3 ms·

Are you arguing for the invalidity of most, if not all agent-based simulations?

• swatow 12y ago
  Yes I am. I don't think they are a useful way to think about the world. One model in isolation can appear compelling, as some other posts in this thread indicate. But you can't view them in isolation, because all the model shows is that a simulation with certain properties exists. The problem is that: 1. There are a huge number of ways to model the same process. There are many details of the model that could be changed or tweaked, each giving different results. This is a bigger problem for agent based simulations than traditional game-theoretic/economic models (although it's a pretty big problem in both cases). 2. Even if you know that your model is the "right" one for the process you're interesting, in the real world all kinds of processes are interlinked. E.g. racial segregation is highly linked with Southern vs Northern, rural vs urban and wealthy vs poor. It's possible that there things swamp the process that the simulation is modeling. Even if they don't they can make the data so messy that it's impossible to test the model empirically (not that there was any attempt in this case).