Hi Nick, What's wrong with this argument?
My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually arguing about the value of that sort of study. If you are interested in the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best current physicist think. Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the development of ABMs that got us there. If that history makes it easier to understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art. -- Russ On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson < [email protected]> wrote: > All, > > For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting > discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are > there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based > models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle > variations? > > Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such > classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the > narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note > the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In ABM's, there > must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a > program longer than a seven line Word macro. > > Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his > experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. > Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for > evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic > classifications, the historical record of evolution. If we took this > analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of > ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the > code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless > endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so > interesting in the evolutionary case. > > But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification > that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst > species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, > as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary. > > So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of > abm's look like? And should we care about it? > > Nick > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, > Clark University ([email protected]) > > > > > > ============================================================ > 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 >
============================================================ 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
