Jonathan Lawhead

“ When people disagree over what policy we should be following, the disagreement flows out of a disagreement about their model of the world. The idea was that if people could come to a shared understanding or at least agree toward the model of the world, then they would be much more in agreement about the policy we should take. ”

“ There’s a fantastically deep point here: one that (it seems to me) has been underemphasized by both philosophers of science and political philosophers: to a very great extent, policy disagreement is model disagreement. When we disagree about how to solve some social problem (or even when we disagree about what counts as a social problem to be solved) , our disagreement is—at least in large part—a disagreement about what model to apply to some aspect of the world, how to parameterize that model, and how to use it to guide our interventions [8] . ”

“ The outward goal of the game—to construct a thriving city—is really just a disguised exercise in model exploration. Those who excel at the game are those who excel at bringing their mental models of the structure of the game-space into the closest confluence with the actual model the designers encoded into the rules of the game. ”

“ If we’re to succeed in shifting the public opinion of climate science--and if we’re to avoid engaging in a precisely analogous public fight over the reliability of the next complex system science breakthrough--then we need to communicate the basics of complexity-based reasoning, and we need to help the public understand that science is a living enterprise. We need to communicate to the average citizen the truth of the maxim from Chapter One: the world is messy and science is hard. ”

“ Nowhere is this clearer than when public policy purports to be guided by scientific results. Taking the particular values that we do have as given, [9] a sound public policy that aims to make the world a certain way (e.g. to reduce the heavy metal content of a city’s drinking water) is best informed by careful scientific study of the world—that is, it is best informed by the creation and examination of a good model of the relevant aspects of the world. ”

“ If we have good reason to think that this trend is one that is unlikely to disappear with time—or, even more strongly, that it is a trend that is an ineliminable part of the science in question—then we will be forced to confront the problem of how to reform the relationship between science and policy in light of this new kind of science. Wright’s pronouncement that model convergence is “just how science works” might need to be reexamined, and we ignore that possibility at our peril. ”

“ Novel work in a variety of fields--everything from ecology to network science to immunology to economics to cognitive science--is showing us that many natural systems exhibit behavior that is (to put it charitably) difficult to explain if we focus exclusively on the behavior of constituent parts and ignore more high-level features. We’re learning to think scientifically about topics that, until recently, were usually the province of metaphysicians alone, and we’re learning to integrate those insights into our model building. ”

“ It seems to me that the lesson to be drawn here is that all these questions (which strategy is best? Should we mitigate or adapt?) are as misguided as the question “which climate model is best?” We should, rather, take our cue from the practice of climate scientists themselves, encouraging innovation generally across many different levels of spatio-temporal resolution. ”

“ In many cases, the lack of scientific consensus on a single model to be used (or at least on relatively small family of models to be used) when working with a particular system is a sign that more work needs to be done: we may not agree, for instance, about whether or not the Standard Model of particle physics is the one we ought to work with in perpetuity, but this disagreement is widely appreciated to be an artifact of some epistemic shortcoming on our part. ”

“ Climatology (like economics, another widely mistrusted complex systems science) does great violence to the public perception of what good science looks like. The predictions and methods of science bear little resemblance to the popular paradigm cases of science: Issac Newton modeling the fall of an apple with a neat set of equations, or Jonas Salk working carefully in a forest of flasks and beakers to isolate a vaccine for polio. ”

“ While this complexity revolution has changed (and will continue to change) the practice of scientific model building, it must also change the way we talk about science in public, and the way we teach science in schools. The future impact of complexity must be neither confined to esoteric discussions in the philosophy of science, nor even to changes in how we build or scientific models. ”

“ As a player, a lot of what you’re trying to do is reverse engineer the simulation. You’re trying to solve problems within the system, you’re trying to solve traffic in SimCity, or get somebody in The Sims to get married or whatever. The more accurately you can model that simulation in your head, the better your strategies are going to be going forward. So what we’re trying to as designers is build up these mental models in the player. The computer is just an incremental step, an intermediate model to the model in the player’s head. ”

“ It’s not unusual for novice players to be beaten by a wide margin without recognizing the game is over—a true beginner’s mental model of the state of play might be so far off that he might not understand his defeat until his more skilled opponent shows him the more accurate model that she is using. A large part of becoming proficient at playing Go consists in learning how to manipulate the relevant mental models of the board, and learning how to manipulate the pieces on the board such that your opponent is forced to accept your model. ”

“ As people played with the game, they discovered that some of those limitations could be exploited by the clever player: putting coal power-plants near the edge of the buildable space, for instance, would cause a significant portion of the pollution to just drift “off the map,” with no negative impact on the air quality within the simulation. Some of these issues were fixed in later iterations of the game, but not all were: the game, while a convincing (and highly impressive) model of a real city, was still just that—an imperfect model. ”

“ In our deliberations about which laws to enact, or which policies to reform, we may need to appeal to scientific models to provide some relevant data, either about the way the world is now, or about how it will be after a proposed intervention is enacted. We may need to rely on models to allow us to explore the consequences of some proposed intervention before we try out a new policy in socio vivo; that was the intended application of SimHealth, but the model in question need not be so explicit as a computer simulation. ”

“ Instead, the disconnect between the scientific consensus and the public opinion about the reliability and effectiveness of climate models is a symptom of science education and science journalism that has been left behind by scientific progress. ”

“ The important point for us is that the purpose of model-building is to create something that can be more easily manipulated and studied than the system of interest itself, with the hope that in seeing how the model behaves, we can learn something interesting about the system the model is supposed to represent. ”

“ It is easy to see why this is a relevant (and important) road to explore—even if the possible threat of climate change turns out to (so to speak) blow over, fossil fuels will not last forever. However, engineering viable replacements to fossil fuel energy is an expensive, long-term investment. While important, we should not allow ourselves to focus on it single-mindedly—just as important are more short-term interventions which, though possibly less dramatic, have the potential to contribute to an effective multi-level response to a possible threat. ”

“ This position, I think, reflects a mistaken assumption about the trajectory of climate science. The most important practical lesson to be drawn here is this: if we wait for climate scientists to agree on a single model before we try to agree on policy, we are likely to be waiting forever. Climate scientists seem interested in diversifying, not narrowing, the field of available models, and complexity-theoretic considerations show that this approach is conceptually on firm ground. Our policy-expectations must shift appropriately. ”

“ The view that I’ve associated variously with traditions in reductionism, eliminativism, and mechanism--the view that the world consists in nothing over and above, as Hume put it, “one little thing after another”--is proving increasingly difficult to hold onto in the face of contrary evidence. ”

“ One consequence of this is that some of the difficulties of designing good public policy—a practice that we can think of, in this context, as a kind of social engineering—are inherited from difficulties in model building. ”

“ The public, however, very clearly does not. The widespread failure to accept the urgency and immediacy of the call to act to avert a climate change disaster is one symptom of this failure to understand. ”

“ Despite these simple rules (and in contrast to chess, with its complicated rules and differentiated pieces) , incredibly complex patterns emerge in games of Go. While the best human chess players can no longer defeat the best chess computers, the best human Go players still defeat their digital opponents by a significant margin. ”

“ One player has a supply of white stones, while the other has a supply of black stones. Players take turns placing stones at the vertices of the grid (rather than in the squares themselves, as in chess or checkers) , with the aim of capturing more of the board by surrounding areas with stones. If any collections of stones is entirely surrounded by stones of the opposite color, the opponent “captures” the stones on the inside, turning them into the stones of her color. ”

“ For instance, directing resources toward increases in efficiency of current energy expenditure might be more effective (at least in the short run) at making an impact. Innovations here can, like EMICs, take the form of highly specialized changes: the current work on piezoelectric pedestrian walkways (which harvest some of the kinetic energy of human foot impacting sidewalk or hallway and store it as electrical energy) is an excellent example [11] . ”