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The problem with incommensurabilities is that they do not tally with our natural tendencies to fall for the nirvana fallacy. We crave for general solutions. Such solutions would be provided by a general model for marginal-DOLAR!-cost valuations of transactions. But the elements of the virtual DOLAR! value are incommensurable. Thinking in terms of general DOLAR! […] Continue reading → ...

I began to tweet again on March 1, spirited on by the UWV ICT-plan-and-litigation situation. My agent-based modeling perspective leads to a whole collection of tweets which I can chain together, I just noticed. I will use the current chain to explain my modeling assumptions. My main assumption is that agent based modeling and simulation […] Continue reading → ...

Unlike economic men, we play multiple roles concurrently: part community man, part civil servant, part entrepreneur and part consumer. But we tend to identify with a single one. Yet with each transaction we exchange (and stash) four currencies, not one. Such opens up several possibilities to model for political `not just for the money’ deliberations […] Continue reading → ...

Marco Velicogna and I are editing the forthcoming EQPAM Special Issue on Legal Requirements Engineering for Complex Sociotechnical Systems. Here is the call. Continue reading → ...

DOLAR!s for Mazzucato? In The Value of Everything Mariana Mazzucato states her aim as putting value back at the centre of economic reasoning. She has an inclusive value concept. I fear that such would facilitate legitimation of the abuses she fights instead of curbing it. When Science, Sociology, Law, Economics and Psychology are specializations around […] Continue reading → ...

When DOLAR! would indicate the value of a mechanism for Division-of-Labor-and-Reintegration issues, the DOLAR! value of Wikipadia would be high and the DOLAR! values of the (Dutch) ICT plans for the UWV (2019) and the judiciary (KEI, 2018) would be negative. Methinks that in political decision making we often behave as-if we know the DOLAR! […] Continue reading → ...

The lead article in de Volkskrant   (a mainstream Dutch newspaper) of today provides an example. The UWV, responsible for processing social benefits in the Netherlands, is reported to be summoned to litigation by its Works Council in the attempt to prevent an ICT plan of 500M Euros to be realized. This is stuff that […] Continue reading → ...

After several years of neglect I take up the blog (and twitter) again. In 2016 I decided to find out more about how complexity and legal theories could inforce each other. Since then I worked on what the questions are and how agent based  modeling can help. We (with Kunbei Zhang) considered several use cases […] Continue reading → ...

The following astract was submitted to CCS16 by Kunbei Zhang and Aernout Schmidt: Blending Complexity Research Disruptive complex adaptive systems (CASs, e.g. the profiling/social-media complex) put more and more pressures on individual agents’ capacities to act autonomously and responsible. As legal theorists we have some questions here. The foundation of our trade is a conception […] Continue reading → ...

Marion Dumas (SFI, USA) and  Aernout Schmidt (Leiden University, the Netherlands) are organizing a one-day Satellite Session on Law and Complexity for the Conference on Complex Systems, September 2016 in Amsterdam. The initiative is a follow-up on a discussion about the role of legal theorists in interdisciplinary complexity research teams. The proposal has been awarded  and […] Continue reading → ...

On November 21, 2015, I attended the launching seminar of the NPCS (Netherland’s Platform for Complex Systems). The occasion seemed important to me. Many of you have contributed to its establishment. So first of all: congratulations! I went there with high expectations of meeting kindred spirits. These expectations were more than met, yet I also […] Continue reading → ...

Yesterday we (Tina, Michiel, Carl, Gerrit-Jan and me) had a brainstorm meeting over the peer-reviewed, published article by Michiel on Big Data and what credible bargaining powers consumers can feasibly command in order to be taken seriously while endeavoring to participate in the shaping of privacy contracts, case law and legal rules that protect their […] Continue reading → ...