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Performativity Of Models, Rajesh Venkatachalapathy

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Inspired by Latour's work in social studies of science and technology, Callon, MacKenzie and others developed a performativity critique of economics. Building on this, Healy (2015) recently discussed the performativity of network models. While useful, I move away from French continental philosophy to avoid unavoidable comparisons with Foucauldian conceptions of performativity. Instead, I use ideas from vanilla historical sociology of science and technology and cognitive science to understand performativity.

I first discuss Healy's critique of network models. Keeping with the worst traditions in systems science, I greedily apply this concept to all models in science and engineering by first critiquing …

What If Our Beliefs About A System Are Not Wholly Accurate? What If?, Gary Langford

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

For most people, a system is a construct with vexing complexities, many many parts, and perhaps wrapped with a goal or intention. Add to that simple construct a set of terminologies that are commonly applied when speaking of “systems” and we just might have veered away from discoveries of imminent importance. Ask yourself, “You said it was a system, but how did that statement help you solve your problem? How far off would we have to be in our perception of systemsness for us to make mistakes of consequence? One Hundred Billion are lost annually in software projects that failed …

The Limits Of Control, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Regulation (Discussion), Joshua Hughes

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

When we want to solve a problem, we talk about how we might manage or regulate—control it. Control is a a central concept in systems science, along with system, environment, utility, and information. With his information-theoretic Law of Requisite Variety, Ashby proved that to control a system we need as much variability in our regulator as we have in our system (“only variety can destroy variety”), something like a method of control for everything we want to control. For engineered systems, this appears to be the case (at least sometimes). But what about for social systems? Does a group of …

Reconstructability Analysis Of Elementary Cellular Automata, Martin Zwick, Hui Shi

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Reconstructability analysis is a method to determine whether a multivariate relation, defined set- or information-theoretically, is decomposable with or without loss (reduction in constraint) into lower ordinality relations. Set-theoretic reconstructability analysis (SRA) is used to characterize the mappings of elementary cellular automata. The degree of lossless decomposition possible for each mapping is more effective than the λ parameter (Walker & Ashby, Langton) as a predictor of chaotic dynamics.

Complete SRA yields not only the simplest lossless structure but also a vector of losses of all decomposed structures, indexed by parameter, τ. This vector subsumes λ, Wuensche’s Z parameter, and Walker …