Re: Modeling the Emergence of Political Parties

[Sven N. Thommesen]

At 06:56 AM 10/21/99 -0700, Glen Ropella wrote:

> Cool model, Darren!
> <snip>
> Any chance you'll publish the source?
>
> glen

Second the motion! I'd definitely like a look at how you coded the network 
aspect of this.

And I'll chime in with a nasty little question for you (and for the rest of 
the list, for that matter): I notice you start out saying that your model 
'demonstrates' some classic results. This is an excellent beginning, but 
(most likely) not enough to get a Ph.D.

Let me play devil's advocate here: Let's assume your model next is used to 
ask a novel question, and you get an interesting result. Now, what were you 
planning to say by way of justifying why the world should take your result 
seriously? 'The world' so far has become used to accepting only 
mathematical results that can be proven (while much of the justification 
for using agent based models is precisely that we can relax assumptions 
until the model is too complicated to ever prove results mathematically!)

[I could take a somewhat cynical stance here and say that proper 
justifications don't matter, that what matters is whatever the current high 
mucky-mucks in the respective disciplines accept, so that all we Swarmers 
have to do is to keep churning out models that are interesting to *us* 
while we wait for the Old Guard to die off so *we* can become the high 
mucky-mucks. But, let's not be quite that cynical ...]

Sven



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