[jimduk]

Hi, apart from Hayek (and maybe Ursula Le Guin, and A Hamilton), has anyone got any good pointers on theories for when you favour local over global knowledge or vice versa. Either political theories, or game-theoretic. Transaction cost economics is the closest thing I've seen, and maybe some of Stuart Kauffman's stuff on the adjacent possible and the CEO's job being to 'recut' the company into different divisions. But I've never seen anything along the lines of - if I have a changing fitness landscape L and a set of communicating agents A with different sets of knowledge, and they can use their knowledge to extract value from the local landscape, or they can make tools to increase the value of that knowledge or they can communicate or they can listen, then in what situations should you take different actions. The extremes are easy ( local changing landscape, high comms costs, then don't listen to anyone else; static similar landscape, cheap comms, listen to the cleverest agent); Maybe there is some biology stuff with ants or some agent-based modelling work ?

[JamesLeonis]

I can recommend two authors: Nassim Taleb and James C Scott. In particular their books "Antifragile" and "Seeing Like A State" respectively.

[klmadfejno]

Controversy over Taleb is no secret, but I'll say it every time. Everything I've seen by Taleb seems to be him posing an idea that is obviously flawed, claiming that it is mainstream among widespread experts (when its not), and then taking credit for saying its incorrect, whilst making the reader feel smart because they too see why its obviously wrong.

[baryphonic]

I'm not sure this is true.

Sometimes he says things that are, well, nonsense (e.g. a lot of his anti-GMO posturing), and other times he's right on the money (e.g. criticizing Black-Scholes long before the '08 crisis). In all cases, he insults his detractors as "bullshitters" when it is only warranted for some.

[zaphod4prez]

Both great books!

[davio]

Lean manufacturing or Toyota production system is pretty relevant. The concept of sub-optimizing metrics seemed especially topical to the article.

[camjohnson26]

Demming’s Out of the Crisis talks about reducing variation to improve efficiency and how difficult that is.

[tomgp]

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is a great “nonfiction novel” about the problems of (and conceptual/mathematical limits to) central planning in the Soviet Union.