INDEP online Talk with Dennis Yao on Political, Theoretical, and Computational Models of Social Worlds

This talk considers the role of politics in the construction of systems of democratic planning. The thesis is that planning systems are downstream of theoretical models of society, and theoretical models are downstream of politics. But what makes a political question different from a theoretical one? The definition of a good model may change as we shift registers. And what guarantees do we have that the tools we build for democratic planning will be responsive to these questions?

For example, there may be various demands that a planning system should operate the same regardless of your position in society. But then this implies taking into account those positions which may be exogenous to the system. The definition of success thereby becomes bounded to historical-political processes. We will consider a framework for incorporating this type of social information in the case of computer simulations, as well as the challenges of deploying such computational models.

Dennis Yao is a member of the Subset of Theoretical Practice.

The event will be in English.

To participate, register here.

Photo by Bioscience Image Library by Fayette Reynolds on Unsplash.