Re: Affective measures in the social sciences produce more ideologic agi

In a message dated 9/15/2002 9:51:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, malexan@net-link.net writes:


>  think the problem social sciences have fallen into results from their age.  Many social sciences were already well developed by the beginning of the 20th century.  Social scientists of that day looking at their successful natural science colleagues, would naturally seek to emulate them.  The most successful natural science of the time was physics and it was from physics that social scientists took their cues.  Economists have gone down this path the furthest.  Today, academic economists are more like applied mathematicians than social scientists.
>  


I was looking at your material on Kondratieff and found it most interesting. I should like to pursue this further. Let me recall a recent book by a French economist (I forget his name, I will check it out) on these questions. I noted the way he found that Alan Greenspan caused an alteration in his predictions!  Greenspan is a clever fellow, and his behavior, ideology apart, is often well-informed by these cyclical issues. 
So that's my point, in this case. 
In general, we can produce a theory of a large-small amount of historical evidence. Large, five thousand years, small by comparison with the ages of deep time evolution. 
You see the question of prediction requires taking into account the whole cosmic state! We are hardly equipped to do that! As yet. 

But the question of prediction is more like the question of input and output to a reactive model. Like a computer which is predictable, as opposed to a computer with a mouse, which can't predict the outcome of the user's choice. So a GUI model of history is different from a deterministic one. 

Also, we can have a causal system that degrades against its 'telos', and a teleological system that resets the 'causal drift' into a right direction. 
The point being we have basic reality questions to answer prior to modelling, is our system causal or teleological or what? 
John Landon
Website on the eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
nemonemini@eonix.8m.com