Personal characteristics of effective political actors

 

Reference

Robert W. Allen, Dan L. Madison, Lyman W. Porter, Patricia A. Renwick, Bronston T. Mayes (1979) Organizational Politics: Tactics and Characteristics of Its Actors. California Management Review, Volume: 22 issue: 1, page(s): 77-83. https://doi.org/10.2307/41164852 

Variations of the Observer Error

observer error: An error of observation or measurement due to failure of the observer to identify, measure accurately, or interpret some aspect of the phenomena that are being observed. This can have many reasons and causes, including careless or hasty measurements, faulty instruments, erroneous or illogical interpretation, and/or any of many possible sources of bias. It erodes the credibility of science when it occurs. Oxford Reference

Lucas critique argues that it is naive to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data. (Wiki).

Lucas critique (version 2): "Any statistical relationship will break down when used for policy purposes". Danielsson's corollary: A financial risk model breaks down when used for regulatory purposes.


Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." (Wiki)

Scientists and Governments

Plato wrote an entire book to argue that Philosophers would provide the best governments that societies can aspire.

However, history provides cases where this assertion is simply wrong. Thus, Wolfgang Panofsky purportedly stated that: "confidence that science can perform on command is unwarranted."

Who was right most of the time?


References

Panofsky, W. (1993) Particles and Policy. AIP

The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas

The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas is another perpetual problem. "Action at a distance" seems to be admissible in the  field of intellectual influences

Collingwood's pronouncement:

"...these methods of description are characteristic of that frivolous and superficial type of history which speaks of ‘influences’ and 'borrowings’ and so forth, and when it says that A is influenced by B or that A borrows from B never asks itself what there was in A that laid it open to B’s influence, or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowing from B. An historian of thought who is not content with these cheap and easy formulae will not see Hegel as filling up the chinks in eighteenth-century thought with putty taken from Plato and Aristotle." Idea of Nature, 128

Claudio Guillen

"... to ascertain an influence is to make a value judgment, not to measure a fact. The critic is obliged to evaluate the function or the scope of the effect of A in the making of B, for he is not listing the total amount of these effects, which are legion, but ordering them. Thus "influence" and "significant influence" are practically synonymous."

Very interesting insights from Hyrkkänen (2009):

• according to the influence model, to explain some element of the thought of a writer A is to maintain that A has been influenced by an earlier writer B, i.e. A has adopted an element into his thinking from the works of B, or from discussions with B, or, indirectly, via C, or in some other way.
• According to Hermerén, the influence model is misused if research is ‘totally dominated by the search for influences’ – if, in other words, ‘the billiard ball model of artistic creation’ is followed.
• Adopting an influence entails reflecting on alternatives, which is a process of weighing more or less consciously the available influences.
• If we perceive an adopted influence as an answer to a question, or more generally, as a solution to a problem, it becomes understandable why human beings are receptive only to some but not to all possible influences.
• The cases of Vico and Hegel illustrate how people set apart by time can be reunited by similar problems they happen to share. Moreover, for the very reason that human beings may share similar problems, they may arrive at similar solutions.
• ...it would be more promising to try to explicate and understand the reasons for the similarity of problems.
• In the case of independent invention, the interpreter has to consider or imagine the alternative solutions to the problem the inventor had in mind. In the case of an influence being adopted, the task of interpretation is to understand why the agent happened to select a certain influence from the available alternatives. In both cases, the central task of the interpretation is to answer the question of why an idea has, more or less consciously, been adopted.

Concepts (The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood by William M. Johnston, p. 87)

• Intellectual debts
• Source of stimulus for his own philosophizing
• parallels and similarities of doctrine
• ideas traceable to x
• "Collingwood ask us to focus not on what was borrowed, but on what led the borrower to select what he did. Intellectual borrowing tells us something about the borrower only if we go on from there to examine how it fits into the body of his thought. A corollary of this view, which Collingwood does not spell out but which he implies throughout his analyses of other men's thought, is that to borrow is to interpret... It was the multiplicity of his interests and his command of many fields of learning which made Collingwood "capable of borrowing" from Croce, Gentile, and Vico. It was his almost unique intellectual versatility which "laid [Collingwood] open to their influence." p. 87
• "If the source of specific ideas in Collingwood is obscure, the inspiration behind his life-work is clear. He is the fully-educated man, full according to the ideal of John Ruskin... One might say of Collingwood, as of Ruskin, that he is himself the greatest influence on his own thought." p. 89-90

References

• Hyrkkänen's All History is, More or Less, Intellectual History: R. G. Collingwood’s Contribution to the Theory and Methodology of Intellectual History.
• Claudio Guillen's The Aesthetics of Literary Influence, p. 38-39

Techniques for Generating/Eliciting a Hierarchy or Network of Objectives

When structuring an ill-defined problem, eliciting the underlying objectives is fundamental. The task is subjective, but it certainly help to follow a formalized strategy. Evans p. 45 lists some existing approaches.

Clemen and Reilly (2017) p. 52 ask: "How do we first separate means and fundamental objectives and then construct the fundamental-objectives hierarchy and the means-objectives network?" and suggest four guiding questions, techniques, for organizing means and fundamental objectives:

• Why Is That Important? (WITI)
• How can this objective be achieved?
• What do you mean by that?
• Of what more general objective is this an aspect?

Buede (1986) proposes two structuring methods: top down and bottom-up approaches.

• Top-down method: it's objective-driven (close to Keeney and Raiffa 1976); "the analyst begins by ascertaining the global objectives of the decision maker and proceeds to a value structure by subdividing the objectives, sub-objectives, and so forth until a final set of attributes is obtained."
• Bottom-up approach: it's alternative-driven. "The analyst begins by questioning the decision maker for a reasonable set of alternatives, each of which might solve the problem. Once the alternatives are defined, the analyst generates a value structure by probing the decision maker for the major differences between the identified alternatives. The analyst then categorizes these differences into groups corresponding to objectives so that a hierarchical value structure can be systematically constructed. The identified differences comprise the set of attributes."

Manheim and Hall (1967) reject the method which hinge on too much mathematization of decision components (e.g. cost-benefit analysis, and utility theory: von Neumann and Morgenstern) because they "it tends to obfuscate the issues of choice by concealing them in the mathematics of utility". Which is reasonable. The method is:

1. goal fabric analysis: list all the known goals for the project and then identifying the various relations among the goals.
2. utilize the goal fabric analysis to rank the alternatives. This entails mapping each new alternative onto the goal fabric (i. e., predicting the performance of the alternative with respect to some of the goals) and then, using this mapped information and the structure of the goal fabric, comparing the new alternative with one previously ranked, to fit the new one into the ranking.

"The method operates on only two alternatives at a time. Any attempt to formulate a list of goals runs into problems of consistency, overlap and varying degrees of detail of the goals. These problems are usually approached by trying to state all the goals in a uniform way. In the method we propose, however, this is precisely what is not done: the list of goals can contain overlap and different degrees of detail. We propose analyzing the list to identify explicitly all the relations among these "non-uniform" goals. The goal analysis is intended to structure the goals by identifying the relations among them that are relevant to evaluation of the alternatives." There are four relations of importance (the first two guide expansion of the goals list in order to clarify the vague goals)

1. specification: entails explaining in more detail what we mean by the general goal. 
2. means-end: describes how a goal can be accomplished
3. value-wise dependence: are those goals that can be evaluated only in conjunction with other goals.
4. value-wise independence: can be evaluated on their own, without regard to any other goals

Reference
Evans, G. (2017) Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Industrial Engineering. CRC.
Clemen and Reilly (2014) Making Hard Decisions with DecisionTools. CENGAGE
Keeney (1992), Value Focused Thinking. Harvard, p. 57ff
Keneey and Raiffa (1976) p. 31ff
Buede (1986) Structuring Value Attributes. Interfaces, 16. 2
Manheim and Hall (1967) Abstract representations of goals. MIT