Here are some recent phrases that entered the policy lexicon in the last few years that I absolutely hate – “whole of government” and “game changer.” There is a faddishness to tropes in the policy arena that proliferate, that capture a certain sentiment of the moment that soon become over-used. Earlier, it was “tipping point.” I kind of hated that one too. These words are useful short-hand. Ah yes, a game-changer, that which changes the game, a...
H/T to Jacob Levy for pointing this out on twitter.
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. There has been a debate on the Duck lately about the meaning of rational choice theory and game theory, and how it’s different from varied alternative approaches (here, here, and here). I wanted to offer a different interpretation than Arena and Jackson. Both give pretty orthodox interpretations, where...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Michael Martoccio, who is a PhD candidate of Early Modern History with a minor specialization in IR Theory at Northwestern University. His research broadly examines the role of cooperation in shaping political change in Europe, c. 1300-1700. His projects include a study of cooperation-building institutions in Central Italy, the late medieval market for sovereign rights, and a comparative analysis of...
One of the more specious criticisms of the "stopkillerrobots" campaign is that it is using sensationalist language and imagery to whip up a climate of fear around autonomous weapons. So the argument goes, by referring to autonomous weapons as "killer robots" and treating them as a threat to "human" security, campaigners manipulate an unwitting public with robo-apocalyptic metaphors ill-suited to a rational debate about the pace and ethical...
In the Guardian this morning, Christof Heyns very neatly articulates some of the legal arguments with allowing machines the ability to target human beings autonomously - whether they can distinguish civilians and combatants, make qualitative judgments, be held responsible for war crimes. But after going through this back and forth, Heyns then appears to reframe the debate entirely away from the law and into the realm of morality: The...
Above, I've posted another photo of the crack Duck blogging team (that's me upper left, my dissertation advisor is lower right). Right now, I'm en route to a conference in Norway so my 22 month old son has prepared the following post of Thursday Morning Linkage. (Well, if he had, there would be lots of posts about dogs. He loves dogs.) In any case, you're stuck with my persistent interest in conservation, energy, and health issues. More polio...
This brief post started life as a comment on a Facebook discussion thread about peer reviewing practices but I thought it might deserve a wider readership. The question was raised: is it kosher for a journal editor to request information about good reviewers from the author of the manuscript? The general consensus, with which I agree, was that it's fine to request those names because editors are always looking for qualified reviewers, and the...
In his latest post, PTJ moves us past the worst critiques of "rational choice theory" and focuses on a few more nuanced concerns.1 I'm glad to see the conversation progressing, and this type of exchange is one of the things I love most about academic blogging. However, I find some of PTJ's arguments problematic. I argued last week that most criticisms of "rational choice" amount to attempts to persuade graduate students not to learn a...
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between IF and paper citations had been getting stronger, but as predicted, since 1991 the opposite is true: the variance of papers’ citation rates around...
According to a new survey I've just completed, not great. As part of my ongoing research into human security norms, I embedded questions on YouGov's Omnibus survey asking how people feel about the potential for outsourcing lethal targeting decisions to machines. 1000 Americans were surveyed, matched on gender, age, race, income, region, education, party identification, voter registration, ideology, political interest and military status. Across...
So, I teach at a policy school, and though our core pedagogical enterprise is the MA program, we have a small PhD program that is a mix of political science, economics, and maybe a dash of public administration. Though I have not worked closely with that many PhD students, the ones I have worked have been superb. Still, the job market being as it is, it is always tough for graduates of our program, like any other, to land an academic job. The...