This week marks the seventh anniversary of Understanding Society. That's 954 posts, almost a million words, and about a hundred posts in the past twelve months. The blog continues to serve as an enormously important part of my own intellectual life, permitting me to spend a few hours several times a week on topics of …
Social knowledge at the micro level
People engage in their social worlds on the basis of a dense set of abilities and cognitive frameworks that permit them to make sense of the interactions they encounter, and to shape their behavior in ways that work for their purposes in the setting. People are creative, adaptive social actors, and this means that they engage …
Granular perspectives on the Cultural Revolution
It has been observed in earlier posts that there is still a lot we do not understand about China's Cultural Revolution (post, post, post). Why such a sudden and apparently crazed eruption of violence? Why such ultra-radicalism among extremely young adolescents? Why the apparent self-destruction of the Party? How to explain the behavior of Mao …
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Social mechanisms and ABM methods
One particularly appealing aspect of agent-based models is the role they can play in demonstrating the inner workings of a major class of social mechanisms, the group we might refer to as mechanisms of aggregation. An ABM is designed to work out how a field of actors of a certain description, in specified kinds of …
Modeling organizational performance
Organizations do things that we care about. They are generally at least partially designed in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes, and managers continue to tinker with them to improve them. And we have very good reasons for wanting to be able to measure their performance, to introduce innovations that improve performance, and …
Emergentism and generationism
media: lecture by Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on chaos and reduction Several recent posts have focused on the topic of simulations in the social sciences. An interesting question here is whether these simulation models shed light on the questions of emergence and reduction that frequently arise in the philosophy of the social sciences. In most …
Verisimilitude in models and simulations
Modeling always requires abstraction and simplification. We need to arrive at a system for representing the components of a system, the laws of action that describe their evolution and interaction, and a way of aggregating the results of the representation of the components and their interactions. Simplifications are required in order to permit us to …
Computational models for social phenomena
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pBreyekwJs There is a very lively body of work emerging in the intersection between computational mathematics and various fields of the social sciences. This emerging synergy between advanced computational mathematics and the social sciences is possible, in part, because of the way that social phenomena emerge from the actions and thoughts of individual actors …
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A sense of injustice in China?
Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Here is how he put his central question: This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at …
Turning points in history?
We often think that the histories of nations or peoples take turning points. A series of events occur that could have gone either way, things went badly rather than well, and the future development of this people is forever changed. It is on a different branch line, going to a different destination altogether. And if …
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