Yes, in your posting you talk like a methodological individualist. I am
surprised, considering your rejection of economics! How do you feel about
those few MABS that explicitly model macrosocial phenomena--like Carley's,
and like some of the multi-level simulations (CORMAS) that explicitly model
social entities?
>I guess this is what Keith calls 'the "trial and error" of successive
programming
>of simulations, observing what fails and what works, and expanding the
>methodology when it seems necessary.' That seems an appropriate approach
to me
>for two reasons.
I agree that it is appropriate--in fact, it is what defines MABS--but I
argued that it should be only one piece of a larger research program that
also incorporated foundational theoretical discussions, and engagement with
sociology.
The parallels with classic GOFAI should make us nervous. 1970s researchers
had great hubris vis-a-vis social science. "Those guys are a bunch of
softies, what they've done is worthless, we're better off starting from
scratch. Anyway, we're not concerning with carbon-based intelligence, we
are modelling intelligence in the abstract." They spent a few decades
developing formalisms which were not based on any supporting evidence or
theory from social science research. And they failed famously.
Suppose the discipline of sociology had discovered solid evidence that
methodological individualism was guaranteed to fail (I believe that this is
indeed the case). Further, suppose that you knew nothing about current
developments in sociology, and instead continued with successive
implementations of progressively better models of social systems, based on
methodologically individualist assumptions. This seems to me to be a
recipe for reproducing the entire history of research in sociology.
Someday far in the future you would reach a plateau at which further
success would be stymied; but if you had been aware of sociological
research, you could have saved yourself a couple of decades of work.
In our conversations at MABS 2000, I liked the fact that you criticized
economics for proposing models that were not empirically validated. This
is pretty much the same point I am making; sociology is the place where you
go to get your model validated, in my view. Otherwise, you have to redo
all of the sociology to validate it yourself. Why reinvent the wheel, when
the sociological knowledge could help you get to your goal faster?
R. Keith Sawyer
Assistant Professor
Program in Social Thought and Analysis
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO 63130
314-935-8724
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~ksawyer
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