Dear Jess and Caleb,. So, we are in hartford with the free wifi, warm and dry, and our plane is on time. In such moment of enhanced mortality, it washes over me that neither of you knows the name of our Lawyer. It Peter Ziomek and he lives in Amherst. He aint much of a lawyer but he has the paper.
Caleb, well se yhou in six hours. Love to you both, Nick -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Friday, September 28, 2012 2:29 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] DEBATE about Religion and Atheism - modeling ERIC P. CHARLES wrote at 09/27/2012 06:53 PM: > Well... so much for discussing modeling... I don't get what you mean by that. In order to model, you have to have something to model. You suggested that agents subscribing to social liberalism had a particular justification problem (contradict their own doctrine - intra-agent contradiction - or tolerate doctrinal contradictions between agents). But you leaped from the realm of thought (hypocrisy/contradiction) to mechanism/ontology (tolerant society) without providing any _thing_ to model. There's no referent to which a model can refer. Or, even if there is one, it's too vague to grok. It's bad practice to reverse engineer a model from analytic methods like contradiction. A better route is the forward, synthetic, constructionist map from mechanism to phenomena. Once you have at least one forward map, you can begin serious work on the inverse map. I suggested a mechanism: currency and trade. From that referent you should be able to build a model mechanism from which consistent justification can emerge. Steve further suggested some nuance to the mechanism that may well add finer grained building blocks (IOU vs. YOM). And I then elaborated a bit on the objects being traded (distinguishing between necessary vs. luxury goods) and suggested that a model measure _other_ than the currency itself be used to observe the system. Steve also mentioned using a semi-closed agent so that its interface (trading) is a projection of a larger internal system (which would give it some hysteresis and perhaps lower its predictability without adding any stochasticity). Bruce, earlier, tossed in the option to measure the system as a network and, perhaps, a hint at a hypothesis that might be tested: agents primarily motivated to trade facilitate larger, more connected networks. Then you, David, and Carl began hashing out whether the model should be rule-based or not. I read Carl's comment as a suggestion that each agent could be rule-based, but use different rules, some of which might be reflective. I.e. one agent's rules might take expressions of other agents' rules as inputs ... i.e. meta-rules or rule operators. This seems like a very common casual modeling conversation, to me. What's questionable is whether the mechanism we've suggested so far will contribute to a debate about religion and atheism. -- glen ============================================================ 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
