Speaking For All Mankind

While reading The Predictioneer’s Game by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I kept thinking that his theory of predicting people’s actions by their interest in an issue (salience) and their power to affect that issue (influence). I put the book down and checked my bookshelf.  I then pulled out Everyman’s Prince: A Guide to Understanding Your Political Problems by William Coplin and Michael O’Leary which had a very similar method for predicting people’s actions by calculating each of the actors’ issue positions, salience, and power to arrive at the likely outcome of a conflict.  The only real difference was that Mesquita dressed up his analysis with game theory.

It was Mesquita’s use of game theory that reminded me of a second book on my shelf: Steven Brams’ Theory of Moves.  Brams extends upon classic game theory to demonstrate how people don’t just consider their next move in a game (or political situation) but also countermoves and moves that counter the countermoves.  Players model their opponent’s thinking processes and consider the variables of salience and power to determine how the game will evolve.  Brams also adds the dimension of information that is a vital factor in determining a sequence of moves.

I bring these two books up because, taken together, they are a much better and more informative read than The Predictioneer’s Game.  Mesquita repeatedly trumpets his new findings and how he is a much sought-after consultant because his adroit use of game theory can predict the future.  He gives a few past predictions that were successful and (in false humility) one that wasn’t successful (but only because he couldn’t foresee a key Senator’s affair).  His first two chapters purport to be a tutorial on game theory but you would be better off reading The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life for a more accurate understanding of game theory.  The rest of the book is a rambling digression of how his theory could have predicted historical events. Retrodiction is poor evidence.

It took a while but I finally determined that what Mesquita was actually doing was trying to marry game theory with economic man theory.  Trying to analyze peoples’ actions based solely on rational actors coldly calculating their self-interest has been overturned by the latest theories in neuroscience and behavioral economics.  Once I realized this, I was tempted to stop reading but I pressed on.  I should have stopped.  Applying behavioral economics with game theory would be a great advance forward for both fields.  I hoped that this was Mesquita’s intent but what he really did was to try to revive a discredited theory (rational choice theory) with the revived interest in game theory.  Not a rational choice or a good strategy in this case.

Finishing up Lynn Kahn’s Performance Networks: Transforming Governance for the 21st Century.  It’s a quick read that explains the benefits of using performance networks or cross-agency networks to work on common issues such a juvenile rehabilitation or environmental issues.  Her “Ten Views of Government Performance Networks” sounds more like effective project management.  Basically, have a good vision, communicate the vision effectively, and have performance measures.  Nothing wrong with that but it does point out how government needs modern project management.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Just a quick pointer to a great article from Herding Cats that considers the new definition of project management 2.0 and finds that it still doesn’t explain why PM 2.0 is better than PM 1.0.  It seems another case of “the Web 2.0″ changes everything mania that has afflicted other fields like training, teaching, and public administration.  Yes,  online social networking has aided in project management but so has the telephone, the fax machine, and the copier.  The point is improving communication and not the tools that facilitate communication.  Thus, the real advance of PM 2.0 would be more effective means of communication than what is offered by PM 1.0.

David Armano of Logic+Emotion writes: “Stop looking for the next Twitter. Why? It’s simple—because the odds are you already have plenty of projects and ideas with proven potential that you need to improve on without worrying about the next thing you’ll start.“  Armano then goes on to list the four major tools that still have significant value: websites, blogs, intranets, and social community applications (Facebook, Ning, etc.).  It’s good advice because each of the tools bring different capabilities and assets to the overall communication infrastructure of an organization.  Better to have a full toolkit to choose from than just one tool to work with.

In my previous blog, I wrote several posts praising Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth.  It is a brilliant application of complexity theory to economics that demonstrates the failure of classical economic theory.  As Beinhocker explains, early economists attempted to make economics more scientific by grafting classical physic theories onto the field.  The most pervasive concept was “equilibrium” which has guided economic thought since the 1800s.  It was this central concept that has divorced economic theory from economic reality as Beinhocker successfully demonstrates in Part One of his book.  A better explanation of what really happens in economic systems is the interaction of autonomous agents acting in a complex and evolving fitness landscape.

I was reminded of Beinhocker’s book when I read John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.  Cassidy recounts the economic history of the last hundred years to explain the market failures of 2008 and 2009.    Like Beinhocker, Cassidy also blames the emphasis on equilibrium in classical economics to blinding economists like Greenspan to the realities of how economic systems actually work (as Greenspan himself admits in the book’s introduction).  Even though Cassidy calls his conclusions “reality economics,” his descriptions of subprime mortage market and the near-failure of the market giants are great examples of complexity economics.   In fact, it is hard not to read Part Three of How Markets Fail without thinking of how complexity economics (Part Two of The Origin of Wealth) can much better explain the events of 2008 and 2009 better than traditional economic theories.

How Markets Fail is an important book and another great argument on rethinking economic theory.  Why this is important to government is that efforts to fix the economy are based on outmoded theories which only go to make the situation worse.  By adopting complexity economics, governments can better treat economic issues and help sustain the market system.

This is from the O’Reilly who is the technology publisher.  In the last year or so, he has written extensively on the use of Web 2.0 for opening up government and improving the connection between government and the citizens it serves.  In January 2010, he plans to publish Open Government which will be a collection of essays, interviews, and case studies.  Should be a must read when it is published.

There are seemingly numerous applications for elearning and trying to craft an elearning system can be confusing.  Learning Conversations has a great guide for determining what applications to use.  I especially like the fact that the guide is aimed toward the learner and not driven by the technology.

But, I believe it only looks like a large number of applications.  Many of the applications are just variations of wikis, blogs, twitter, and FaceBook-type applications.  Where are the truly new applications that enhance the learning experience?  By focusing on the needs of the learners, I am sure that the new applications will arrive.

One of the reasons that I ordered a Nook is because Android is its operating system.  Ever since Google released Android, it has gained market share rapidly.  According to Bill Gurley, this is because Google has created the “less than free” business model.

Thank goodness someone wrote a manual.

When I was last in the federal government (1997-1999), I was detailed part-time to the President’s Y2K Date Change Task Force.  I helped support GSA’s efforts to educate the public about efforts to prepare computer systems for the “odometer roll-over” as we informally termed it.  This was a real risk but with some advance planning and a few common sense actions, the world came through the year 2000 with just a few humorous hiccups.

Now, NASA has launched a web page to handle the concerns around the 2012 “prophecy.”  2012 is not real like the Y2K problem and even the Mayan elders are disclaiming the hype around the “prophecy.”  Of course this won’t convince the conspiracy theorists but it may help people who can distinguish between a movie and reality.

UPDATE: Slate has an article explaining how the government’s response to Y2K might hamper efforts on global warming and pandemics.