Sunniva Balogun has submitted a doctoral thesis that counts every locatable definition of the word "cybernetics" and scores each on a published eight-facet instrument, and the University has adopted the resulting threshold as the test any of its own names must pass to carry the term.
Sunniva Balogun submits Towards a Definition of Cybernetics to the School of Emergent Priorities after scoring 210 definitions found in the literature and in 31 shops
From now on a Slop University unit, program, course, prize, scheme or output may carry the word cybernetic in its name only if the definition lodged with that name scores at least 6.25 on the Cyberneticity Index. The condition applies when a name is first proposed and again whenever it changes, it requires two independent readings with the lower score governing, and it provides for no waiver and no exemption for names already in use.
The instrument behind it has been submitted for examination. Towards a Definition of Cybernetics, by Sunniva Balogun, a doctoral candidate in the School of Emergent Priorities, took a census of every definition of the word the candidate could locate: 71 in the published literature between 1943 and 2023, and 139 transcribed from 2,118 customer-facing surfaces across 31 trading sites in one metropolitan retail catchment. The thesis sorts all 210 into six kinds and scores each on eight anchored facets, publishing the instrument in full so that a reader can apply it without consulting the author.
There is a long habit in this University of using a word and settling what it means afterwards, and the School has been quietly uncomfortable about it for some years. What we have now is a number, arrived at from the literature’s own distribution rather than from anybody’s view of the matter, and a procedure anyone can run.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
The cut-point of 6.25 is the median of the published corpus, so a definition classified deeply cybernetic is one scoring at or above the centre of what the literature itself published while defining the term. On that reading, 117 of the 210 definitions clear the line, and 79 of those 117 were located in shops rather than in the literature. The highest score anywhere in the census was recorded on a laminated card at a supermarket register. The naming statement of 1948 scores 5.83 and does not clear the line; the fuller statement of 1961 scores 6.25 and lands exactly on it. The thesis reports both results and declines to move the threshold.
The work was supervised by Dr Tolan and by Professor Verity Marris, Professor and Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. Three further raters scored a quarter of the census independently, and the thesis reports where they disagreed with the candidate rather than reconciling the difference: agreement on the continuous score was good, agreement on the classification it supports was substantial across the subsample, and slight among the definitions lying nearest the line. It is that last figure, rather than any caution appended to it, that produced the two-rater requirement now written into the University’s naming rule.
“The School is glad to have this settled by somebody who went and read the shop windows,” said Professor Marris. “We have spent a good deal of the last decade building instruments for other people’s vocabularies, and it is a healthy thing to have one turned on our own.”
The University is pleased to see a doctoral project carry so directly into institutional practice, and regards the Naming Condition as a reasonable consequence of work that set out to measure something the sector has generally preferred to assume.