I'm sorry I missed out on all the interesting threads last week. I was swamped helping a center for occupational safety and health in California rethink how they design, implement and evaluate their training programs using concepts from that thing that we don't know what it is (:
I'd like to add a comment. The first thing is, you don't necessarily need a model to apply complexity to society. If you are considering a model, I like Axelrod's way of thinking about them. He sees them as "thought experiment labs" for a conclusion based on social research. So first of all the social research has to be solid to really do it properly. More often than not it isn't. The lab let's you test arguments of the form, if people do things in particular ways properties will emerge at the level of society. By "test" I mean it lets you see if the conclusion can be "generated," to use Epstein and Axtell's concept, in just the way your social research suggests that it can. It's a way of making the argument that underlies the conclusion explicit so it can be better evaluated, and it allows for exploration of the space of results that the same argument produces and alternative spaces given control parameter changes. It's a test of plausibility and an exercise in clarity, nothing more, nothing less. Robert's example of the Iraq war is an interesting one. First of all, the question would be, what kind of social research would we do to figure out what kind of agent dynamics produce a society that goes to war as opposed to one that doesn't. This is an overwhelming project, but an important one. Historians and political scientists have written much on the subject. Unfortunately there are plenty of recent cases we'd have to explore and document as well. We'd need a large number of "real world" runs--i.e. case studies--before we could figure out if "virtual" runs were possible to design. Could we even simplify enough to conceive of a model? For our many different kinds of agents there'd be critical events, diffusion of opinion, leadership responses, perceived threat, positions in national historical trajectories, all interacting and changing as the story developed, with war and peace (to keep it simple) possible emergent social system positions that would in turn influence agents and perhaps change the trajectory, as is currently going on with Iraq. That's just the start of a list of things. FRIAMers may have already discussed such issues over the week, but I thought I'd toss out this particular view of the social/policy model theme to help cope with the loss of toothpaste and shampoo on the trip home. You should have seen the lines at LAX. But I was rewarded with a seatmate who was a professional clown from Albuquerque returning from a balloon workshop in Las Vegas. Not your average agent. Mike ============================================================ 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
