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:


> I have to question the value of theory without prediction.  What is the point?


Thanks for your interesting response. Let me just answer this one issue to start. 

If you wish a theory to predict, present one with a prediction on the order of Newton's model of physical systems. None of that type have been found for biological or cultural systems. 
Nothing preempts some future kind of theory that can make some other type of prediction. Take a simple example, the simplest, the exponential function in demographics. This is the most direct case of a math model applied to a population. It should predict exactly what will happen. Yet nearly every effort to do so has been incorrect, at least in detail. But, the approach is still of great use. Nonetheless the predictions all too frequently fail or are merely background information (of great use) as a rubric of comparison. 
Why does this happen? It is not a simple question of the mechanics of the model. People in the population can modify their bahavior based on knowledge of the prediction!  It's that simple. This feedback between the model and the future outcome is a distintinctively different phenomenon. 
The same is true of these economic models using differential equations. Mostly these are a limited range of differential equations with a nice bump in them, to be shaped to the data in some interesting way. So what finally?  

The question of prediction or not is seen nicely in the study of economic cycles. The agent in the present is able to transform the future based on information about the past. That simple difference creates a new type of situation that should be studied thusly in its own right. No absolute rejection of prediction need  be entailed. 

Note that the eonic model has many concealed predictions however. It 'predicts' or retrodicts that there should be some diffusion from the Old to the New world, despite the claims for independent cultural evolution, etc... I think this is starting to be confirmed. 

The point about prediction in the eonic model then is not absolute. But we are dealing with systems where the agent is immersed in the system, able to modify the future based on past information. 

By the way, concealed in the many myths of 'aeons' which the eonic model reduces to rubble, but with an ironic comment on their real meaning, we find a prediction of modernism in outlandish myth in such as Joachim de Floris. Ancient men, we forget, predicted a new age to come, though in Zoroastrian confusions, they never got it straight! Sure enough that new age came!!!!!   So these ancient primitives had a predictive model of their own (they are always permutations of Zoroastrianism stuff). 
I think the eonic modle makes sense of that, though I sidelined all of that stuff to keep my material out of the clutches of New Age nonsense types. 
Note that the one Amazon reviewer of my book World History and the Eonic Effect was a student of Rudolf Steiner zeroing in instinctively on these archetypes which seem to be there but aren't.  I am a prisoner of these Steinerians. I have never read him. 

Amusing. Would someone please review this book at Amazon (five stars please) and rescue me from Steinerians. 

Your considerations are of interest, and I will reply further. This 'gesture' of the non-preditive is a line of attack worth pursuing. 

John Landon
Website on the eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
nemonemini@eonix.8m.com