Ray -
While I appreciate your recipe for re-deriving similar results to
Woodard's 11 Nations independently, I think Stephen and I were asking
for your own critique of the one on the table. If I understand your
title of "Conscilient Heuretician" I can see why you went to answering
as you did.
You suggested this model was tainted by Woodard's cultural bias. I
certainly believe that his *presentation* of it reflects a political
bias which might be rooted in a cultural bias if we share the same
distinction. I don't doubt that there are aspects of his research that
went into building this model that were tainted by Woodard's cultural
biases (of which I know little). I suppose I could read his book to
find out if he introspects at all in it on the surprises he found in his
research.
I was just curious about others' specific reactions to the general
layout (is it compelling? does it fit your own anecdotal experience?)
and to any specifics (how does it align with your own
identity/affinities? Does it reinforce or debunk stereotypes you hold
about others?) and lastly is it useful (does it inspire acceptance or
understanding of a heretofore dismissed or antagonistic group to you?
can you understand behaviours in others that you previously had to
discount or ignore? could it help you form alliances you previously
thought impossible?). I was also hoping that others knew of similar but
different alternative (yet rich) models of this nation and it's
geopolitical regions.
Or as Doug suggests, perhaps I am just "thinking about thinking" here to
no effect.
The SPEME algorithm works for historical analysis by looking at
multiple sources (primary, secondary, et cetera) and placing the
person within those spectrums. Once you have the sources placed
within those spaces (and they are spaces, not just ranges), one can
look at their differences and see if those are observational or
cultural (i.e. did one person only see the war events from limited
perspective or does he have a cultural bias about the warring
parties). Only then do you have a chance at understanding what was
probably the reality - if you can keep your cultural biases out of the
process.
As for the "good enough" issue - I think it is possible for ordinary
individuals to duplicate the 11 nations work using other methods if
they are willing to put in the non-trivial effort. You could use free
or low-cost resources at either Amazon or Microsoft to pull in all of
the data one considers relevant from the WWW, run it through MapReduce
(preferably using an abstraction language), and generate analyses.
Finding like-minded individuals would distribute the load. The
Internet and WWW make this possible - before them, only an academic
with access to a lot of source material could have done it. Likewise,
only like-minded academics would have found each other and distributed
the work load. Now, like-minded ordinary individuals can find each
other via the Internet and WWW. This is part of the major current
phenomenon of our time - the gradual shift of what used to require
large, communal resources to the possibility of being done by individuals.
LIbrary science is driven by categorization and customers - what
doesn't the library have and what will the library patrons demand.
I'm sure there are many librarians who think the works of Will and
Ariel Durant are substandard - but their libraries have those books.
BTW, I personally like their work for the breadth and, if one
considers the background of the authors, the books can be used with
that grain of salt.
Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
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On Nov 11, 2013, at 11:13 AM, Stephen Thompson wrote:
Ray:
Thanks for the resources to investigate. This will take a bit of time.
However, at what point do you say "I don't have the time to duplicate
or generate my own
research to derive a model similar to 11 Nations"? We can not all be
experts in everything. At
some point we must depend on others to have done a "reasonably"
objective job of creating
their model.
I don't know of a formal rubric / algorithm / process by which one
critiques scholarly works
from outside the field. I am sure such tools exist. It looks like
you are showing one below.
I wonder if there is such a process taught in Library Science? Do
such folks need to critique
books as they are published as to the efficacy of adding them to the
local collection?
StephT
On 11/11/2013 11:40 AM, Parks, Raymond wrote:
I would analyze this using the algorithm I learned from my history teacher in
high school - Social, Political, Economic, Moral, Emotional - drawing on openly
available information from the World-Wide Web. In some ways, this is a big
data exercise, albeit drawing from previous big data sources.
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