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"Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the early Simon (primarily satisficing-and-search models) and the later Simon (on problem solving) can shed light on important topics in our discipline such as budgeting, turnout, and party competition."
"In the review piece, Bendon notes that there are two main branches of BR approaches – that pioneered by Simon (and March), and that associated with Kahneman and Tversky (K&T). These two approaches are compatible, but different in focus. K&T focus on universal or nearly universal errors in judgment (prospect theory) or perception (framing effects, where the description of otherwise identical choices can influence decisions). Simon, on the other hand, was more interested in processes of decision-making in light of the impossibility of by-the-book rationality."
"Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes that such dissatisfaction expresses itself as what we have come to understand as protest: collective public action that aims for social or political change. The past year has seen a great global wave of protest movements, among which the Arab Uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement are only the most well known. But what can protest accomplish in highly complex societies? What are the limits of protest?
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I can think of at least three important limitations. The first is perhaps the most obvious: though, as I noted above, the protest repertoire is large and protesters constantly innovate (the Egyptian protests succeeded in part because of innovative ways of deceiving the police, building up a movement, and identifying promising political opportunities), they are in a race with other actors who are not sitting tight. Develop a tactic that exploits a vulnerability in the political opportunity structure – like the “Occupy” tactic we have seen spread in the past year – and opponents on the other side of the issue will often enough develop something that, if it doesn't entirely counteract the effectiveness of your tactic, will certainly render it less effective. Revolutionaries are creative, but dictators can be too.
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The second important instrumental limitation of protest is also pretty obvious, and has to do with the scarcity of the most important resource that voice requires to be effective: time (or, more specifically, coordinated time). Protest works to focus attention; it concentrates the diffuse and uncoordinated dissatisfaction of many into a unified chorus, and amplifies this dissatisfaction in ways that attract the attention of publics that might share some of these dissatisfactions, and of political coalitions that can act to change the circumstances giving rise to them. But in the short run, the attention budget for all issues of interest is limited; attention can be shifted, not created, since we are a finite number of human beings who live only a finite amount of time.
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"Starting off in political science and then moving through several disciplinary domains such as management theory, psychology, sociology, economics, organization and institutional theory, March’s academic career has been focused on understanding and analyzing human decision making and behavior. The basic thesis that he has pursued is that human action is neither optimal (or unboundedly rational) nor random, but nevertheless reasonably comprehensible (March, 1978, 1994, 1999). The ideas that were developed to understand human behavior in organizations in March’s early work in the analysis of how people deal with an uncertain and ambiguous world included, among other things, the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing "
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As March mentions in the following interview, a key theme in his later work (and a theme underlying his recent movie on leadership) is examining the problems of achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation (see, in particular, March, 1991, 1996a). Exploiting existing capabilities is full of rewards in the short run, but doesn’t prepare people for changes in technologies, capabilities, desires, tastes, and identities. For such preparation, exploration is necessary. Exploration involves searching for things that might come to be known, experimenting with doing things that are not warranted by experience or expectations. In all areas (in research as well as in life) we need both sides; illustrating, perhaps, a variation of Milan Kundera’s discussion of the ambiguous issue of the lightness-weight opposition, the combination of which is the source of numerous contradictions and difficulties; yet also the essence of being (Kundera, 1984).
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So what does this have to do with leadership? In March’s most recent academic venture–a movie produced with filmmaker Steven Schecter on this theme, titled Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership–March provides an intellectually stimulating interpretation of the contemporary meaning of Don Quixote, using interviews with modern leaders, wine drinking in Spain, and numerous episodes drawn from the novel to demonstrate the significance of joy, commitment, and imagination.(n2)
In keeping with this message, March, sees teaching "as a calling of faith, not a consequential act." As elaborated in the interview below, Don Quixote’s basic message remains important to teachers, leaders, and the rest of us. As March says, "Quixote reminds us that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness."
"One of the presentations was by Ole Peters, from the Department of Mathematics at the Imperial College of London. His presentation compared time series analysis with ensemble analysis. Time series analysis takes one realization of a process and runs it over a very long time period and then looks at the distribution over the course of that run, whereas ensemble analysis creates many copies of the process and runs these over a shorter period, and then looks at the distribution of those results. Time series analysis is what you see over many years in one universe, ensemble analysis is what you see when you take many universes and integrate across them to look at the distributional properties.
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"The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers."
"Many scientists make extravagant claims as to the scope and power of scientific thinking, claiming that ultimately it will provide a complete understanding of everything. But Russell Stannard, himself an eminent high-energy physicist, strongly disagrees with this grandiose claim. Indeed, in The End of Discovery, Stannard argues that eventually--perhaps in a few decades, perhaps in a few centuries--fundamental science will reach the limit of what it can explain. On that day, the scientific age, like the stone age and the iron age before it, will come to an end.
To highlight the boundaries of scientific understanding, Stannard takes readers on an engaging tour of some of the deepest questions facing science today--questions to do with consciousness, free will, the nature of space, time, and matter, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and much more. For instance, from his own research field, he points out that to understand the subatomic world, scientists depend of particle accelerators, but to understand the very smallest units of nature, it has been calculated that we would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy. Clearly, unless a new approach comes along, we might never understand fully the most basic building blocks of the universe. "
Links to a number of Richard Heinberg videos on peak energy.
One group is trying to define science so as to exclude things that they find objectionable. The other is trying to define the common elements of science, so as to include all the things that they like.
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