STS mastodon: who/what should I be reading for history of operations research? trying to piece together some stuff in routing and navigation tech history and seems to all come back to OR but wondering if someone's actually written this up already
@ingrid Paging @joelitobarski, hopefully
@jcalpickard @ingrid I know that William Thomas' "Rational Action" (MIT Press, 2015) covers OR, and possibly there's also something in Erickson et al "How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind" (Chicago, 2013)?
@joelitobarski @jcalpickard thanks! Rational Action has been recommended a lot, looking forward to checking it out
@ingrid @jcalpickard You're welcome - hope it's useful! Maybe Hunter Crowther-Heyck's work on Herbert Simon and systems science might also touch on OR
@ingrid @jcalpickard btw, if you are interested in a broader historiography of cybernetics (which strongly intersects with OR) then this is wonderful: https://collopy.net/writing/2012/cybernetics-bibliography/
@ingrid Making me wish i had continued on with Operations Research instead of switching to Statistics
@ingrid There's Russell Ackoff and Stafford Beer and Ashby for non-core OR.
Specific to (near-shore) navigation, see Cognition in the Wild?
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/CognitionInTheWild
@ingrid hi ingrid, i am writing an STS book on AI supply chains/materiality and in one chapter I discussed OR history. Also, I did study OR as a mathematician so happy to share insights.
more specifically: the lineage of routing/nav in operations research and the transfer of these methods to industry are the story that's less legible to me