Well Marcus, isn't that is entirely the point, and why models are unreliable and need help?
A model invariably represents only a person's belief's about the world. The physical subject being represented is both fabulously more complex than any belief system can be, and full of things that are differently organized and requires it's own language of description. It's why one needs a different mode of description for each way of describing what a person is. It's why science, being one language of description, is incomplete. In some cases, a common language seems adequate for many subjects, but only when you are careful to ask the same kind of question of each subject, consistent with that common language. To use common terminology for different things you do need to ignore the discrepancies as insignificant, though. As when your economic system collapses because they were not actually insignificant, that turns out to be an error. It ends up being much safer to think of the physical world as complexly changing place needing many languages of description and close attention, and for science, to watch the fit of your model to see if discrepancies are developing. In order to pick up significant errors due to emerging discrepancies, you need to become aware of what's happening. One way is to watch closely for them. You can also rely on hearsay. The world is full of independently evolving systems, each changing it's organization in response to its own place in the world, in its own way, and developing emergent behaviors as it does. Lots of systems we share the environment with seem sort of diffuse and passive, and others rather distinctly individual with strong independent individual reactions to being interfered with. There's no 'book' you just have to watch. If you're not watching and only wait till you loose your job to know that you should have been watching, (like a lot of us are at the moment) you're out of a job. It's like we were imagining an open road and were driving along in our car and didn't see the water coming because it wasn't on the map. The water coming was real obvious to the people looking out the window who were repeating saying in increasingly urgent tones "hey there's water coming". Am I wrong to be stunned at how difficult it is to get an acknowledgement here that living in a physical world means that theory is not enough? Phil Henshaw NY NY www.synapse9.com > -----Original Message----- > From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On > Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels > Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 2:12 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] models that bite back > > Phil Henshaw wrote: > > That's only in you model, and leaves out the rest of the world. My > "hunch" > > is it's good to watch the rest of the world for diverging > continuities > > too... > > > Nothing prevents a person from explicitly representing and revising > beliefs about the world in a model, especially in an ABM. > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
