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Adapted and extended from an address to the Military Applications Society of INFORMS delivered in Monterey CA on 27 March 2012.

The importance of the soc sci's has been much exaggerated. The soc sci'ts are particularly bad at prediction, & so at helping us to forestall the SP crises that occur more & more often. The rate of soc change has gone up very sharply for a number of reasons, so surprises are more frequent. This rate should ae reduced, at least in rich countries, which face far more unknown situations. Poor countries, on the other hand, mainly face situations known from those slightly more advanced. What poor countries mostly need, therefore, is better information, of old kind, not new kinds of information. Crisis-anticipating information will mostly be valueless, since no one knows how to winnow it. It also requires many low-level informers, & the identity of these people is a major problem of pol'al power. So is the identity of the processor & publisher of their data. Substantial improvements in information & its use might abolish democracy. HA.

The importance of the social sciences has been much exaggerated. The social scientists are particularly bad at prediction, and so at helping us to forestall the socio-political crises that occur more and more often. The rate of social change has gone up very sharply for a number of reasons, so surprises are more frequent. This rate should be reduced, at least in rich countries, which face far more unknown situations. Poor countries, on the other hand, face mainly situations known from those slightly more advanced. What poor countries mostly need, therefore, is better information of old kinds, not new kinds of information. Crisis-anticipating information will mostly be valueless, since no one knows how to winnow it. It also requires many low-level informers, and the identity of these people is a major problem of political power. So is the identity of the processor and publisher of their data. Substantial improvements in information and its use might abolish democracy.

InAn American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,Gunnar Myrdal (1944) argued that white Americans were caught in a dilemma, torn between their commitment to noble democratic principles—what Myrdal called the American Creed—on the one side, and their belief in the superiority of the white race, on the other. Myrdal was certain that in the struggle between democratic principles and race prejudice, the former would prevail. Prejudice, Myrdal famously predicted, was about to disappear. Acknowledging the considerable progress that has taken place in American race relations over the past 60 years, we show that on this particular point Myrdal was wrong. Contrary to his prediction, prejudice has not disappeared; nor has its political significance diminished. Prejudice remains and its importance for politics depends, today as in Myrdal's time, on political circumstance: on the vicissitudes of history and the actions of leaders.

Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) fire in anticipation of and during rewards. Such firing has been suggested to encode reward predictions and to account in some way for the role of this area in adaptive behavior and learning. However, it has also been reported that neural activity in OFC reflects reward prediction errors, which might drive learning directly. Here we tested this question by analyzing the firing of OFC neurons recorded in an odor discrimination task in which rats were trained to sample odor cues and respond left or right on each trial for reward. Neurons were recorded across blocks of trials in which we switched either the number or the flavor of the reward delivered in each well. Previously we have described how neurons in this dataset fired to the predictive cues (Stalnaker et al., 2014); here we focused on the firing in anticipation of and just after delivery of each drop of reward, looking specifically for differences in firing based on whether the reward number or flavor was unexpected or expected. Unlike dopamine neurons recorded in this setting, which exhibited phasic error-like responses after surprising changes in either reward number or reward flavor (Takahashi et al., 2017), OFC neurons showed no such error correlates and instead fired in a way that reflected reward predictions. Copyright 2018 ; This work was supported by funding from NIDA . The opinions expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not reflect the view of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the United States government. ; https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2018.01.013