[FRIAM] complexity and society

[Michael Agar]

I'm sorry I missed out on all the interesting threads last week. I  
was swamped helping a center for occupational safety and health in  
California rethink how they design, implement and evaluate their  
training programs using concepts from that thing that we don't know  
what it is (:

I'd like to add a comment.

The first thing is, you don't necessarily need a model to apply  
complexity to society.

If you are considering a model, I like Axelrod's way of thinking  
about them. He sees them as "thought experiment labs" for a  
conclusion based on social research. So first of all the social  
research has to be solid to really do it properly. More often than  
not it isn't.

The lab let's you test arguments of the form, if people do things in  
particular ways properties will emerge at the level of society. By  
"test" I mean it lets you see if the conclusion can be "generated,"  
to use Epstein and Axtell's concept, in just the way your social  
research suggests that it can. It's a way of making the argument that  
underlies the conclusion explicit so it can be better evaluated, and  
it allows for exploration of the space of results that the same  
argument produces and alternative spaces given control parameter  
changes. It's a test of plausibility and an exercise in clarity,  
nothing more, nothing less.

Robert's example of the Iraq war is an interesting one. First of all,  
the question would be, what kind of social research would we do to  
figure out what kind of agent dynamics produce a society that goes to  
war as opposed to one that doesn't. This is an overwhelming project,  
but an important one. Historians and political scientists have  
written much on the subject. Unfortunately there are plenty of recent  
cases we'd have to explore and document as well. We'd  need a large  
number of "real world" runs--i.e. case studies--before we could  
figure out if "virtual" runs were possible to design. Could we even  
simplify enough to conceive of a model? For our many different kinds  
of agents there'd be critical events, diffusion of opinion,  
leadership responses, perceived threat, positions in national  
historical trajectories, all interacting and changing as the story  
developed, with war and peace (to keep it simple) possible emergent  
social system positions that would in turn influence agents and  
perhaps change the trajectory, as is currently going on with Iraq.  
That's just the start of a list of things.

FRIAMers may have already discussed such issues over the week, but I  
thought I'd toss out this particular view of the social/policy model  
theme to help cope with the loss of toothpaste and shampoo on the  
trip home. You should have seen the lines at LAX. But I was rewarded  
with a seatmate who was a professional clown from Albuquerque  
returning from a balloon workshop in Las Vegas. Not your average agent.

Mike