Posted by
Carl Tollander on
Jul 01, 2007; 6:58am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/JASSS-and-despair-tp524155p524157.html
Robert,
The discussions earlier this week about the nature of explanation
yielded 2 notions about the necessity of historical contingency in
modeling. One referred to 'real historical data', that is, the elements
of the model reflect a sampling of some actual situation, and can be
explained as some abstract transformation between 2 historical data
points. The other referred to the idea of understanding the historical
situatedness of the modeling methodologies employed, such that one can
explain what one is doing and why. It's probably useful to consider
these as different kinds of explanation.
I have not been reading JASSS lately, except when specific papers get
recommended, so can't comment on whether their reviewers are pushing for
greater validation against historical data. There was a (humbling)
article in the 14 June edition of Nature about mentoring better reviewers .
As to the methodology notion about explanation, there could be an idea
about the responsibility of authors to employ the history of their
methodologies when explaining their results across disciplinary or
research group silos. I've been reading Thurston (
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/9404/9404236v1.pdf ) about just how
difficult this can be (at least for mathematicians) and Corfield (
http://www.dcorfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/HowMathematicians.pdf ) about
how research groups might formulate their methodologies and programs so
they can be effectively communicated.
We might take JASSS to task for setting the bar too low, but to be fair
the problem may simply be that this kind of modeling is not far enough
along as a discipline for its practitioners to have the training and
expertise to do the latter kind of explanation. It may also be that
thus far it takes most of a given career to get any good at it. In
either case these are early days, and it seems to me there is at least
the hint of a path, if there is the will to build towards it.
Carl
Robert Holmes wrote:
> The latest issue of Journal of Artificial Societies and Simulation is
> available at
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html>
> I dunno, after our discussions about the nature of explanation,
> reading JASSS left me thoroughly depressed. Want to guess how many
> papers compared their simulation results with real historic data?
>
> Robert
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