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Would you rather sociological models not contain any physics or math? What do you propose?
by anotherone15 7y ago
Would you rather sociological models not contain any physics or math? What do you propose?
- knzhou 7y agoI would prefer an empirical approach, as some take in macroeconomics. Just parametrize things you care about in terms of measureable quantities, and go out and measure them. Once you have that, there's no need to slap on some model that says, like people are a frustrated antiferromagnetic spin lattice on a random small world graph. It doesn't add anything. If you want to explain the results of the measurements, you can do it just as well with words.
- anotherone15 7y agoWhat about parameters that are hard to measure? Take for instances infectious disease models, often a very simple set of ODEs that are capable of capturing the wide ranging dynamics that we observe. One of the crucial parameters in these models is the transmission parameter, which determines the rate at which susceptibles become infected upon contact with an infected. Transmission is a function of a long string of physical, chemical, biological, social and economic variables. I am not sure how feasible it is to determine from first principles this parameter and so it is obtained from fitting the model to data. So in this case, one does not directly measure the parameter, but infer it from the data conditional on the model.