Bring back the Norbert Wiener page as `/norbert-wiener`

https://www.udemy.com/course/crash-course-arduino-and-microcontroller-development/

https://www.lesoir.be/art/d-20120427-W09C7N

https://wiki.gnuradio.org/

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3147/Norbert-Wiener-A-Life-in-CyberneticsEx-Prodigy-My

---

title: "Who's that dude?"

linktitle: "Who's that dude?"

description: "The man on the HSBXL logo is Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who founded cybernetics. Who he was, and why a Brussels hackerspace keeps his face on its logo."

aliases: [/NorbertWiener]

---

{{< image src="images/norbert.svg" alt="The HSBXL logo: a line drawing of Norbert Wiener wearing brain machine goggles" >}}

The dude on our logo is Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the MIT mathematician who founded

cybernetics. He has been the face of this space for about as long as the space has

existed, and this page is here so you do not have to guess why.

## The man

Wiener was the kind of prodigy that biographies are written about. He finished high

school at eleven, took a maths degree at Tufts at fourteen, and had a Harvard doctorate

in mathematical logic in 1913, before he turned nineteen. He went on to study with

Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and with David Hilbert at Göttingen, then

spent the rest of his working life at MIT.

The maths he left behind is still in daily use. The Wiener process is the standard model

of Brownian motion. The Wiener filter, worked out during the Second World War while he

was building a predictor for anti-aircraft fire, is the reason a noisy signal can be

cleaned up in a principled way rather than by taste.

## Cybernetics

The anti-aircraft work is where the bigger idea came from. A gunner, a gun and a moving

aeroplane form one system that measures its own error and corrects itself. Wiener noticed

that the same shape appears in a thermostat, in a steam governor, in a hand reaching for

a glass, and in an animal keeping its balance. In 1948 he named the study of that shape

in [_Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine),

from the Greek _kybernetes_, the steersman, because the steering engine of a ship was one

of the earliest feedback mechanisms anyone built.

Feedback, error, signal and noise, the message as the unit of a system: that vocabulary

came out of Wiener and the [Macy conferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences)

around him, and it is now so ordinary that nobody remembers it had to be invented.

## Why we keep him

Because feedback is what actually happens in a hackerspace. You build the thing, you

measure it, it is wrong, you correct it, you go around again. That loop is the whole

method, and Wiener is the person who wrote down its mathematics.

Because he refused to stay in one discipline. Cybernetics was assembled out of

mathematics, electrical engineering, neurophysiology, biology and philosophy, by someone

who did not accept that those were separate buildings. On any given Tuesday the space

contains a soldering iron, a radio, a bookscanner and an argument about ethics, which is

roughly the same disposition.

Because he took responsibility for what he built. After Hiroshima he stopped accepting

military work and government money, and said so in public in

[_A Scientist Rebels_](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1947/01/a-scientist-rebels/306731/)

in _The Atlantic_ in January 1947. Refusing to hand your work to people you do not trust

is a live question in this building too.

And because he saw the current argument coming, in detail, in 1960. In

[_Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation_](https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/Wiener.pdf),

published in _Science_ that May under the subtitle "As machines learn they may develop

unforeseen strategies at rates that baffle their programmers", he wrote:

> If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot

> efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and

> irreversible that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then

> we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which

> we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.

That is the alignment problem, sixty-odd years early, filed alongside the sorcerer's

apprentice and W. W. Jacobs' monkey's paw. He also wrote

[_The Human Use of Human Beings_](https://archive.org/details/NorbertWienerHumanUseOfHumanBeings)

in 1950 for a general audience, because he thought these were everyone's problems and not

a specialism.

## He was not a saint

Worth saying, since we put him on the logo. His biography is called

[_Dark Hero of the Information Age_](https://archive.org/details/darkheroofinform0000conw_p9d0)

for a reason. In 1952 he cut off Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, two of his closest

collaborators, without explanation and for good, and

[the reasons are still argued over](https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic-235253/).

Pitts never really recovered. Admire the work, and read the footnotes.

## The drawing

{{< image src="images/hsb-banner.png" alt="The 2009 HSB banner: line-art Norbert Wiener with a brain showing through his skull, brain machine goggles and a barcode moustache" >}}

The artwork is a line-traced portrait of Wiener with a brain showing through the skull, a

barcode where the moustache goes, and a pair of Mitch Altman's

[Brain Machine](https://makezine.com/projects/the-brain-machine/) goggles over the eyes.

The Brain Machine is an open hardware sound and light machine from MAKE Volume 10 that

flickers LEDs at brainwave frequencies, and it has been soldered together at hackerspace

tables all over the world. The original wiki page put it plainly:

> Basically it's just a cool dude, overlayed with brainmachine (out of Mitch Altman Makers'

> shed) and FOSDEM brainz.

The banner above was uploaded by Sandb on 30 September 2009, back when the space lived at

`hsb.wikidot.com`. The vector master at the top of this page is `norbert.svg`, uploaded by

ptr\_ on 8 October 2009 with the entire description "use inkscape to edit". Both come from

the [archived wiki](https://wiki.hsbxl.be), and both are under the GFDL 1.2 that covers it.

He has not gone unchallenged. The wiki's

[sticker page](https://wiki.hsbxl.be/Sticker) is a long trail of members proposing

alternative designs, none of which ever replaced him.

## A Brussels footnote

Cybernetics has roots in this city. In 1993, barely two years after the Web went public,

the [Principia Cybernetica Web](https://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/) went online at the VUB in

Brussels and became one of the largest sites on the early Web. Wiener's vocabulary was

being maintained a few kilometres from here while most of the internet was still text

files.

## Read more

- [Norbert Wiener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener) on Wikipedia

- [_Ex-Prodigy_ and _I Am a Mathematician_](https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3147/Norbert-Wiener-A-Life-in-CyberneticsEx-Prodigy-My), his two volumes of autobiography, free from MIT Press

- [The Norbert Wiener papers](https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/600) at the MIT archives

- [The original wiki page](https://wiki.hsbxl.be/NorbertWiener) this one replaces, last edited in August 2010

- Hacker News has been chewing on him for years, most usefully on

  [his relationship with Russell](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619347) and on

  [the original AI doomer](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36178171)

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