#  Political Violence Workshop 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **September 25, 2012** 

 12:00PM - 02:00PM EDT 

 



 

### “Breakthrough Problems and the American Indian Wars”

A “breakthrough problem” is a situation in which decision makers are uncertain about how long it will take or how much it will cost to achieve a particular goal. This kind of scenario recurs in many areas, and it is especially prominent in the analysis of military strategy. Yet while breakthrough problems may be familiar, their dynamics can be counterintuitive. Many standard models of learning and adaptation revolve around the notion that decision makers are observing repeated processes; breakthrough problems, by contrast, involve cumulative processes, which follow a different logic. Decision makers should not necessarily become more pessimistic about their ability to achieve a breakthrough, even as they continually fail in their attempts to do so—there are many situations where we should in fact expect the opposite to be the case. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing breakthrough problems, explains how it departs from standard approaches that political scientists use to model the way that decision makers form and revise their expectations, and shows how the framework sheds new light on salient experience through a case study of US military strategy in the American Indian Wars.

### Speaker:

**Jeffrey A. Friedman**, *Graduate Student Associate; Weatherhead Center Dissertation Completion Fellow. PhD Candidate, Committee on Public Policy, Harvard University.*

### Chair:

**Robert H. Bates**, *Faculty Associate (on leave 2012–2013); Harvard Academy Senior Scholar. Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Department of Government; Professor of African and African American Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.*



 

 



 

 See also:- [ 2012–2013 ](/academic-year/2012%E2%80%932013)
- [ Political Violence Workshop ](/seminars/political_violence/schedule)
 
 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)
 


 Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/node/804626/event-feed.ics)  Copy link link