Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and …
Cyber threats
David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times, and has covered cyber security issues for …
Downward causation
I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors (link). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on …
Shakespeare on tyranny
Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic and historian whose insights into philosophy and the contemporary world are genuinely and consistently profound. His most recent book returns to his primary expertise, the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. But it is -- by intention or otherwise -- an important reflection on the presidency of Donald Trump as well. …
Social generativity and complexity
The idea of generativity in the realm of the social world expresses the notion that social phenomena are generated by the actions and thoughts of the individuals who constitute them, and nothing else (link, link). More specifically, the principle of generativity postulates that the properties and dynamic characteristics of social entities like structures, ideologies, knowledge systems, …
What the boss wants to hear …
According to David Halberstam in his outstanding history of the war in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, a prime cause of disastrous decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was an institutional imperative in the Defense Department to come up with a set of facts that conformed to what the President wanted to hear. Robert McNamara …
Regulatory failure
When we think of the issues of health and safety that exist in a modern complex economy, it is impossible to imagine that these social goods will be produced in sufficient quantity and quality by market forces alone. Safety and health hazards are typically regarded as "externalities" by private companies -- if they can be …
Empowering the safety officer?
How can industries involving processes that create large risks of harm for individuals or populations be modified so they are more capable of detecting and eliminating the precursors of harmful accidents? How can nuclear accidents, aviation crashes, chemical plant explosions, and medical errors be reduced, given that each of these activities involves large bureaucratic organizations …
Machine learning
The Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan hosted an intensive day-long training on some of the basics of machine learning for graduate students and interested faculty and staff. Jake Hofman, a Microsoft researcher who also teaches this subject at Columbia University, was the instructor, and the session was both …
Mechanisms, singular and general
Let's think again about the semantics of causal ascriptions. Suppose that we want to know what caused a building crane to collapse during a windstorm. We might arrive at an account something like this: An unusually heavy gust of wind at 3:20 pm, in the presence of this crane's specific material and structural properties, with …
Understanding Society 