LONDON — I came up out of the Underground this morning at the wrong station, a humbling way to begin a post about the meaning of position. The conference I am here for, the Warwick/Yale/Princeton meeting on political economy, takes its name, at one remove, from an English county whose old town lent its name … Read more
A large strand of social network analysis treats triangles as special. Three people all connected to each other — a closed triad, a triangle in the graph-theoretic sense — show up in the literature as the minimum unit at which social structure is supposed to begin crystallizing. Triangles carry transitivity. They support trust. They coordinate … Read more
A quick correction on The Only Clause Available, published Friday. I wrote there that the US–Iran ceasefire expires Monday. It expires Wednesday, the 22nd — the two-week truce began April 8, and I miscounted by two days. (Ed.: A formal theorist, miscounting.) The prediction itself stands for Wednesday: a renegotiated form of ambiguity rather than … Read more
In a 2015 symposium on big data and measurement, Maggie Penn and I argued that social choice theory is central to the analysis of complex data precisely because any reduction of high-dimensional data into a usable measure involves aggregation, and aggregation involves choices about what to preserve and what to discard.1 We used the Florentine … Read more