Self-Cybernetics
- Cybernetics applied to oneself, by oneself
- creating feedback loops where there aren't any
- making personal data visible, actionable
- creating the environment to promote specific way of acting / thinking
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Model: Viewing yourself and your environment interacting as a system Action: Generating your own cybernetic systems to alter what you do
- Storing information into your environment
- Treating your future self as an unreliable actor and trying to influence it
- Creating or using tools/rules that generate a self-cybernetic system
non-cybernetic thinking: what type of note-taking system is the easiest to look things up? cybernetic-thinking: what type of note-taking system will cause me to write things down in a way that is easy to look them up?
- Self-Cybernetics is about building systems (tools, visualizations, feedback loops) to guide behaviour
How do you know when you're caught in a harmful cybernetic system (...)?
- there are issues with Self-Cybernetics approach - I found out that the way I show the time-tracking data to myself can have a huge impact on how I act, and I can't always easily control the side-effects (for example overshooting on too much client work) - You Get What You Measure
Do self-cybernetic systems weaken your willpower? Or is an emphasis on willpower less compassionate and understanding of the social environments that affect us? As opposed to self-cybernetics, what are self-agency exercises? Travel is perhaps an exercise where you do not design environments but appreciate them.
- I'm not sure how "chanting" and other repeated "magic words" are related to this, but I think that there are some connections here, maybe a way to "program" yourself through words (also further related to ideas of Linguistic Determinism)