Rational choice model Wikipedia
Aggregate rationality in archaeology
AI Overview In archaeology, aggregate rationality refers to the principle that large-scale, long-term patterns in the archaeological record are the emergent result of many individual, adaptive decisions rather than top-down societal decrees. National Institutes of Health (.gov) Because archaeological data rarely capture the intent of a single person, archaeologists rely on aggregate patterns to understand past human behavior. The concept spans several key theoretical and methodological frameworks: Key Theoretical Frameworks Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE): HBE operates on the premise that individuals make adaptive, rational choices to maximize their survival and reproductive success (e.g., foraging, toolmaking, or settling). Over time and across a population, these localized choices manifest as broad, measurable patterns, such as shifts in settlement locations or dietary breadth. National Institutes of Health (.gov) Agent-Based Modeling (ABM): ABM relies on the concept of aggregate rationality to simulate past societies. Archaeologists program "agents" (digital representations of people) with basic rules of behavior and resource optimization, allowing them to observe how large-scale, complex societal structures organically emerge from the bottom up. Deutsches Bergbau-Museum +1 Assemblage Theory: Instead of viewing artifact groups as reflections of a single unified "culture," this approach explores how individual objects, human actions, and environmental factors intersect to form dynamic, emergent aggregates of practice over space and time. Springer Nature Link +1 Methodological Implications Understanding "Irrational" Acts: Not all ancient practices conform to modern, Western standards of practical, cost-effective utility. Archaeologists, such as those working with the European Journal of Archaeology, note that ritualistic or symbolic actions—which might appear irrational on the surface—can reflect distinct, past forms of rationality when viewed in their complete environmental and cultural context. Taylor & Francis Online +3 Critique of Homo economicus: Many anthropologists have moved away from the assumption that ancient humans acted as perfectly rational, omniscient economic actors. Instead, aggregate rationality allows for bounded rationality, where decisions are made with limited information and under social or environmental constraints
Aggregate rationality in archaeology via Google Scholar
Particularism and the retreat from theory in the archaeology of agricultural origins Kristen Gremillion et al. PNAS (2014)
Review of Wurzer, Gabriel, Kowarik, Kerstin and Reschreiter, Hans (eds.): Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology Advances in Geographic Information Science (2014)
Archaeology as Complexity Science: An Agent-based Perspective bergbaumuseum.de
Models are pieces of machinery that relate observations to theoretical ideas (Clarke, 1972)...A complex adaptive system, then, is a complex system containing adaptive agents, networked so that the environment of each adaptive agent includes other agents in the system.
...Agent-based Modelling and Complexity Economics for Archaeology?!
- Economics is interested in the production, allocation and consumption of material goods and also services, but mainly in present time.
- Archaeological evidence, both indirect (e.g., land-use change) or direct (e.g., material artefacts) are part of the economic systems of our past.
- Economic theory is not limited to market-economies.
- Complexity Economics is transdisciplinary.
Social_Theory and Archaeology Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (pdf)
Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology Shumon T Hussain and Maneul Will J Archaeol Method Theory (2020) (full text)
In anthropology
... In anthropology, "aggregate rationality" refers to the concept of whether the collective behaviors of a society—such as economic trends, institutions, or rituals—can be explained as the logical sum of individual, self-interested decisions. It is a central point of debate between formalist and substantivist schools of thought. [1, 2, 3]Anthropologists approach aggregate rationality in the following ways:
1. Rational Choice Theory (Formalism)
2. The Cultural Critique (Substantivism)
- The Core Idea: Posits that human behavior, across all cultures, can be understood as the aggregate outcome of individuals making logical, self-interested choices to maximize their material or social gain.[1]
- Application: Used frequently in economic, ecological, and evolutionary anthropology to model collective-action dilemmas, such as the management of shared resources or community trading networks. [1, 2]
3. Bounded Rationality and Practice
- The Core Idea: Anthropologists often argue that true aggregate rationality is a myth. Substantivists emphasize that human decision-making is not universally driven by capitalist utility-maximization, but is instead embedded in complex webs of social meaning, religious obligations, and kinship. [1, 2, 3]
- Application: Collective institutions often emerge from "thick psychological" cultural beliefs and historical realities rather than technical, economic formulas. [1]
4. Group Selection vs. Individual Maximization
- The Middle Ground: Many modern anthropologists utilize frameworks like bounded rationality. This approach acknowledges that while people do use reasoning, they do so with limited information, distinct cultural cognitive biases, and culturally defined goals rather than absolute, objective logic. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- The Evolutionary Perspective: Anthropologists debate whether aggregate cultural practices (like food sharing or specific taboos) exist because they are rationally chosen by individuals, or because groups with these practices were more successful in survival and evolution (cultural group selection). [1]
Aggregate rationality in anthropology Google Scholar
Rational Choice Theory R Jon McGee and Richard L Warms
Rational choice theory is an umbrella term for a variety of models explaining social phenomena as outcomes of individual action that can in some way be construed as rational. "Rational behavior" is behavior that is suitable for the realization of specific goals, given the limitations imposed by the situation. The key elements of all rational choice explanations are individual preferences, beliefs, and constraints. Preferences denote the positive or negative evaluations individuals attach to the possible outcomes of their actions. Preferences can have many roots, ranging from culturally transmitted tastes for food or other items to personal habits and commitments. Beliefs refer to perceived cause-effect relations, including the perceived likelihood with which an individual's actions will result in different possible outcomes. For example, a village head may believe that raiding a neighboring village A has a higher probability of success than raiding a neighboring village B. Constraints define the limits to the set of feasible actions (e.g., the amount of credit one can get imposes a budget constraint on those considering buying a house).
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz Darren Mueller via library.upenn.edu (2024) and full text from Duke UP
10 Hacks Every MacBook Pro User Should Know
Brian Sietsema, Linguist/Priest via languagehat
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A synthetic cell grew, copied its DNA, and split in two boingboing
Rainbow Nation maps mania
How Trump Sabotaged Independence Day Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
Book Freak Kevin Kelly
H.G. Wells Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)Science Friday
The making of the Manhattan Project Alex Wellerstein...Cai et al. (5) integrate a dynamical learning model into a computing system that processes data inside the memory hardware, rather than moving data back and forth to a separate processor. The platform can perform high-fidelity calculation with a millisecond-scale latency, establishing a pathway toward real-time computation in clinical imaging, robotics, and embodied intelligence.A neural dynamical system (6) is a computing framework that models how a surface continuously evolves over time, guided by artificial neural networks that define the rule of motion. In contrast to discrete-time models, such as a residual neural network that cannot reproduce the smooth temporal evolution of a physical system, a neural dynamical system formulates continuity by integrating an embedded neural network—a fixed, pretrained artificial neural network with weight values stored in memory units—and adjusting the discrete interval used in each iteration (time step). Such a continuous framework is mathematically designed to smoothly deform a system's state on a manifold surface—such as genus-0, which has zero “holes” and can be continuously deformed without introducing topological changes (tearing or merging) over time. This topological consistency helps ensure that the simulated dynamics remain physically faithful while improving fidelity and predictability.
...Cai et al. integrate a neural dynamical system into a computing-in-memory architecture (7) that performs data storage and computation within the same memory array. Analogous to processing raw milk on a dairy farm instead of transferring it to a factory, a computing-in-memory approach fundamentally reduces the latency and energy use incurred by data movement in von Neumann devices.
End "reusable" waste dumping in Africa
A Hormone Cell Atlas maps the human endocrine system at cellular resolution
Ronald Ernest Hahn obit, via Ted Gioia
Stop, collaborator, and listen! Sarah Kendzior
...The most galling aspect of Trump's 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force?Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty.
The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
Trump gets blamed, but he's an inflatable tube dude at a mafia chop shop. His apathy to governance is mistaken for sway. Governing was never the point. Trump's casual treason has always made him an ideal vessel for America's going-out-of-business sale.
The buyers are foreign and domestic, but one looms above all. One that demands from Americans both taxation and representation — for their wars, their genocide, their demands that US laws on speech and assembly be shaped around their desires, US independence be damned.
The uniparty's fealty lies with Israel.
...The few representatives that oppose funding Israel — whether a right-wing libertarian like Thomas Massie or a left-wing Ferguson activist like Cori Bush — are ousted through smear campaigns and massive donations to candidates selected for their obedience to the lobby. American civilians who criticize Israel's wars risk losing their jobs, particularly if they work in education, media, or law. Jewish-Americans who criticize the Israeli government are deemed traitors: to Israel.
There's a Crack in Everything Sam Buntz
...The way digital recording technology functions feels like an allegory for how the world has moved more generally. Digital recording functions by cutting music up into pieces, into bytes, whereas traditional analog methods record the whole sound. They don't leave anything out. This is why vinyl records have higher fidelity, with the needle flowing over the unbroken groove rather than interpreting a collection of mico-pieces of sonic data. Philosophically, we could argue that the move towards digital constitutes privileging the part over the whole and hence the left brain (which perceives parts) above the right brain (which perceives wholes). The world has grown more technical and hence more obsessed with analysis, with dissection.Naturally, this acts at cross-purposes with artists, who follow their instincts and intuitions, who trace the flowing line of the whole, as opposed to engaging in the analytical dissection more characteristic of the technical professions (and of editors). But the coldness of digital, its harsh white LED-like glow, can be strategically incorporated to generate a personal and artistic effect.
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Photo statistics: how many photos are taken every day in 2026?
Five Photography Truisms That Aren't True. Or Are They? Pete Cripps at Medium
...It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
--David BaileySeeing Before Knowing“ Anthony Morganti at Medium
The Tiny White Grain That Runs The World (And No — It's Not Cocaine) Quantastic Journal
...A battery is a controlled difference across a boundary. One side holds more charged stuff than the other. The machine works because the difference wants to collapse, and some clever structure forces the collapse to pass through a useful gate.Modern biology runs on ion gradients, charged differences held across membranes so thin they make a soap bubble look like a Chernobyl's dome. Sodium on one side. Potassium on the other. A gate opens, charge moves, a nerve fires, a muscle contracts, a thought crosses the room inside your skull and becomes your hand reaching for the...salt shaker.
So the first battery wasn't built. It was metabolized.
...Every animal cell is a tiny border dispute. Sodium wants in. Potassium wants out. Water wants to follow the crowd. The cell wants to live, which means it has to keep the crowd from becoming a flood.
So the body runs a pump. It spends energy shoving sodium out and pulling potassium in, over and over, like a nightclub bouncer working the door during a riot. Three sodium ions out, two potassium ions in. One ATP molecule burned for the privilege. Repeat this enough times and the membrane becomes a charged wall.
In the brain, this maintenance bill gets obscene. Neuroscience estimates that the sodium-potassium pump uses about 20 to 40 percent of the brain's energy. That means a big slice of breakfast never becomes a poem, a bad decision, or a brilliant excuse. It goes into keeping tiny charged particles apart so the next signal can actually happen.
...The body hides infrastructure inside pleasure. You think you want chips. The mammal wants voltage.
...People worked the Hallstatt salt mine in Austria for thousands of years, carving wealth out of a mountain. And salt preserved tools, textiles, leather, wood, and human waste so well that researchers could study ancient feces and identify what miners had eaten. In one Iron Age sample, DNA from Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae gave the first molecular evidence for blue cheese and beer consumption in Iron Age Europe. The proof came through Hallstatt waste.
...Sodium-ion batteries are now leaving lab promises for industrial seriousness. Their appeal is easy to understand. Sodium is common, widely distributed, and far less geopolitically concentrated than lithium, cobalt, nickel, or graphite. The chemistry can suit stationary storage, where weight matters less than cost, safety, and supply. A 2025 analysis of sodium-ion battery roadmaps found pathways to competitiveness with low-cost lithium-ion batteries in the 2030s, but only with technical progress and with outcomes still tied to lithium, graphite, and nickel markets.
...Oil was power because it stored ancient sunlight in a dense, burnable form. It is indeed a superpower that makes machines move, armies faster, suburbs possible, plastics cheap, and politicians strangely emotional about shipping lanes. Salt works through a different logic: it stores difference. Across a membrane, that difference becomes life. In food, it becomes time. In a state monopoly, it becomes revenue. In a cavern, it becomes strategic fuel. In a battery, it becomes a charger waiting behind a gate.
A civilization can run for a long time on the substances that help it cross boundaries, between seasons, markets, bodies, empires, and electrons. It can also forget that every boundary has a cost. The body pays in ATP. The deer pays in distance. The miner pays in lungs, joints, and years. The river pays in chloride after the thaw.
And the future pays when another “abundant” material becomes a growth story before anyone asks what scale will do to it.
Mapping the Origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything maps mania
...dozens of creation stories that you can explore on the Origin Myth Map, an interactive atlas of the myths that civilizations have used to explain the origins of the universe, the earth and humanity. The map brings together the origin traditions of 51 civilizations spanning five historical eras, from prehistoric societies to the early modern period....The Origin Myth Map's Migration Paths mode highlights some of the great journeys that carried myths and cosmological beliefs from one region to another. For example, the Silk Road transported far more than silk, spices and precious goods. For over 1,600 years it also served as one of history's greatest conduits for the exchange of religions, philosophies and cosmological ideas.
Gaza Genocide is a World-Historical Event Juan Cole
...It's enormous. 80% of the buildings have been destroyed and, as you say, 1.7 million people displaced. There were only two million people in Gaza. So it's almost everybody that has been displaced. And people are living in tents. Most important medicines are not available. There's high mortality not only from people having been bombed to death but also from disease, from malnutrition, and from inadequate health care, because most of the hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. The children are not in school except informally, because the schools have been destroyed. There are no schools or universities standing.So this is a world historical event. We have seen many genocides in the last century. We saw Rwanda and Cambodia and so forth. But if we look at this proportionally — it's a small place, with the 2 million population — then the proportion of people devastated by this particular military campaign, which I think is a genocide, is unprecedented.
Crooked Donald and the Strait of Hormuz Tom Engelhardt
building a crwth, a might-be Project
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Alien v. Predator or MAGA meets AI - a "crossover" monument to the USA at 250 Adam Tooze
We live in a world of divergent, incongruent but overlapping shocks. In recent years, I've been trying to capture this agglomeration of heterogeneous historical forces with the notion of the polycrisis. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the USA it seems as though we may need a more graphic image.In pop culture there is a genre known as "crossover", where the main protagonists of different fictional universes — often monsters — are brought together in one narrative space.
...From the point of view of anyone trying to narrate our current reality, such crossovers may serve as a fertile image: Not one nightmare, not one drama, not one cast of "bad guys" v. "good guys", but distinct, overlapping dystopias, in a giant melange.
In 2026 we have the China shock discourse — the global division of labour being upended by China's gigantic growth model -—some sort of East Asian mechatronic giant, more or less effectively corralled by the CPC on a mission of historic national rejuvenation.
Then we have the war-mongering "middle powers" — the likes of Russia, Israel, UAE unleashing regional mayhem.
And we have the US, still straddling the world with its military and financial infrastructure, but caught internally by the dynamics of MAGA and AI.
...Does "America" have a program? Does it form anything resembling a single coherent power, whether for better or worse? At this point, surely, it would be embarrassing to claim so. Better surely to concede that elite coherence has collapsed and that the US as it enters its second quarter millennium, is best thought of not as a single coherent agent, but as an incubator, a petri dish, a "zone" from which things emerge that defy summation in a single graphic image.
...it was, in fact, from the midst of that process of transformation, in the 1930s and 1940s, that the comic book imagination of the US emerged. So if we grant that the US has always been a "zone" as much as a single coherent state, let us concede that Jefferson or suburban imagery is candy coated. In the current moment, the environment that comes to mind is not a slave-based idyll like Jefferson's Monticello, but Batman's Gotham city — a mythical, corrupt and depraved urban sprawl, located somewhere in New Jersey.
...On the national anniversary, the USA as "zone" is presided over by a president who is shamelessly engaged in haphazard and fly-by-night self-enrichment to the tune of a few billion dollars or so, mainly through crypto scams. Meanwhile, the broligarchs — the real lords of Gotham city — play for the serious money, with rockets, chips, AI models, a hundred billion, a trillion at a time.
For birthday entertainment, the White House hosts cage fights.
The Pentagon is a war-fighting machine that has command-chain issues and unleashes mayhem with global implications in coalitions with other powers, for which it lacks any obvious national rationale.
Dotted across this landscape there are, of course, much private prosperity, livable communities, comfortable suburbs and highly potent centers of innovation. In those centers engineers from all over the world work to generate new technologies of finance, fossil energy and tech. If we are looking for powerful, world-changing monsters in Gotham city, right now, AI is where it is at.
Max Headroom — Complete Series at archive.org
via Tooze:
...President Donald Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in his first year back in office, often in intense bursts tied to market events he created.The total dollar value of the trades was somewhere between $600 million and $1.86 billion, according to his financial disclosure for 2025, which lists values in broad ranges. Many of the transactions involve large companies that have business with the federal government.
Trump averaged 85 trades per market day, an analysis of the report shows. Just 10 days accounted for about a quarter of all trades executed in 2025. Many of those came during heightened volatility on Wall Street after Trump had already announced policy changes.< /blockquote>
and from WSJ, via Tooze:
Trump Made $1 Billion on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a FortuneMorten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire.Instead, the value of those tokens tanked. While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week.
"In crypto, people say a game is a game," the digital-asset entrepreneur said. "He played a better game than I did."
It has been clear for some time that President Trump's forays into the crypto world have been lucrative, but the stunning disclosure that those ventures earned him some $1.4 billion last year underscored the different reality the president is living in from many of the investors who have embraced digital assets alongside him.
The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.
Roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump's memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent a few thousand on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen's analysis of 26,663 wallets shows that 85% of World Liberty's $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater.
The Grain of the Note Philip Clark at NYRB
...The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the literal fear of God. The composer Liza Lim conceived her forthcoming work Tongue of the Land, crafted for the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, around the demands of this long-forgotten instrumental hardware.Sealskin Jeff Dworsky
Two Scorpions in a Jar: Netanyahu and Trump Informed Comment
