On 04/15/2014 08:37 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
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's no reason why we wouldn't pursue both qualitative and
quantitative models. I find myself arguing for the idea that all quant
models are preceded by qual models anyway. It's a straightforward
extension of the philosophical problem of degree vs. kind (for those of
us who think philosophy is useless).
I think the notion of an attractor survives the dimensionality problem.
It seems clear that patriarchy is a stable attractor. I don't know
why, of course. But we can speculate then try to hone the speculation
into hypotheses that can be tested qual, first, and quant for those that
survive long enough. Qualitatively, we can test your (1) by translation
across geography. Do white males get all the goodies in, say, Peru?
How about the Central African Republic? Etc.
On 04/15/2014 03:52 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
A master equation for an economic system will be high dimensional.
I think the concept of a master equation is inscription error. If you
look hard enough for such an equation, you will find one. But it may be
illusory, which means whatever you find will break for inexplicable
reasons, until you find the new one or go with an equation-free approach.
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).
It's not clear to me that time spent with family is antithetic to time
spent at work. There's a long tradition of combining the two... just
look at the Koch brothers... or the Bush dynasty. ;-) The curse of high
dimensionality is even worse than you've mentioned so far in that we
have no idea which variables are identical, equivalent, dependent, and
independent. Indeed, anything we _name_ a variable is suspect. But
none of this should stop anyone with the energy and interest. All we
need do is hone speculation down to a falsifiable model, falsify it, log
it in the database, and iterate.
The trick is that the _database_ sucks. We don't keep track of how
well/poorly our models are doing.
E.g. this was in the news recently:
Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as
Representative of Atheists
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0092302
And this was cited as evidence the author (Gervais) is biased:
Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036880
These aren't just qualitative models.... but it's super easy to
criticize the choices they made in quantification. Why? Because the
database sucks.
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?
You don't need occult qualities like love and hate. There are plenty of
almost-quantified qualities to consider first. Things like the Happy
Planet Index or the Narcissistic Personality Index are in that fuzzy
border and could be used to accrue falsified models. (Things like the
Gini index may help with Steve's model (2).)
The experiments that would be
illuminating can't be done for practical or ethical reasons.
It's true that the experiments that would be _ultimately_ illuminating
can't be done. But there are those that could be _somewhat_
illuminating... and I argue that there are lots of psych, social,
ecological, neuro, and biological experiments that are currently being
done that help, even with the gender inequality problem.
But again, why can't we _relate_ these results into some more complex,
systemic models? ... because the database sucks.
--
⇒⇐ glen
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