Has Agent-Based Modelling Already Solved The “Problem of Complexity?” | Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown
Our final seminar of the autumn term will be delivered by Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown of the University of Leicester.
This deliberately polemical title is an attempt to express my concern with the status of the field called “complexity” which, at its extremes, seems to reproduce the traditional perils of extremely simple (but potentially non applicable) formal models and speculative narratives.
The argument is contextualised and developed by focusing on certain aspects of the method (and methodology) of Agent-Based Modelling (though no prior knowledge of ABM will be assumed) to show how complexity is not a distinct field (any more than there needs to be a field of “linearity”) but a pattern of behavior that may or may not be displayed by particular systems.
By reprising the arguments for ABM being an empirical method following a systematic methodology (and the hazards of it not being that) the presentation attempts to set up a less splendid but much more satisfying role for the study of complex phenomena.
Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown
Lecturer
University of Leicester
My intellectual career dates from the moment in an economics tutorial when I wondered what would happen if half the people in the UK made decisions based on rational choice and half using adaptive learning. I had seen no sign, in my undergraduate degree, of tools that could handle such questions.
By serendipity, I was interested in Artificial Intelligence and this introduced me to the idea that you could understand complex behaviours (like vision and speech generation) more effectively by building computer models of them. Gradually (and with many false starts) I managed to “pin down” this idea so it was workable in a social science context, discover a specialised community of scholars who were already interested in this approach and find a permanent job that allowed me to pursue my interest. I have been doing that in diverse ways ever since.
My enthusiasm for rigorous research methods and my heterodox preoccupations have exposed me to the merits of diverse academic disciplines while protecting me from being socialised into the preconceptions of any one. My vision is now that ABM should become a specialised but accepted research method across the social sciences (like Social Network Analysis for example) and my experience is that many of the divisions between these fields are needlessly artificial. The differences between what is needed to build a credible ABM in archaeology and criminology are, in my opinion, far more interesting.
The most economical summary of my research interests is provided by my academia.edu page, which can be found at https://leicester.academia.edu/EdmundChattoeBrown.
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