Skip to content

A Guide to Modelling Social Reality

Note: This is a guide to formal modelling social reality; note that a learn cognitive structure in your brain is almost a model of reality; but an internal one.

Why do people underestimate the complexity of social reality?

  • Observability: Unlike in chemistry or molecular biology, the “atoms” of social reality — people, actions, and institutions — can be seen with the naked eye. This superficial visibility creates the illusion of simplicity.
  • Complex Feedback Loops and Expectations: Almost everyone is bad at modelling social reality. The challenge is no longer modelling it accurately, but convincing others that you have done so.
  • Lack of Technical Capacity: Interaction, feedback loops, adaptation, emergence, and other nonlinear features make social reality extraordinarily difficult to model.

QA:

  • Why the ontic idea of system - is invalid to represent a system?

Area

Theorist