5 ms·

The Self as a Dynamical System (1999) [pdf]

• PaulHoule 4y ago
  As someone who got a PhD in chaos theory in 1998 I think that paper is a mockery of the subject.
  • yamrzou 4y ago
    Why do you think so?
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      It uses a lot of buzzwords w/o a lot of understanding. The quality of work in the "complex systems" field was frequently awful to the point where many people would roll their eyes whenever they heard the word fractal. People in the physics community (where I worked) would frequently plot a histogram on a log-log plot and draw a line through it and say they had a power law distribution. We had no methods for hypothesis testing and nobody had ever heard of an "estimator". I published a paper that was invalid. because I got pressured into doing that despite having reservations. There wasn't a lot of literature aimed at physicists about how to do this the right way until 2005, after I bombed out out physics. Here is a talk about it. https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/2010-10-18-Meetup.pdf https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/2010-10-18-Meetup.pdf There are phenomena that occur over a wide range of scales which might be better be described as "multi-fractal" in that it doesn't look like a line on a log-log graph and that is just something people observe without a lot of theory or understanding.