Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3

Posted by Marcus G. Daniels-2 on Aug 06, 2006; 2:01am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Friam-Digest-Vol-38-Issue-3-tp522318p522332.html

Hi Phil,
> It's a step in the right direction to try to distinguish objective fact
> from subjective opinion, but there are lots of things for which that
> isn't easy.  
It would be interesting to evaluate a model of political violence by
populating an imaginary world with an ensemble of individual psychologies.

One assumption could be your notion of everyone in `living in their own
dreamworld', subject to different forces of propaganda, economic
constraints, and so on.  They all react to their world independently,
and are at once both amoral and innocent, but over time various sorts of
organizations and ideals take shape and these in turn shape generation
after generation.   Alternatively, one can imagine that people in power
"follow their gut" because their advisors are not trustworthy. The
question being the degree to which coarse vs. fine-grained interactions
in populations explain how power and institutions form as well as
co-evolved organizations that seek to destroy these institutions.. [etc]

Marcus