Understanding Society

One of the most interesting authorities on social models and simulations is Scott Page. This month he published a major book on this top...

This month marks the end of the eleventh year of publication of Understanding Society . Thanks to all the readers and visitors who have ...

Sexual harassment of women in academic settings is regrettably common and pervasive, and its consequences are grave. At the same time, i...

Quite a few posts here have focused on the question of emergence in social ontology, the idea that there are causal processes and powers...

There is a new exciting and valuable contribution from the research group around Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and John Friedman, this t...

Are emotions real? Are they hardwired to our physiology? Are they pre-cognitive and purely affective? Was Darwin right in speculating th...

image: Adolf von Menzel,  The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) Readers may have noticed that my current research interests have to...

In 2011 James Scott gave a pair of Tanner Lectures at Harvard. He had chosen a topic for which he felt he had a fairly good understandin...

An ongoing thread of posts here is concerned with organizational causes of large technology failures. The driving idea is that failures,...

An issue which is of concern to anyone who receives treatment in a hospital is the topic of patient safety. How likely is it that there ...