Ann Mary Francis

Beyond Doomsday: reading Von Foerster’s 1960 equation as a lesson in second-order cybernetics

Purpose This article revisits the 1960 “Doomsday” equation of Von Foerster, Mora and Amiot on the anniversary of its author’s birth. It asks what the equation’s now-evident empirical deviation teaches about prediction in social systems, and argues that the deviation is best read...