> > Carl: do you think policy modeling, and category theory in general, > could handle encoding an organization? To date, the efforts I'm aware of speak to a Category Theory (CT) environment where agents equipped with identities navigate and create additional model structure among categorified data. We might consider organizations to be black-box generators of such categorified data, but we don't yet model the organizations themselves explicitly. The current work is thus about interoperability and mixing of models and the theories about them. I think that this work is necessary to figure out how to more easily explore and calibrate spaces of models, but that general organizational modeling might be a bit ambitious for the approach at this point.
Here's why. Organizational modeling is usually difficult because (1) the organization is not always cognizant about what the salient features are (it looks for things that are more easily quantifiable), (2) there are usually different factions within the organization that will tell you (alas, over the duration of contract) that the 'actual' features are different from those you were told about by those other guys last month, and (3) what is actually salient may be different depending on what the organization is trying to do at any given time and the environment it is currently situated in. My (admittedly limited) experience with a machine learning project seems to reveal to me that the feature-extraction area is still full of unsolved problems. While these problems aren't totally intractable (my friends deal with them all the time), for me (a small organization) they are distracting, so, accordingly, I'm trying to keep the focus more on policy space than organization space, at least for now. The questions one asks of models synthesized by CT-like approaches will be more of the 'how does a group of models extend itself when we do X or modify the group's model mix', as opposed to the 'how does a static model (however nonlinear it may be) react when we do X'. Given the difficulties in modeling organizations I mentioned above, I tend to believe that the former approaches will eventually come to bear more fruit. However, 'eventually' probably doesn't mean 'tomorrow', and anyone new to complexity modeling approaches should keep in mind that these approaches will likely help extend the reach of current modeling practice, not compete with it. Carl ============================================================ 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
