cognitive largess (was Re: reductionism)

Posted by Marcus G. Daniels on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524144.html

Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
> To be clear, the process works this way:
>
> 1) casual observation and psychological induction leads to a (usually
> mental) model
> 2) an experiment is designed based on that model
> 3) data are taken from the experiment
> 4) a more rigorous model is derived from the data (perhaps regulated by
> the prior model)
> 5) repeat as necessar
That can happen, but it isn't necessary.   An extreme example is study
of financial instruments, where it is very clear how the `thing' works,
and the process of measurement has nothing to do with modelers that
might find the thing useful or interesting to study.  The data from
trading systems is complete and precise.   The psychology or motives of
the people using the system of course aren't directly measured, but at
least this is not an example of a pathological circularity of data
collection being biased by a mental model of the system.

In practice, I think often 1-3 are decoupled from 4, especially for `big
science' where a lot of competitive people are involved.

Even if it they were often tightly coupled, it strikes me as absurd to
equate the value of multiple perspectives with experiment.  (Not  that
you are..)  If a whole range of mechanisms or parameterizations can
reproduce an inadequate validation data set, and there is no way to
imagine a way to measure a better one, then that's a clue the modeling
exercise may lack utility.