Marcus -
I understand that pre-inventing Psychohistory (ala Asimov) is an
out-of-reach task. Predictive models in general are hard, and as you
say, this one has deeply compounded problems of dimensionality and
testability, etc.
What I'm seeking are notional models with more acknowledgement of the
complexities and maybe a qualitative hint toward any first or second
order "unintended consequences" they might hint at.
Familiar, brutally simple models are on the order of:
1. White Males get all the goodies, everyone else gets bupkis.
2. The rich get richer.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that both of these are basically
true in many contexts, but I don't think they help us do much except
*maybe* continue/restart/accelerate "affirmative action" programs and/or
sharpen the blade on the guillotine (for the rich).
A *notional* model helps people think about the problem space, and not
just people with a strong technical understanding of the problem space.
The public is trained to look for simple, linear relationships between
things and zeroth order effects, I'm just calling for the development of
a broader and deeper description of these very relevant problems. Is it
possible that we might operate with more hope, more earnestness, maybe
even less cynicism if we had models that suggested nonlinear response
curves and "tipping points" (as Malcom Gladwell popularized)? We might
avoid problems such as are described in Susan Faludi's "Backlash" and
"Stiffed" where the most well intentioned reactions to first order
symptoms of inequality have lead to various unexpected results that
undermined the original intentions of the actions.
Just my $.02
- Steve
On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 13:53 -0600, Steve Smith wrote:
I believe that our "common understanding" of such problems as
gender/race inequalities tends to be too "simple" which might explain
why progress in the domain is both slow and somewhat herky-jerky.
A master equation for an economic system will be high dimensional. For
example, every person has assets to track over time. There are
many-to-many economic transactions that explode the state space.
Forget about geometry you can visualize. And a lot of the variables are
not going to be independent. Time spent at work and time spent with
family will be t and (1-t). Income will be correlated with t (paid by
the hour).
To get at gender culture things various stateful things like affinity to
peers and family need to be quantifiable somehow. Are love and hate a
linear scale or logarithmic? Maybe it is more like a step function?
And how do you validate these system evolution models? You might be
able to give someone a million dollars but you can't easily take it
away, or spontaneously make a janitor a medical doctor or get most
people to agree to change their sex. The experiments that would be
illuminating can't be done for practical or ethical reasons.
It's a curse of dimensionality in spades, and only by contrasting
Billions and Billions of different policy systems could one hope to get
good enough statistics to say that a hypothetical master equation was or
was not at work in the real world.
Marcus
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