Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on public administration and organizational sociology. (I do actually have qualifications to opine on spatio-temporal stochastic processes.) Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left unfinished in 2023, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Ole E. Barndorff-Nielsen, Fred Espen Benth, and Almut E. D. Veraart, Ambit Stochastics [doi:10.1007/978-3-319-94129-5]

Having previously described related work, by Barndorff-Nielsen and different collaborators, in an edited volume, I will risk repeating myself a bit. Suppose we have a random field \( Z(r, t) \), with \( r \) the spatial coordinate and \( t \) the time coordinate. The "ambit" of the space-time point-instant \( (r,t) \) is the set of all point-instants \( (q, u) \) with \( u \) earlier than \( t \), and where \( Z(q,u) \) is (causally) relevant to \( Z(r,t) \). (This is what, in my own work and that of my students, we've called the "past cone" of \( (r,t) \).) Having a regular geometry for the ambit of every point-instant imposes important restrictions on possible distributions for random fields. A large part of this book is about exploiting those restrictions to make models of various biological, physical, and financial (!) phenomena more tractable. The results on turbulence, in particular, were pretty eye-opening to me.

A lot of the rest of the book is about defining stochastic integrals, where \( X(r,t) \) is the integral of \( Z(q, u) \) over the ambit of \( (r, t) \). This is actually neat, if you are really into stochastic integrals, but I have to admit I had trouble keeping track of the real-world (or at least modeling-world) point of all the mathematical elaboration.

Reading this needs a good grasp of measure-theoretic probability, and some prior acquaintance with stochastic integrals and stochastic differential equations (Kallenberg would more than suffice on both scores). With that background, I found it pretty clear, and the parts about spatio-temporal modeling, at least, very interesting. §

Donald Chisholm, Coordination Without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational Systems [1989; Full text free online from the publisher]

At least the time Chisholm was writing, authors in public administration, management theory, etc., would commonly opine that it was important for efficiency and robustness to have services delivered by a single integrated formal organization; or, failing that, by formal linkages across organizations. The point of this book was to push back against that, seeking to demonstrate that informal ties, across the personnel of otherwise dis-connected organizations, could do useful coordinating work, without the bureaucracy, alienation, and general dreary grind of formal inter-agency processes. The empirical case study was public transit in the Bay Area, then (and now) a mess of disparate jurisdictions and agencies. (The Washington, D.C. area, and the unified Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, serves as a less-detailed contrast case.)

My reaction to this is pretty mixed. On the one hand, Chisholm does indeed demonstrate that his informal ties, together with a good deal of ad hoc improvisation, helped the system function. There certainly was coordination through these informal social connections among key personnel, and he has a lot of interesting ideas about how these informal ties were created and activated, and how they might be cultivated. He also has some sound observations about looking for nearly-decomposable sub-systems, and splitting organizations along those lines. (This is inspired by Herbert Simon, but is also reminiscent of early, Notes on the Synthesis of Form-vintage Christopher Alexander.)

On the other hand, there are downsides to informal coordination to which he is partially or totally blind.

1. Because this is all informal, drinking- or squash- buddy stuff, it is fragile in a way Chisholm doesn't acknowledge. It's all well and good that when you need to make something work with Muni, you can call up your good friend Frank, but what happens when Frank retires, or has a heart attack, or has a mid-life crisis and moves to Petaluma with his secretary, or (God forbid) has an affair with your wife? (I use the gendered language deliberately; see below.) Such coordination is also not accountable in the way that formal processes can be. I think it's fair to say that Chisholm says nothing about this sort of downside, about fragility and lack of accountability, at all.
2. Unsuprisingly, Chisholm documents a great deal of homophily in these informal ties. (I can't recall if he uses that bit of jargon.) Bluntly put, if you wanted, in the 1970s/1980s, to informally coordinate your Bay Area transit agency with others, you should really have been white, male, at least middle class, college educated, lived in a certain kind of neighborhood, etc., etc., through all the usual categories. (There is an annotated sociomatrix which is just begging for algorithmic community discovery, if I ever get around to transcribing it.) If, as a matter of democratic public policy, we want to open positions of responsibility to people who do not check all those boxes, but we also rely on informal coordination in the way Chisholm describes, we will find that the newcomers are systematically less effective, because they are excluded from the cliques that make things happen. (Or at best they'll make their own clique.)

Now, the fact that informal coordination has downsides doesn't mean it's useless; everything has downsides. But I am struck by how little attention this book gives to what seem like obvious difficulties.

In a phrase: This would be a much stronger book if it had wrestled with Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". §

Allison Brennan, Nothing to Hide

Mind candy thriller, somehow equally about a serial killer and about secrets in marriage. (Previously in this series.) §

Monique Snyman, Dark Country

Mind candy horror/mystery, stalking and being stalked by the somewhat-supernatural serial killer, with extensive local color for contemporary South Africa. There are rough patches, but it's a perfectly enjoyable specimen of this type of novel. It's obviously the set-up for a series, and I'm not sure I need to follow these characters, but I would be happy to read more by Snyman. §

Disclaimer: I got a review copy through LibraryThing, but I have no stake in the book's success.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; Enigmas of Chance; Networks; Commit a Social Science