Reading Wiener in Rio

This self-consciously somewhat rambling paper revisits the connections between the themes of Wiener´s cybernetics and the social sciences. They seem to be more fruitful in communications and cognition than in feedback control. The phenomena of bubbles and bursts in adaptive control and in financial economies suggest that adaptation is a crucial concept that might serve to rebridge the gaps formed over decades of independent research. Adaptation often involves optimization. The barycenter method is direct optimization technique which may prove useful in extending those employed in adaptive control. It has wider applicability than the better-studied derivative-based methods, and is roughly equivalent to a type of synthetic gradient method. This being a paper about Norbert Wiener´s work, it concludes with mathematics. We obtain some useful results concerning the barycenter method in a continuous-time framework, which is perhaps more complex but offers a clearer perspective of the relationships with traditional model-based optimization techniques.