International Relations

One of the most interesting authorities on social models and simulations is Scott Page. This month he published a major book on this topic, The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You , and it is a highly valuable contribution. The book corresponds roughly to the content of Page's very successful Coursera course on models and simulations, and it serves as an excellent introduction to many different kinds of mathematical models in the social sciences. Page's fundamental premise in the book is that we need many models, and many intellectual perspectives, to make sense of the social world. Mathematical modeling is a way of getting disciplined about the logic of our theories and hypotheses about various processes in the world, including the physical, biological, and social realms. No single approach will be adequate to understanding the complexity of the world; rather, we need multiple hypotheses and models to disentangle the many concurrent causal and syste...

This month marks the end of the eleventh year of publication of Understanding Society . Thanks to all the readers and visitors who have made the blog so rewarding. The audience continues to be international, with roughly half of visits coming from the United States and the rest from UK, the Philippines, India, Australia, and other European countries. There are a surprising number of visits from Ukraine. Topics in the past year have been diverse. The most frequent topic is my current research interest, organizational dysfunction and technology failure. Also represented are topics in the philosophy of social science (causal mechanisms, computational modeling), philosophy of history, China, and the politics of hate and division. The post with the largest number of views was "Is history probabilistic?", posted on December 30, and the least-read post was "The insights of biography", posted on August 29. Not surprisingly, the content of the blog follows the topics which I...