Phil Henshaw wrote: > I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling > the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real > service. There will be policy makers and I think it is safe to say they'll find it easier to convince people of their policies if there are some dramatic stories involved (e.g. 9/11, WMDs). I expect a careful and restrained story of the kind you describe above will be overwhelmed in general by story tellers at think tanks like the Project for the New American Century who don't hesitate to provide `leadership' (Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld).
On a technical note, I don't buy that social simulations would be computationally prohibitive, given the will. The fastest general purpose supercomputer at Livermore is $100e6 U.S. (BlueGene/L) having 130k processors. Suppose a simulation ran for a day, that's still 130k simulations a day. That's a lot of sensitivity analysis one could do. It might take 10 teams of modelers to keep such a machine busy. For national security, what's a $100 million here or there? The 2006 budget for Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative computing was $661 million and $6.3 billion overall for stockpile stewardship. Yet I keep hearing that `non-state actors' the new threat.. > How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? Detectives, trial lawyers, and spies tease out models from deceptive people and suboptimal evidence. No shame in formalizing these models, if only to make it clear what is far from being known. And to deal with a culture that only wants compliance and to stay `on message' all I can suggest is to 1) stomach it, and 2) slowly bend the message in some other direction. Marcus ============================================================ 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
