Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Seeing Around Corners

Schelling’s model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce outcomes that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: outcomes that were in no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate. “The interplay of individual choices, where unorganized segregation is concerned, is a complex system with collective results that bear no close relation to the individual intent,” he wrote in 1969. In other words, even in this extremely crude little world, knowing individuals’ intent does not allow you to foresee the social outcome, and knowing the social outcome does not give you an accurate picture of individuals’ intent. Furthermore, the godlike outside observer—Schelling, or me, or you—is no more able to foresee what will happen than are the agents themselves. The only way to discover what pattern, if any, will emerge from a given set of rules and a particular starting point is to move the pennies around and watch the results.

Poorly titled, but fascinating piece on artificial societies and the insights these models create. Long, but well worth the read.

I used to think that the notion of government funding for late-night basketball was silly, or at best symbolic. In fact it may be exactly the right approach, because pulling a few influential boys off the streets and out of trouble might halt a chain reaction among their impressionable peers. It now seems to me that programs like President Clinton’s effort to hire 100,000 additional police officers and spread them in a uniform film across every jurisdiction are the gestural, brain-dead ones, because they ignore the world’s lumpiness.

I’m also rapidly coming to the conclusion that The Atlantic is one hell of a magazine (and most, if not all of it appears to be available free online!)