ERIC P. CHARLES wrote at 09/27/2012 06:53 PM: > Well... so much for discussing modeling...
I don't get what you mean by that. In order to model, you have to have something to model. You suggested that agents subscribing to social liberalism had a particular justification problem (contradict their own doctrine - intra-agent contradiction - or tolerate doctrinal contradictions between agents). But you leaped from the realm of thought (hypocrisy/contradiction) to mechanism/ontology (tolerant society) without providing any _thing_ to model. There's no referent to which a model can refer. Or, even if there is one, it's too vague to grok. It's bad practice to reverse engineer a model from analytic methods like contradiction. A better route is the forward, synthetic, constructionist map from mechanism to phenomena. Once you have at least one forward map, you can begin serious work on the inverse map. I suggested a mechanism: currency and trade. From that referent you should be able to build a model mechanism from which consistent justification can emerge. Steve further suggested some nuance to the mechanism that may well add finer grained building blocks (IOU vs. YOM). And I then elaborated a bit on the objects being traded (distinguishing between necessary vs. luxury goods) and suggested that a model measure _other_ than the currency itself be used to observe the system. Steve also mentioned using a semi-closed agent so that its interface (trading) is a projection of a larger internal system (which would give it some hysteresis and perhaps lower its predictability without adding any stochasticity). Bruce, earlier, tossed in the option to measure the system as a network and, perhaps, a hint at a hypothesis that might be tested: agents primarily motivated to trade facilitate larger, more connected networks. Then you, David, and Carl began hashing out whether the model should be rule-based or not. I read Carl's comment as a suggestion that each agent could be rule-based, but use different rules, some of which might be reflective. I.e. one agent's rules might take expressions of other agents' rules as inputs ... i.e. meta-rules or rule operators. This seems like a very common casual modeling conversation, to me. What's questionable is whether the mechanism we've suggested so far will contribute to a debate about religion and atheism. -- glen ============================================================ 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
