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.
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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.

