Paul Smaldino is a psychology professor who is maybe greatest identified for his article with Richard McElreath from a number of years in the past“The Pure Choice of Unhealthy Science,” which presents a kind of agent-based mannequin that replicates the expansion within the publication of junk science that we’ve seen over the previous a number of a long time.
Since then, evidently Smaldino has carried out loads of analysis and instructing on agent-based fashions within the social sciences extra usually, and he has simply launched a e book referred to as “Modeling Social Habits: Mathematical and Agent-Based mostly Fashions of Social Dynamics. and cultural evolution. The e book has social science, code, graphics – it has every thing.
It is an old-school textbook with trendy materials, and I hope will probably be taught in 1000’s of lessons and promote thousands and thousands of copies.
There’s only one factor that bothers me. The e book is entertainingly written and filled with concepts, and in addition does an amazing job of expressing issues concerning the fashions it simulates, with out simply performing like every thing is already identified. What worries me is that nobody reads books anymore. If I consider college students taking an agent-based modeling course and utilizing this e book, it is exhausting to think about most of them truly. whereas studying the e book. They’ll begin with the homework, then flip by way of the e book to attempt to determine what they want. That is how individuals learn non-fiction books today, which I suppose is without doubt one of the explanation why books, even ones I like, are normally repetitive and poor in content material. Readers don’t need the e book to supply an fulfilling studying expertise, so authors do not ship, and readers do not anticipate it, and so on.
Let’s be clear: it is a guide, not a specialist work. It’s a readable and entertaining e book within the fashion of Regression And Different Tales is a readable and entertaining e book, not like Weapons, Germs and Metal. But, as a e book about social science strategies, it’s entertaining and thought-provoking. Moreover, I prefer it as a strategies e book as a result of it focuses on fashions slightly than statistical inference. We tried to realize an identical feeling with A Quantitative Tour of Social sciences however with much less success.
So it makes me slightly unhappy to see this effort of care put right into a e book that only a few college students will possible learn from paragraph to paragraph. I feel issues have been totally different 50 years in the past: again then, there was nothing to learn on-line, you acquire a textbook and it was in entrance of you so that you learn it. The plus facet is that readers can now create the graphics themselves (I assume Smaldino has a web site someplace with all the required code), so there’s that.
P.S. Within the preface, Smaldino is “grateful to all of the modelers whose work impressed the chapters of this e book. . . I significantly need to acknowledge the debt owed to the work of,” then he lists 16 names, together with . . . Albert-Lázló Barabási!
Eh?? Is that this the identical Albert-Lázló Barabási who stated that scientific citations are price $100,000 every. I assume he did good issues too? Maybe this deserves its personal agent-based mannequin.
