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Modelling Opinion Formation with Physics Tools: Call for Closer Link with Reality
In essence, the author is calling out physicists for building models for the social sciences without actually knowing anything about the social sciences. An occasionally entertaining read, and one that has a larger message about people who build models and the need for sanity checks with the phenomena that they're intended to model.
EDIT: fixed the link so that the anchor text and URL are each now in their proper place. :P :)
In essence, the author is calling out physicists for building models for the social sciences without actually knowing anything about the social sciences. An occasionally entertaining read, and one that has a larger message about people who build models and the need for sanity checks with the phenomena that they're intended to model.
EDIT: fixed the link so that the anchor text and URL are each now in their proper place. :P :)
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Interesting that it all comes down to this, in a sense.
The real question is this: how do we learn from this, and put in place safeguards against this kind of thing happening again? Clearly the real problem is that the model was applied without regard for its limitations, so it's not clear that better models are the right answer here.
Interesting that it all comes down to this, in a sense.
The real question is this: how do we learn from this, and put in place safeguards against this kind of thing happening again? Clearly the real problem is that the model was applied without regard for its limitations, so it's not clear that better models are the right answer here.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/06/12/2213233.shtml
I haven't read the paper yet...but I suspect that this is one of those cases in which the process of building a model obscures the fact that the inputs and objective functions are not well-defined.
Nevertheless I plan on checking this out at some point.
I haven't read the paper yet...but I suspect that this is one of those cases in which the process of building a model obscures the fact that the inputs and objective functions are not well-defined.
Nevertheless I plan on checking this out at some point.
