Zero Intelligence Agents

There are few texts that have shaped modern military philosophy more than Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. Having been written more than two centuries ago, its lasting impact on military affairs is a testament to its unique quality and importance. As a student of conflict, but not a practitioner, this is not a work that —on the surface—appears immediately relevant to the academic pursuits in the study of conflict. With chapters covering “The Passage of Rivers” to “Attack of a Mountain Range,” Clausewitz provides what may best be described as a how-to manual for the conduct of war, and for better or worse, one would be much more likely to find On War cited in a class at West Point than in a graduate-level political science course. During a recent cross-country trip, however, I had the opportunity to read it and was struck by Clausewitz’s persistent use of rational choice in forming his strategic and tactical strategies.

My motivation for reading On War was two-fold; first, given the frequency with which it is cited by the conductors of war I felt a personal deficiency in never having read it. Second, and more importantly, the work is often presented as evidence to the power of qualitative work in conflict research, and thus implying a weakness in formal or quantitative work. To be sure, Clausewitz is a tremendous student of war. To support the claims in each chapter, he cites battle examples from all of the great European and ancient wars. Fully aware of my own bias, and the tendency of one to read what wants to read, there is an undeniable theme of rational choice interwoven into On War, and as such, this text may further prove its worth—as a bridge between academics and practitioners.

Continue reading Clausewitz and Rational Choice

Michael Innes, blogger friend and research fellow at the University of Leeds, sent me a note announcing an interesting new venture (emphasis mine):

I’d like to draw your attention to a new magazine project. Some of you may already be familiar with The Complex Terrain Laboratory (CTlab) and its blog, Current Intelligence. That blog has now moved to its own accommodations (http://www.currentintelligence.net) and evolved into Current Intelligence Magazine.

CTlab’s online presence will effectively cease to exist at some point over the coming weeks, at which point the terraplexic.org URL will redirect to the new site.

The new website looks great, and with a team of heavy-hitting contributors I would expect great things from CI Magazine!

How do I know?

Continue reading New Mexico Loves My Blog!

Blogging will be very limited (vacant) for the rest of this week, as I am traveling to New Mexico to discuss models of social networks with the very smart folks at Los Alamos National Laboratories—the people who bring you NetworkX. If you’re in New Mexico this week, come say hello!

In the meantime, Valdis Krebs asks the following question via Twitter: Why don’t terrorists organize in this distributed way?

Continue reading Terrible Covert Network Structure?

This is the fifth in a series of thought pieces exploring how human rights can be studied both formally, through the use of abstract models, or empirically through large-N statistical models.

Literature on the connections between human rights treaties and their realization is both long and contradictory. This is illustrated clearly by the review of theoretical expectations within the human rights treaties literature provided by Neumayer. This review spans the gamut of theories, from the most pessimistic (neo)-realists, such as Hathaway, whom predict that not only will treaties not result in realization, but can actually work to prevent human progression, to the most optimistic “transnational human rights advocacy networks.” Here, I will focus on the claims of the latter by exploring the structure of these networks, and affect this may have on their internal dynamics.

As Neumayer states, these advocacy networks, “consist of international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, together with domestic NGOs and other civil society groups, parties, or the media committed to human rights (Neumayer, 2005, p. 930).” The theory posits that through their combined effort, these networks are able to apply increasing levels of pressure to oppressive regimes through a “spiral model.” This occurs through five stages, each with an increasing realization of human rights. Given that the relationships among these organizations is assumed to be a network; however, it is peculiar that the theory would predict both collaboration and iterative improvement.

Continue reading Challenges to the ‘Advocacy Networks’ Theory in Human Rights

Yesterday, Andrew Exum—a person who admits his own ignorance of the current state-of-the-art in political science literature—presented his “manifesto” on the quantitative analysis of conflict. While Exum’s bonafides in counterinsurgency and military strategy go without saying, given that he knows almost nothing about quantitative analysis I found this manifest rather disingenuous. Furthermore, since he has referred to me as a quantitative “hired assassin,” I felt an additional duty to respond.

To be fair, Exum has recently praised the work of contemporary quantitative analysis of conflict by scholars such as Lyall, Berman and Shapiro, all three of which whom are well deserving of praise. As such, it is peculiar that Exum would feel the need to present this manifesto after having to first be told by others about this work (due presumedly to his own admitted ignorance); and second, actually liking it. To be sure, such an endeavor is useful, as it is clear that both subtle formal models and sophisticated statistical analyses can be manipulated and misinterpreted to present dangerous falsehoods; however, Exum’s attempt to undervalue the contributions of this work with respect to policy is equally dangerous.

Continue reading On the Value of Quantitative Analysis of Conflict

This is the forth in a series of thought pieces exploring how human rights can be studied both formally, through the use of abstract models, or empirically through large-N statistical models.

At its core, Bury the Chains is an account of how a tiny—yet active—minority changed an economic system in Great Britain from the ground up. The economy supporting human trafficking for slavery during the 18th century in England was enormous, and at the time it would have seemed impossible to change the system, let alone in a mere fifty years of protest and resistance. The process by which these ideas, e.g., the morally abhorrent nature of slavery, were spread and absorbed by the English population and its elites is fascinating from the perspective of the power of social networks, and how information can be transmitted through these ties.

There is a large literature on the importance of revolutionary vanguards, with a burgeoning sub-field exploring the effect of these highly influential individuals formally. The difficulty with this work is that many of these models produce untestable predictions. That is, data does not exist on the dynamics of interactions among these vanguards and the populations they target. Substantively, however, we can understand these interactions as occurring within a population of heterogeneous individuals, each with a unique ideal point (with respect to the position promoted by a vanguard) and a propensity for influence. In addition, this population exists on a rich fabric of social ties, over which information related to the vanguard can be transmitted, changed, absorbed or rejected. As such, a potential avenue for testing the hypotheses of previous formal work, or original contributions, is to design a computational model of networked social interaction of heterogeneous agents.

Continue reading Testing Models of Revolutionary Vanguards

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the Slate series Searching for Saddam, which describes how refocusing the militaries attention at Saddam’s social network—rather than his military hierarchy—was critical in his ultimate capture.

Amid all that disaster, the capture of Saddam Hussein has become a forgotten success story. It’s an accomplishment that wasn’t inevitable. In a five-part series that begins today, I’ll explain how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein. I’ll also look at how this hunt was a departure in strategy for the military, why its techniques aren’t deployed more often, and why social-networking theory hasn’t helped us nab Osama Bin Laden.

The series began yesterday and will finish on Friday, and as such I will withhold comment until I have read the entire piece. Thus far; however, it has been a fascinating account of the people and who promoted network science, and why it was so critical for tracking Saddam. That said, I was a bit dismayed by the phrase, “theories that underpin Facebook,” from the above quotation. If, in fact, it turns out that the military was relying on Facebook level network theory then one could easily understand why those techniques have been unsuccessful in narrowing the search for bin Laden.

This post is an open-ended thought experiment regarding my ongoing research in random graph models of social networks.

On Wednesday I attending my first NYC Machine Learning Meetup, where the topic was graphical models. The talk was given by Max Khesin (slides and video), and while I am casually familiar with the subject of probabilistic graphic models it was an excellent introduction. The representation of probabilities as a directed graph is very elegant and powerful, and as such the talk motivated me to think about how to apply it to my own work.

Continue reading Open Problem: Decomposition of a Complete Graph Into A Bayesian Network

It is not often that I find myself interested in domestic politics, but this morning the Obama administration released the following graphic related to job loss data and it caught my eye. Continue reading What’s Wrong with the Obama Job Loss Graphic?