RML,

Well, one of the major barriers to using science to communicate the choices available to people is that scientific models, confusingly, represent the parts of economic systems as having no individual choices…

scientific models, confusingly, represent the parts of economic systems as having no individual choices

Equations represent systems as composed of controlled variables and actual physical systems are generally composed of individually learning parts.

The miss-match produces a multi-fold miss-communication.  It leaves all sides, even people on the same side, confused and ineffectual.  Economies always behave by themselves.  They were never “steered” by policy pressure except at the margins.

So our micro views of systems (of individual people, and choices) is as wrong about the macro views (those of science) about as much as the reverse.  Science has been simply leaving out the role of the parts of complex systems in learning new behaviors for the whole.

science uses “control theory” to describe exploratory environmental systems, full of independently learning parts.

No model could ever predict those.  Pressures represented in theory as controling economies actually never did is the problem.  Artificial pressures wouldn’t control them either, then, except at the margins or where they are found to be natural for the learning parts of economies as a way to change their whole ways of living.

That gap calls for inventing a different sort of learning process, both for scientists more interested in the large scale properties of systems, and for people more interested in understanding their own options for changing their roles.

The traditional problems of communicating science is still there.  What is a huge mistake is forgetting that science uses “control theory” to describe exploratory environmental systems, full of independently learning parts.

It suggests the need for new modes of explanation. I’m finding, though, that even with help ecologists feel uncomfortable in admitting that nature has more than rules and equations for us to acknowledge and study.  With other sciences it’s even more difficult.

I think the public would much better understand the science if science was better at being truthful about the mismatch between deterministic theory and our highly animated real world reality.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com

2/13/12 ed