Hi, Russ,
Thanks for your interesting response.
Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to gather
information about human evolution. After all, it matters not how we got here,
but who we are, now that we are here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I
have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for understanding
human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense in terms of where
we came from than it does in terms of where we are.
But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based
modeling. I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she
gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain. Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other? I dunno. I just dont know
enough about it.
But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s And would
a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying to decide
what sort of approach to use to a new problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest
in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?
that is the question I was asking.
Thanks again for helping me clarify,
NIck
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: [email protected];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group
Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
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])
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