top | item 25859525

(no title)

jimduk | 5 years ago

Hi, apart from Hayek (and maybe Ursula Le Guin, and A Hamilton), has anyone got any good pointers on theories for when you favour local over global knowledge or vice versa. Either political theories, or game-theoretic. Transaction cost economics is the closest thing I've seen, and maybe some of Stuart Kauffman's stuff on the adjacent possible and the CEO's job being to 'recut' the company into different divisions. But I've never seen anything along the lines of - if I have a changing fitness landscape L and a set of communicating agents A with different sets of knowledge, and they can use their knowledge to extract value from the local landscape, or they can make tools to increase the value of that knowledge or they can communicate or they can listen, then in what situations should you take different actions. The extremes are easy ( local changing landscape, high comms costs, then don't listen to anyone else; static similar landscape, cheap comms, listen to the cleverest agent); Maybe there is some biology stuff with ants or some agent-based modelling work ?

discuss

JamesLeonis|5 years ago

I can recommend two authors: Nassim Taleb and James C Scott. In particular their books "Antifragile" and "Seeing Like A State" respectively.

klmadfejno|5 years ago

Controversy over Taleb is no secret, but I'll say it every time. Everything I've seen by Taleb seems to be him posing an idea that is obviously flawed, claiming that it is mainstream among widespread experts (when its not), and then taking credit for saying its incorrect, whilst making the reader feel smart because they too see why its obviously wrong.

zaphod4prez|5 years ago

Both great books!

davio|5 years ago

Lean manufacturing or Toyota production system is pretty relevant. The concept of sub-optimizing metrics seemed especially topical to the article.

camjohnson26|5 years ago

Demming’s Out of the Crisis talks about reducing variation to improve efficiency and how difficult that is.

tomgp|5 years ago

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is a great “nonfiction novel” about the problems of (and conceptual/mathematical limits to) central planning in the Soviet Union.