Operations Research is still a thing, but financial engineering pays better. I think an engineering school concentration in operations research is a wonderful thing. I would take an undergrad engineer in OR over any "data scientist" any day of the week. I will not need to explain what linear algebra is to an OR engineer. I will not need to explain to him/her that there are multiple probability distributions and one cannot simply assume that it is normal because you have a lot of data, and especially not if your variable is discrete (not making this up).
I am not aware of your deliciously-named subject, but he sounds cool enough. I will say that if language limits you, study up on philosophic logic. It is like computer programming, but useless. Ultimately, it is difficult to explain difficult ideas. Unfortunately, clear writing is not all that valued these days. If you work hard, you will get better at it, but the morons will still assume you are using chatGPT because they are incapable of writing and thinking quickly. I am convinced that most of us were surprised by chatGPT's widespread use because we have no need for it, while those struggle with reading and writing are not exactly advertising their crutch.
Similarly, you will hear that financial engineering is "all they do" at Princeton, but if you go to the other 99.99% of universities where Investment Banks and hedge funds will NEVER recruit, and it is all about OR. Ever warehouse, factory and call center uses the principals of operations research. Outside of the wealthy caverns in Manhattan and Chicago, no one else in the US uses financial engineering. I am the odd case in that I graduated from Cornell and worked in finance, but drugs and a prison term after a fight left me in a new place, where I found myself working in a mattress factory. Oddly, I enjoyed it and found myself running the place a few months later (the plant, not the firm). I regret leaving. I work in a government gig that I love now. but I miss modeling games. It is cool to get paid to model out shipping and receiving, then production, then financial stuff. It is a like a game one is getting paid to play. If I had any sense I never would have left my first job out of college, but not all of us are as sophisticated as Stafford Beer. Thanks for the story. I enjoyed it.
What is your public sector job? I was curious about what you said. I'm from Brazil, and here Operations Research is still very much in its infancy, I think. I didn't finish college, only the initial years, and I couldn't get into the job market of large corporations. Do you have any recommendations on how to practice Operations Research?
Your best bet is to buy a good textbook in your native language. Ideally you want one with some excel macros, or better yet, Python scripts, so you can borrow and alter them to get your job done.
One of the best advantages of working for a small company is that you can often gain a lot of responsibility if you work hard and display competence. Now, the flip side of this is that if you make a mistake, you will lose your job, but if you are careful you can help your employer be more efficient (and make more money) so you can ask him for a raise in your compensation. In my experience, the easiest way to ask for more money is to have direct evidence of how you either saved the company money or increased revenue.
You should be EXTREMELY careful until you know what you are doing. If you were in the US, I would encourage you to take a community college college class (ideally multiple classes) in operations research. Having someone to test you and evaluate your knowledge has a lot of value.
From what I understand, community colleges are rare outside the US. Here they are a bedrock of career advancement for many people. If these are not available in your location, try to "audit" university courses (basically you sit in the class but do not register or take any exams). A better option might be to hire an international tutor to help you get through the text book. The key is to make sure you know what you are doing before you risk your job proposing changes to your employer's factory.
With regard to my current public sector job, it has no connection to operations. There is no reason to think about it. If you want to make factories or warehouses more efficient, there is a LOT of opportunity and most business owners will be happy to pay you more if you are saving them money. The hardest part is getting them to trust you to make changes. That can often take years.
Thank you very much for your time and attention. Actually, after leaving university, I completed a distance learning course to enter the environmental field, until I managed to do well in the public service exam for environmental engineer and will probably be taking a position next month. The environmental field gives me a great sense of purpose, even more so with a decent salary and stability. However, I feel I'm underutilizing my abilities. The times I've tried writing Python scripts to prototype solutions using linear programming have felt great, something that flirts with my potential for logical reasoning, creativity, and is still well-regarded in the capitalist world. It's kind of thrilling to see the code working and finding the optimal solution (of course, still in an amateur way).
A friend of mine who is sadly no longer with us was a disciple of Stafford Beer. I didn’t really pay any attention to what he told me, so I’m really grateful for this fantastic essay.
You really should check... quoting from evegenys project is an error. I'm bored with correcting his work. But you are a professional writer - check staffords entry in Who's Who for his allegedly aristocratic antecedents and his death certificate for his ending, in Toronto.
Thanks for commenting and I hope you enjoyed the piece. Do you happen to have links to either of those sources? I'd love to update them.
I apologize for not doing so before...this was about as much background research as I could do for a blog post, and I may have made some interpolations based on what I'd read.
That ain't even remotely true. Stanford has a large and important Ops Research department; SNOPT comes from there as I recall. CPLEX is another such tool; I don't remember who invented it. AMPL, GAMS are also still used. It's more or less embedded into Data Science, but people usually hire specialists for doing non-trivial optimizations. There are tons of companies which specialize in this: mostly private. Hire a PhD to oversee a bunch of Malaysian coders types of operations.
Beer was a chautauqua nincompoop; same genus and species as K Eric Drexler. Wiener wasn't far behind him, though he did a few things which proved he had mathematical chops. Beer's Cybersyn thing was potemkin everything; he didn't even have working teletypes set up.
Hi there. I was led to your article by the election of Donald Trump, which came as no surprise to me although it did apparently surprise quite a lot of people. (I voted for Jill Stein.) As I was musing about both parties’ sense of emergency (what we have to attend to RIGHT NOW or else!) rather than urgency (what we MUST do now to create what we want in the FUTURE), I thought about David Didau’s article, The Purpose of a System is What It Does.
You will, I imagine, recognize POSIWID as being the output of Stafford Beer, who I had never heard of and didn’t bother to find out about when I first read the article.
Didau is an educator, so that’s his primary focus for the concept. I have a very small (6 person) group that has been meeting for several years to consider the possibility of transforming the world. That’s what we named ourselves: Transform the World. We are currently pursuing the provisional notion that a transformed world would mean a world in which everyone had the freedom to flourish. At the moment, we’re just beginning to get granular with it, identifying categories and parameters and figuring out how to determine what state anything is in: anti-flourishing, pre-flourishing, flourishing, or post-flourishing. If nothing else, it’s a conceptualization exercise.
So I am thrilled to have come across your article because the intersection of Beers and his ideas with both life-as- it-is and the possibility for change is very juicy. Succulent even.
You’re a very good writer. My knowledge in your areas of specialization is limited, so it will be a bit of a challenge to keep up, but I look forward to reading more from you. Thanks so much for this excellent article!
Joycelyn, are you open to others joining? I'm a systems-engineer, recently retired and finally with time to think about what's wrong with the world, just coming across Stafford Beer and Riane Eisler (I long ago came across Friedrich Hayek). My intuition is sensing something important in that intersection, but I can't articulate what it is yet -- much reading to do. The basic logic is, Sustainability is our destiny (ASAP or else), ideally with a criterion of maximizing Gross Domestic Happiness (like the country of Bhutan) rather than GDP -- pulling back toward partnership. I wonder if I might learn something from your group. Conversely, you might like a small book written by a colleague of mine, http://engineersmanifesto.com/, which is how to change just the USA using systems-engineering methods.
Great work. Not sure if you still keep up with these comments as the post is a few years old. But I've been wondering as I dig deeper into Beer's work if it might give further insight into the function of autocracy as it grows here in the US. Specifically I feel like one way to interpret a self dealing fascist state is simply as a response to controlling (attenuating) the level of variety it is dealing with. By focusing on abundance for a select few in the interior at the expense of anyone else in the exterior, the world becomes simpler, and the system of management more successful- at least for the in group. Ultimately the model maximizes for absolute efficiency and long term viability for a single ruler. Which is to say that what can look like a complete mess of management from one perspective (society) can be a hyper efficient one from another. Obviously this is not a successful long term strategy but it would make sense in the short term for particular individuals in power.
Thanks very much for this overview of Stafford Beer and his field. I was just introduced to him courtesy of my husband reading Doomberg's Substack, in which he mentions POSIWID, and had precisely the reaction you describe, of realizing that an idea I have been trying to put my finger on for decades was in fact articulated decades ago. And by someone who was much younger at the time than I am now, but I digress.
I have previously noted that 1970 seemed to be the height of a certain intellectual capacity, as evidenced by some truly stellar writing in law, and by the fact this is the year in which Albert O. Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, or Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. My hypothesis is that there was something about being born at that point in time that provided smart and curious people with an optimal mix of available observations, global travel and dialogue, and the ability to study and express the resultant ideas.
You obviously range much wider than the one idea of Beer's that I am dazzled by, and I have not read his original work (so far I am just looking with bemusement at the price of the books), and you may range in a different direction from the simple governance/organizational improvement questions that drive me, but I wonder if you know offhand whether anyone has put Beer's work together with Hirschman's (assuming that they did not meet or cite each other). It may be a superficial analysis, but it seems to me that marrying Hirschman with Beer answers the dilemma of your subtext in this article: https://reallifemag.com/tipping-the-scale/ (achieving "balance between large-scale systems and individual autonomy").
My focus has been on improving what I call "expert-centred complex systems": public education, justice, health care, and others, where it seems to me that enabling Exit, Voice, or Loyalty to freely interplay would do a lot to cure the tendency of systems and bureaucrats to self-serve in the direction of what Beer deemed their unstated purpose. My work is kitchen-table-level, though, and makes no impact on said systems :-)
Operations Research is still a thing, but financial engineering pays better. I think an engineering school concentration in operations research is a wonderful thing. I would take an undergrad engineer in OR over any "data scientist" any day of the week. I will not need to explain what linear algebra is to an OR engineer. I will not need to explain to him/her that there are multiple probability distributions and one cannot simply assume that it is normal because you have a lot of data, and especially not if your variable is discrete (not making this up).
I am not aware of your deliciously-named subject, but he sounds cool enough. I will say that if language limits you, study up on philosophic logic. It is like computer programming, but useless. Ultimately, it is difficult to explain difficult ideas. Unfortunately, clear writing is not all that valued these days. If you work hard, you will get better at it, but the morons will still assume you are using chatGPT because they are incapable of writing and thinking quickly. I am convinced that most of us were surprised by chatGPT's widespread use because we have no need for it, while those struggle with reading and writing are not exactly advertising their crutch.
Similarly, you will hear that financial engineering is "all they do" at Princeton, but if you go to the other 99.99% of universities where Investment Banks and hedge funds will NEVER recruit, and it is all about OR. Ever warehouse, factory and call center uses the principals of operations research. Outside of the wealthy caverns in Manhattan and Chicago, no one else in the US uses financial engineering. I am the odd case in that I graduated from Cornell and worked in finance, but drugs and a prison term after a fight left me in a new place, where I found myself working in a mattress factory. Oddly, I enjoyed it and found myself running the place a few months later (the plant, not the firm). I regret leaving. I work in a government gig that I love now. but I miss modeling games. It is cool to get paid to model out shipping and receiving, then production, then financial stuff. It is a like a game one is getting paid to play. If I had any sense I never would have left my first job out of college, but not all of us are as sophisticated as Stafford Beer. Thanks for the story. I enjoyed it.
What is your public sector job? I was curious about what you said. I'm from Brazil, and here Operations Research is still very much in its infancy, I think. I didn't finish college, only the initial years, and I couldn't get into the job market of large corporations. Do you have any recommendations on how to practice Operations Research?
Your best bet is to buy a good textbook in your native language. Ideally you want one with some excel macros, or better yet, Python scripts, so you can borrow and alter them to get your job done.
One of the best advantages of working for a small company is that you can often gain a lot of responsibility if you work hard and display competence. Now, the flip side of this is that if you make a mistake, you will lose your job, but if you are careful you can help your employer be more efficient (and make more money) so you can ask him for a raise in your compensation. In my experience, the easiest way to ask for more money is to have direct evidence of how you either saved the company money or increased revenue.
You should be EXTREMELY careful until you know what you are doing. If you were in the US, I would encourage you to take a community college college class (ideally multiple classes) in operations research. Having someone to test you and evaluate your knowledge has a lot of value.
From what I understand, community colleges are rare outside the US. Here they are a bedrock of career advancement for many people. If these are not available in your location, try to "audit" university courses (basically you sit in the class but do not register or take any exams). A better option might be to hire an international tutor to help you get through the text book. The key is to make sure you know what you are doing before you risk your job proposing changes to your employer's factory.
With regard to my current public sector job, it has no connection to operations. There is no reason to think about it. If you want to make factories or warehouses more efficient, there is a LOT of opportunity and most business owners will be happy to pay you more if you are saving them money. The hardest part is getting them to trust you to make changes. That can often take years.
Thank you very much for your time and attention. Actually, after leaving university, I completed a distance learning course to enter the environmental field, until I managed to do well in the public service exam for environmental engineer and will probably be taking a position next month. The environmental field gives me a great sense of purpose, even more so with a decent salary and stability. However, I feel I'm underutilizing my abilities. The times I've tried writing Python scripts to prototype solutions using linear programming have felt great, something that flirts with my potential for logical reasoning, creativity, and is still well-regarded in the capitalist world. It's kind of thrilling to see the code working and finding the optimal solution (of course, still in an amateur way).
A friend of mine who is sadly no longer with us was a disciple of Stafford Beer. I didn’t really pay any attention to what he told me, so I’m really grateful for this fantastic essay.
You might look at https://web.archive.org/web/20080314192927/http://www.vanillabeer.org/staffordbeer.htm
vanillabeer.org seems to be the site for his daughter, who's documented on Wikipedia as an artist. The original link no longer exists.
You really should check... quoting from evegenys project is an error. I'm bored with correcting his work. But you are a professional writer - check staffords entry in Who's Who for his allegedly aristocratic antecedents and his death certificate for his ending, in Toronto.
Hello!
Thanks for commenting and I hope you enjoyed the piece. Do you happen to have links to either of those sources? I'd love to update them.
I apologize for not doing so before...this was about as much background research as I could do for a blog post, and I may have made some interpolations based on what I'd read.
>no one really does Operations Research anymore
That ain't even remotely true. Stanford has a large and important Ops Research department; SNOPT comes from there as I recall. CPLEX is another such tool; I don't remember who invented it. AMPL, GAMS are also still used. It's more or less embedded into Data Science, but people usually hire specialists for doing non-trivial optimizations. There are tons of companies which specialize in this: mostly private. Hire a PhD to oversee a bunch of Malaysian coders types of operations.
Beer was a chautauqua nincompoop; same genus and species as K Eric Drexler. Wiener wasn't far behind him, though he did a few things which proved he had mathematical chops. Beer's Cybersyn thing was potemkin everything; he didn't even have working teletypes set up.
Hi there. I was led to your article by the election of Donald Trump, which came as no surprise to me although it did apparently surprise quite a lot of people. (I voted for Jill Stein.) As I was musing about both parties’ sense of emergency (what we have to attend to RIGHT NOW or else!) rather than urgency (what we MUST do now to create what we want in the FUTURE), I thought about David Didau’s article, The Purpose of a System is What It Does.
You will, I imagine, recognize POSIWID as being the output of Stafford Beer, who I had never heard of and didn’t bother to find out about when I first read the article.
Didau is an educator, so that’s his primary focus for the concept. I have a very small (6 person) group that has been meeting for several years to consider the possibility of transforming the world. That’s what we named ourselves: Transform the World. We are currently pursuing the provisional notion that a transformed world would mean a world in which everyone had the freedom to flourish. At the moment, we’re just beginning to get granular with it, identifying categories and parameters and figuring out how to determine what state anything is in: anti-flourishing, pre-flourishing, flourishing, or post-flourishing. If nothing else, it’s a conceptualization exercise.
So I am thrilled to have come across your article because the intersection of Beers and his ideas with both life-as- it-is and the possibility for change is very juicy. Succulent even.
You’re a very good writer. My knowledge in your areas of specialization is limited, so it will be a bit of a challenge to keep up, but I look forward to reading more from you. Thanks so much for this excellent article!
Joycelyn, are you open to others joining? I'm a systems-engineer, recently retired and finally with time to think about what's wrong with the world, just coming across Stafford Beer and Riane Eisler (I long ago came across Friedrich Hayek). My intuition is sensing something important in that intersection, but I can't articulate what it is yet -- much reading to do. The basic logic is, Sustainability is our destiny (ASAP or else), ideally with a criterion of maximizing Gross Domestic Happiness (like the country of Bhutan) rather than GDP -- pulling back toward partnership. I wonder if I might learn something from your group. Conversely, you might like a small book written by a colleague of mine, http://engineersmanifesto.com/, which is how to change just the USA using systems-engineering methods.
Great work. Not sure if you still keep up with these comments as the post is a few years old. But I've been wondering as I dig deeper into Beer's work if it might give further insight into the function of autocracy as it grows here in the US. Specifically I feel like one way to interpret a self dealing fascist state is simply as a response to controlling (attenuating) the level of variety it is dealing with. By focusing on abundance for a select few in the interior at the expense of anyone else in the exterior, the world becomes simpler, and the system of management more successful- at least for the in group. Ultimately the model maximizes for absolute efficiency and long term viability for a single ruler. Which is to say that what can look like a complete mess of management from one perspective (society) can be a hyper efficient one from another. Obviously this is not a successful long term strategy but it would make sense in the short term for particular individuals in power.
Thanks very much for this overview of Stafford Beer and his field. I was just introduced to him courtesy of my husband reading Doomberg's Substack, in which he mentions POSIWID, and had precisely the reaction you describe, of realizing that an idea I have been trying to put my finger on for decades was in fact articulated decades ago. And by someone who was much younger at the time than I am now, but I digress.
I have previously noted that 1970 seemed to be the height of a certain intellectual capacity, as evidenced by some truly stellar writing in law, and by the fact this is the year in which Albert O. Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, or Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. My hypothesis is that there was something about being born at that point in time that provided smart and curious people with an optimal mix of available observations, global travel and dialogue, and the ability to study and express the resultant ideas.
You obviously range much wider than the one idea of Beer's that I am dazzled by, and I have not read his original work (so far I am just looking with bemusement at the price of the books), and you may range in a different direction from the simple governance/organizational improvement questions that drive me, but I wonder if you know offhand whether anyone has put Beer's work together with Hirschman's (assuming that they did not meet or cite each other). It may be a superficial analysis, but it seems to me that marrying Hirschman with Beer answers the dilemma of your subtext in this article: https://reallifemag.com/tipping-the-scale/ (achieving "balance between large-scale systems and individual autonomy").
My focus has been on improving what I call "expert-centred complex systems": public education, justice, health care, and others, where it seems to me that enabling Exit, Voice, or Loyalty to freely interplay would do a lot to cure the tendency of systems and bureaucrats to self-serve in the direction of what Beer deemed their unstated purpose. My work is kitchen-table-level, though, and makes no impact on said systems :-)