Is it possible that we misunderstand political control after all these years? Existential citizenship as necessary for meaningful political engagement bit.ly/2uEa9I8
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In a past life I was a control theory researcher. Applied to politics it is largely seductive nonsense that explains very little. Look up spectacularly underwhelming history of system dynamics (Jay Forrester, Limits to Growth stuff). Wiener’s Cybernetics led to more woo than wow.
The closest in spirit to a control theoretic approach to politics is Bruno deMesquita’s Dictator’s Handbook model. Most people who try to apply the technical letter of control theory rather than the spirit of it to social systems fail badly.
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The problems of parameter uncertainty, unmodeled dynamics curse of dimensionality, identification/control tradeoffs under instability... all totally kill the idea. It’s all barely tractable with physical systems.
I thought you'd mentioned previous work in control theory, so I was curious re: your take. I can see how fine specification of control in complex systems would be problematic, if not impossible, but if there is actual control, it must be this way, no?
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(i.e., if the proper components, functions, and relationships can be identified, isn't that sufficient? Otherwise, if control cannot even be specified at a general conceptual level, then what grounds are there to assert its presence at all?)
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