Beer formed the term algedonic from two words, algos, meaning “pain,” and hedos, meaning “pleasure.”
This signal alerted higher levels of management to a discrete event taking place in System One, information that might have been lost to filtering or aggregated into a more comprehensive measure of system behavior.
The Algedonic Signal allows higher management to communicate with System One, address the problem immediately, and thus minimize the effect of the emergency on the rest of the system.
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Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. The MIT Press, 2011, p. 39.
In an emergency System One (the organ or the limb) can immediately send a “cry of pain” up the vertical axis to System Three, Four, or Five.