REPLY The Minimum Acceptable Model Standard (SD6750)

[SDMAIL Jack Harich]

Posted by  Jack Harich <register at thwink.org>

Jean-Jacques,

Your list of models is a worthy sample of what's available to help the aspiring modeler. 
It shows how lack of standards has hindered the field's development. Such differences 
between models and their supporting materials creates a Tower of Babel. This reduces 
the efficiencey and effectiveness of communication among modelers, and makes learning 
the craft more difficult than it need be.

I'd like to humbly add my own models to this list. They are not in a peer reviewed journal, 
but are in the form of a 390 page as yet unpublished book at:

http://www.thwink.org/sustain/manuscript2/AnalyticalActivism.htm

The web page includes a link to download the models described in the "Analytical Activism" book. 
There are 8 different models. I'm not one for building one giant model to solve a problem. Smaller 
models are so much easier to understand and use to support a complex argument. The models are in 
Vensim and the manuscript is in PDF or DOC.

Those trying to improve their modeling skills or learn more about ways to model social systems may 
be especially interested in the 4 Dueling Loops models. These build a medium size model in 4 easy 
to follow (I hope) steps.

A meme is a mental belief a person learned from others. See Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" 1976, the 
last chapter, or this page: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/Meme.htm

Memetic infection occurs when a meme passes from a transfer mechanism, such as conversation or a 
book, to a mind the meme was not in before.

Most of these models use memetic infection to express social forces. Our field needs something 
like this so that we can more accurately and correctly model the social problems we face. In fact, 
just yesterday I was reading Demet's "The Promise of Sleep." Page 30 touched on how the field of 
sleep disorders was able to turn itself from an art into a science. The key was discovery of a 
technique to record and graph brain waves with EEG machines. Before then the field was dependent 
on intuition to determine what the brain was doing during wakefulness and sleep. After the use of 
EEG began, the field could now measure its central phenomenon.

Applying SD to social problems is still an art. It needs to become a science.

"Science is largely quantification" says the sleep book on page 38. So what is it in our field that 
we need to quantify to turn it from an art into a science? I suspect it is social forces. I've 
attempted to take a few crude steps here by modeling memes as they travel from one mind to another. 
But I've not experimentally measured meme strength. To do that requires a breakthrough, such as the 
one the sleep book describes on page 58. With the Multiple Sleep Latency Test, sleep researchers were 
now able to measure the size of sleep debt, or the strength of the need for sleep. If we can develop 
a way to measure the strength of particular memes, and the potency of memetic infectivity, then we 
too may be able to take a gigantic leap forward.

For example, what if Forrester's urban decay model had used memes to model relative attractiveness 
in a more fine grained manner? The model could have shown the exact route certain memes traveled to 
cause different levels of attractiveness. This might open up additional insights into poor and good 
solutions.

As another example, what if the CDC diabetes epidemic model that Jack Homer and others worked on used 
memes to model the effects of cultural pressure, advertising pressure, educational campaigns, etc on 
caloric intake and exercise? That would open up a vast frontier of new problem cause and solution insights.

Returning to the models in the download, one model in particular, The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to 
Difficult Problems, uses memes heavily to model exactly what our field is attempting to do at the strategic 
level. The stocks are Hypotheses to Test, Experiments Completed, Hypotheses Accepted, Unsound Selections, 
Unsound Solution Components, Sound Selections, and Sound Solution Components. The book and model shows how 
two different problem solving processes, Classic and Analytical Activism, result in two very different 
solution success outcomes, and why.

Hope this helps,

Jack
Posted by  Jack Harich <register at thwink.org>
posting date  Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:04:50 -0500