Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-25 09:36 AM: > I hope you dont replicate my sin of reading your messages backwards by > reading mine frontwards.
It's not a big deal. Real discussions don't happen on mailing lists, facebook, twitter, or even via e-mail or phone. So, feel free to read these posts and respond in any order, and with any content you wish. It's all in good fun, as far as I'm concerned. Any actual benefit the participants and lurkers receive is gravy. > But I would use a different language to describe your objection. I would > say that you object to my MODEL of the evolution of human society and wish > to substitute a different MODEL. My Model is based on David Sloan Wilson's > Multi-Level Selection Theory, which argues that our individual behavior is > the result of selection at many levels of organization. Thus behavior > which is puzzling from the point of view of individual selection (which I > still think Face book behavior is) is readily explained as a weakness in > the ability to calculate our individual interests arising from selection at > the group level. "Model" is a much abused word. Models (and simulations) are a sub-type of rhetoric. Not all rhetoric constitutes a model. I'd call your (very brief and largely detail-free) rhetoric that celebrity is an effect of being forced to handle a large # of associations and, hence a confusion between "village" and "world" trust is NOT a model. If we include David Sloan Wilson's Multi-Level Selection Theory and inference made from that theory including the above, then I still don't call that a model. I call it one of a theory, thesis, hypothesis, conjecture, or speculation. A model, in my lexicon, must have at least 2 attributes: 1) it must be an extant thing in and of itself and 2) it must have a referent. Your rhetoric has (2) but not (1). And even so, your rhetoric is way too abstract to measure actual human evolution. (Remember that "model" is derived from the same root as "measure"... e.g. a balsa wood airplane is used to measure a real airplane.) You can't measure human evolution with your rhetoric; so, even if you claim it is extant (e.g. in the form of books, video or audio recordings of lectures, etc), it's still quite a stretch to call it a model. p.s. And YES, I know lots of people will claim that lots of people will disagree with my use of the word "model", here. But I hope you realize now that it doesn't much matter to me whether lots of people disagree with my use of the word model, especially if those disagreeing people aren't professional modelers. And don't expect me to believe that pro persuaders (who make their living building rhetoric) are pro modelers. While pro modelers _are_ pro persuaders, pro persuaders are not necessarily pro modelers. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ 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
