---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 13:00:33 -0400
>From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
>Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] game theory
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>
>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
>
>
>
>
>
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