One Big Outline and Two Small Derivations

Over the last few days, I have successfully created a 30-page, single-spaced LaTex document describing the core problems in strategic theory that computational modeling would address. This is an enormous breakthrough and achievement for me (a broken record, but in terms of conceptualization this month + half was huge). Once I had worked my way through various methodological permutations of some methodological first principles, I then felt that I had covered necessary ground to really focus on linking it to strategic studies theory and literature. The result is my conceptual sketch, a 30-page behemoth that looks squarely at the problem of how strategic behavior is viewed through the prism of ends-based rationality, and addresses and surveys a wide amount of literature in the strategic studies and strategic theory universe before proposing a methodological approach. It is, however, a big mess.

Now that I finally seem to have a big picture view that links the Colin Gray and others to the computational aspects, I am less willing to scrap the whole thing and start over (as I often did when I sensed was at a local optima) and more willing to build on it by fleshing it out through experiments as well as scratchpad entries that take an idea from the 30-pager and develop it in more detail. Both will be helpful, but the latter will be especially useful in successively expanding a kind of intellectual search node until I get to the bottom of the tree. This will help me edit the 30-page doc better by knowing what to cut, what is interesting, and what I ought to include in it that I wasn’t sure about, etc.

Also, the more practice I have with LaTex, the better…..You can find the first scratchpad elaboration here, on modeling and political realism. The second one here is on strategic explanations, or lack theorof. I will be posting more of these as they come to me from my scrutiny of the 30-page outline. This is going extremely well, and I’m kicking myself for not trying this method of brainstorming earlier. Given how much progress I’ve made since late August alone, I could have probably done this much earlier and saved myself a lot of time and effort.