Muddling-Through and Deep Learning for Bureaucratic Decision-Making

Large-scale, geographically distributed, and long-term risks arise from diverse underlying causes ranging from pandemics to poverty to underinvestment in protecting against natural hazards or failures of sociotechnical, economic, and financial systems. Protecting against such large-scale risks poses formidable challenges for any theory of effective social decision-making. Participants may have different and rapidly evolving local information and goals; perceive different opportunities and urgencies for actions; and be differently aware of how their actions affect each other through side effects and externalities. Six decades ago, political economist Charles Lindblom viewed “rational-comprehensive decision-making” as utterly impracticable for such realistically complex situations, instead advocating incremental learning and improvement, or “muddling through,” as both a positive and a normative theory of bureaucratic decision-making when costs and benefits are highly uncertain. But sparse, delayed, uncertain and incomplete feedback undermines the effectiveness of collective learning while muddling through, even if all participant incentives are aligned; it is no panacea. We consider how recent insights from machine learning—especially, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning—formalize aspects of muddling through and suggest principles for improving human organizational decision-making. Deep learning principles adapted for human use can not only help participants in different levels of government or control hierarchies manage some large-scale distributed risks, but they also show how rational-comprehensive decision analysis and incremental learning and improvement can be reconciled and synthesized.