REPLY Meaning of Stock/Level (SD6899)

[SDMAIL Douglas Franco]

Posted by  "Douglas Franco" <dfranco at cantv.net>

Alan,

Numbers are not necessarily, 1, 2, 3.1 or I, IX, XX like in Romans. The 
math essential requirement to make a set numerical is to have a relation 
of order among the elements of the set. If you can say that a person or 
an institution do have more trust than other, then trust is a quantity 
rather than a quality. There are many qualities which in a deeper sense 
are really quantities, because you can distinguish between more of such 
variable from less of such variable.  People usually tend to forget 
qualities; therefore human perception of a quality is usually under a 
vanishing pressure. Stock representation of such process imitates the 
building and loosing trust. The error involved in neglecting these soft 
variables is usually greater than the approximations from stock and flow 
representation.

There are improvements needed in SD to deal properly with information 
flows, some of them you already mention in your email. It is very 
difficult to come up with an undisputable solution to these problems, 
but SD is quite useful if you can settle for success when looking for 
significant improvements.

Douglas Franco
Posted by  "Douglas Franco" <dfranco at cantv.net>
posting date  Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:20:55 -0400