someone once told me.
I think it’s a pretty powerful idea. A building block towards modelling a working and intuitive understanding of everything.
