Thursday’s post ended on a one-dimensional dial and a promise. The promise was that a single dimension is exactly what majority rule needs in order to behave. Turn an evaluation loose across many dimensions and it cycles — McKelvey and Schofield, the chaos in this blog’s masthead1 — but compress the whole question of equitable-versus-uniform … Read more
Wednesday’s post answered what selects: a stationary distribution, the wheel turning by no hand in particular. Knowing what the dynamics pick, though, is not the same as knowing whether they picked well. So step off the graph — out of the local view every node is stuck inside — and try to do the one … Read more
Last week I asked you to take your hand off the lever. The argument, compressed, was that the designer we kept reaching for — the planner who would tune the network so cooperation paid and nobody got fleeced — dissolves the moment you write him into the model. There is no seat at the controls. … Read more
A confession before we start: I billed this as three posts, and the arithmetic has not cooperated (Ed.: You definitely know non-cooperation, John). The last two turned up a result and a question big enough that I’d rather run long than rush them, so the series will continue past today. This post is the third, … Read more
On Monday I split the payoff an agent earns into a part that travels with the strategy and a part that stays with the seat, \(f_i = \alpha_{s_i} + \beta_i + \varepsilon_i\), and promised that the positional term \(\beta\) has a closed form that takes about three lines to derive. Today we derive it. The … Read more
When you face a decision you don’t know how to make, you look sideways. You find someone who is doing well — the colleague who made tenure, the neighbor whose kids turned out kind, the friend who somehow retired comfortably a decade early — and you copy what they did. But the rule has a … 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