[From Rick Marken (2001.10.25.0830)]
Me:
>The single virtual control system is, thus, an
>accurate functional model of the behavior of this "society" of 10
>individual control systems.
Bill Powers (2001.10.25.0722 MDT)--
That's damned clever.
Please. You make me blush;-) (Yes. I got the sarcasm).
It seems to me that unless they interact with each other, in the
environment, there's no justification for treating the control systems as
part of one social entity.
I agree. Again, I was just trying to illustrate the fact that a single
virtual control system can mimic the activity of a collection of individual
control systems. Obviously, in real applications one would want to have a
good reason for treating the collection of control systems as one social
entity (the virtual control system).
I should think that there would have to be something about
the systems themselves, some sort of interaction, that would make the
association of systems _discoverable by anybody who looked_. Averaging 10
arbitrarily-chosen variables together does not make the "system"
discoverable by anybody who looks.
Yes. Coming up with a description of that "something" that makes the
association discoverable to anybody who looks will, I think, take more than
the five minutes it took me to build the demo that illustrates the use of a
"virtual control system" to model the behavior of an aggregate of individual
control systems. But now that everyone apparently agrees that the behavior
of a collection of individual control systems can be mimicked using a single
virtual control system (as I did in my H. Economicus model of the economy),
perhaps we can move on to the far more interesting question (which you
mention above) of determining whether any particular collection of control
systems is made up of systems that are actually _associated_ with each other
(so that a virtual control model of the collective can be considered valid).
Best regards
Rick
···
--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org
[From Bruce Gregory (2001.1025.1319)]
Rick Marken (2001.10.25.0830)
Bill Powers (2001.10.25.0722 MDT)--
> That's damned clever.
Please. You make me blush;-) (Yes. I got the sarcasm).
Rick, I'm surprised at you. Bill does not have a sarcastic bone in his body.
[From Bill Powers (2001.10.25.1317 MDT)]
Rick Marken (2001.10.25.0830)]
That's damned clever.
Please. You make me blush;-) (Yes. I got the sarcasm).
I didn't intend it sarcastically. I thought it was clever of you to think
of just having 10 control systems controlling unrelated variables, and
showing that any disturbance of the average value would be met with
resistance, just as if there were a single control system controlling the
average. The only way to disturb the average of 10 variables is to disturb
one or more of them; as the individual control systems resist that
disturbance, the effect on the average will turn out to be resisted in
exactly the same proportion (one tenth of the disturbance, one tenth of the
resistance, for each variable). I assumed you had worked all that out and
were showing that selecting "groups" at random like that was not the way to
study societies. Are you really saying that you _didn't_ mean that?
Best,
Bill P.
[From Rick Marken (2001.10.25.1510)]
Bill Powers (2001.10.25.1317 MDT)
I didn't intend it sarcastically. I thought it was clever of you to think
of just having 10 control systems controlling unrelated variables, and
showing that any disturbance of the average value would be met with
resistance, just as if there were a single control system controlling the
average. The only way to disturb the average of 10 variables is to disturb
one or more of them; as the individual control systems resist that
disturbance, the effect on the average will turn out to be resisted in
exactly the same proportion (one tenth of the disturbance, one tenth of the
resistance, for each variable). I assumed you had worked all that out and
were showing that selecting "groups" at random like that was not the way to
study societies. Are you really saying that you _didn't_ mean that?
My humble apologies. I attributed sarcasm to you as a result of my own
stupidity. No, I had not "worked all that out". I hadn't thought of it and I
thought you were mocking me for _not_ having thought of it myself. So your
only sin is thinking too highly of my mental skills, a sin for which I most
enthusiastically forgive you.
Best regards
Rick
···
--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org