[lbo-talk] game theory

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Celi Ben:
> This mathematician who associated with our lab wrote a long piece about
> prisoner's dilemma, showing how he could make one change, and cause the
> model to behave entirely differently (producing cooperation), to suit his
> stated preconceived bias for how the real world should operate. And he
could
> make a similar change (fluctuating payoff matrix) to a lotka volterra
> competition model and achieve the same thing. His conclusion or point is
> that mathematical models behave as we design them to. Then he has a long
> list of examples where ecologists and economists stepped out of
appropriate
> boundaries to forecast political or applied ecological phenomena with
their
> models, such as when one of the Odums took his box model of energy and
> nitrogen/carbon flows between different parts of the ecosystem to the
> Vietnam war and calculated that the U.S. would win.
> http://two.ucdavis.edu/~worden/tmp/pd.pdf

My exact point.  Paul Ormerod argues a similar point about economic modeling
in his _The Death of Economics_.  His point is that, to quote John Kenneth
Galbraith, such modeling is really the business of supplying needed
conclusions to those in the position to pay for them.  Ditto for medieval
theology.

Wojtek