anachy models

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Ricardo Julião

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Nov 22, 2020, 5:33:49 AM11/22/20
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Hi, i want to know if there is a anarchy model alweary done in Net Logo.
ty

Michael Tamillow

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Nov 22, 2020, 9:01:48 AM11/22/20
to Ricardo Julião, netlogo-users
What does that even mean?

Governance and policy works in small units of decisions and influences - not large units of conspirators demanding controls they can’t possibly execute on. Sure there are ideologies, but in practice they are confounded and fall short.

The best you could say of anarchy is that nothing will ever be anarchy and everything is anarchy.

Define your modeling assumptions before beginning.

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On Nov 22, 2020, at 4:33 AM, Ricardo Julião <rsju...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, i want to know if there is a anarchy model alweary done in Net Logo.
ty

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Jhnib

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Nov 22, 2020, 5:46:09 PM11/22/20
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Dear Michael Tamillow - If you don't have any advice or an answer to a question, then please refrain from posting things that are unwelcoming or can be interpreted as aggressive, especially that you mostly posted your own opinion and not some empirical evidence that your view is correct. 

Ricardo's question is legitimate: "Are there models that attempt to explain anarchy?" is a reasonable and legitimate question and just because it disagreed with your *opinion* of what governance is does not delegitimize it.

Define why you'd like to respond to someone before beginning, and generally be kind, especially to new entrants to this community.

Good luck,

Joseph Shaheen

Charles Lassiter

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Nov 22, 2020, 8:19:33 PM11/22/20
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I couldn't agree more with Joseph's reply.

Ricardo, if you're looking to model facets of anarchy, you might want to begin by sharpening your question. Are you interested in the emergence of anarchical organizations? How they might persist? If you're new to modeling it might be helpful to read Joshua Epstein's 1999 paper "Agent Based Computational Models and Generative Social Science." A quick Google search will get you the PDF. I assign it to my students to help them get I'm the mind set for developing models.

Good luck,
Charlie

Michael Tamillow

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Nov 22, 2020, 8:20:43 PM11/22/20
to Jhnib, netlogo-users
Thanks Joe, but you are wrong. My response was impersonal and objective. Start throwing fireballs why don’t you...

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 22, 2020, at 4:46 PM, Jhnib <joesh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Michael Tamillow - If you don't have any advice or an answer to a question, then please refrain from posting things that are unwelcoming or can be interpreted as aggressive, especially that you mostly posted your own opinion and not some empirical evidence that your view is correct. 

Stephen Guerin

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Nov 22, 2020, 9:08:06 PM11/22/20
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Ricardo,

Your email is relevant and timely to me - Anarchy surely in the news and social media these days. As it happens, I am deep in a rathole of research this weekend around Anarchy, governance, and decentralized command and control and governance of coalition command structures.

Your question
  " is there an Anarchy model already done in Netlogo"   

My answer depends on your definition of Anarchy. Here's a few definitions that I would try when relating to a Netlogo Model.

definition 1
 (vernacular) State of Anarchy: random, disordered and/or observed lawlessness. State of Chaos ( Chaos also used vernacularly as Random)

answer: Many Netlogo models (flocking, fluid dynamics/convection, crowd dynamics, ising models, etc) have phases where the system is disordered depending on the parameter settings. Sweeping your parameters with BehaviorSpace lets you sample the "phase space" of the model. You can measure the disorder of the phase with an entropy metric observing the probability of the agents occupying their available states. (see equipartition theorem) A model in a phase with high entropy could be said to be in a State of Anarchy or State of Chaos. As an aside, I tend to use Chaos more technically (sensitive to initial conditions) and the model is chaotic at the phase transitions or critical points instead of describing the model as being chaotic when it is in the unordered phase. I would avoid the vernacular use of Anarchy but it will require you to also define your term technically.

definition 2:
(etymology)  without a leader. from ánarchos "without a head or chief, leaderless" (from an- AN- + -archos, derivative of archós "leader, chief")


answer: Many of the same canonical complex systems models in Netlogo demonstrate leaderless organization. Traffiic jams, flocking, ant foraging etc. Here, we could say the model is a model of Anarchy regardless of the phase that the model is in. It's more about the logic of the model where organization emerges through the interactions of the agents and not designed in with prescribed hierarchy.


definition 3:
Voluntary association and cooperation. Rejecting subjugation through violence, force, or other coercion.

answer: If requests to change state between agents is done with the ASK and the agent has context-sensitive rules on executing the command, I would say that model has an Anarchist governance model. Somewhere around Netlogo ver 3 or 4,  the preferred pattern was to use ASK.  Prior to this, the pattern was agents would directly change the state of another agent. commanded with no choice. That is now considered bad form in ABM and not adhering to the Anarchist Cookbook :-) This is also along the lines of  Pattie Maes clever definition: "an agent is a software object that can say no". In my research right now with emergency management and Defense, I am thinking about how a firefighter in a in an incident command team hierarchy with command and control, are encouraged to refuse orders for many context-sensitive reasons. I would call incident command in wildfire Anarchical under this definition. 
https://www.nwcg.gov/committee/6mfs/refusing-risk.Contrast that with the military where a soldier can only refuse an order if its illegal. There is related ideas with respect to Mission vs Detailed Command and Control where the former is decentralized and the latter centralized.

definition 4: Rejection of the State as Authority.

answer: A Netlogo model would be Anarchic if the agents exercising authority, emergent or explicit were labeled as such. So imagine having different agents of legal status (State, Corporation, Natural Person) and then calling the model Anarchic if the State was not involved in the authority hierarchy. This is the least interesting example to me.

Hope that helps. As I am not a domain expert in Anarchism in its different forms or even Political Science in general, I would welcome any feedback as I am working on a paper around this.


-Stephen


Dale Frakes

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Nov 22, 2020, 9:10:05 PM11/22/20
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Michael,

I agree with the others that, whether you intended it or not, the tone of your response came off as aggressive and condescending.

The tone of this: "What does that even mean?" Implies, "how can you ask such a stupid and meaningless question?"

And then the rest of your reply was about your personal beliefs around the political viability and meaning of anarchy, which doesn't contribute to an answer about models of anarchy but seems to project to the questioner, "you're ignorant to ask about this since it all means nothing and what your asking about amounts to nothing"

And this, "Define your modeling assumptions before beginning.", with no context, is maybe good advice, but following the rest of your reply comes off as condescending and dismissive.

Now I'm not saying you intended your response to be received this way, but that's how some of us here are receiving it.  If you didn't intend that, it might be worth looking into the importance of tone in communication.  It's especially important in written communication since the normal visual and audio cues are missing so it's easy to come off as aggressive when you don't actually intend it.


As for the question, yes, there are models and efforts around anarchy in agent based modeling.  For example, here's this write up of using ABM to study organizational anarchy: https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2008.04.12/full/

And if you think of "anarchy" as a kind of self-organization, without direction from kind of top-down ruler/organizer, then the concept of anarchy is fundamental to many ideas in agent based modeling.  The classic "ants" model (see the Model Library in NetLogo) provides a nice illustration of how a few basic rules of individual behavior applied to a population leads to a behavior that appears very organized, as if directed from a central authority.

Dale
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/netlogo-users/2359DD8C-AB98-4184-83AF-D15653CEB577%40gmail.com.

-- 
Dale Frakes
Adjunct Instructor, PhD Candidate
PSU Systems Science
dfr...@pdx.edu - http://web.pdx.edu/~dfrakes/

Michael Tamillow

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Nov 22, 2020, 9:52:23 PM11/22/20
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Dale, got ya.

Your link to anarchy discusses decision making, as I implied, but I would love to tear apart the guy’s model to see what he believes on what modelable factors define “anarchy”. I would not disagree with your “ants as a kind of anarchy” either, only that if the definition is so nebulous that it encompasses the ants model, we might as well say “consult all of agent-based modeling” to the original sender.

My answer is helpful, IF it is taken at face value. Yes the “what does that even mean?” implies ignorance of the original poster but that was my intent. Ignorance is not a bad thing in and of itself. So, do we answer the question “what does that even mean?” and fill that void of ignorance with a definition that can be broken down, modeled, validated, and verified? Or do you move on and feel slighted by the implication that you might be ignorant of something?

If your identity is tied up with how much you know and how smart you are, then you will probably choose the latter.

Yes, it offends some people (obviously I know, I have to live with me). That’s why they put Socrates to death. But he taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, and this changed our whole world forever. Real learning feels more like a swift punch to the gut than a hug. Some aren’t ready for it - but I try anyways.

Your welcome,
❤️ Mike 


Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 22, 2020, at 8:10 PM, Dale Frakes <dfr...@pdx.edu> wrote:

 Michael,

Charles Lassiter

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Nov 23, 2020, 1:22:32 AM11/23/20
to Michael Tamillow, Dale Frakes, netlogo-users@googlegroups.com >> netlogo-users
I know there are other philosophers on here who likely know more than I do, but I feel compelled to point out: Socrates often punched up. He antagonized the Sophists -- like Gorgias and Thrasymachus -- because they made beaucoup bucks as teachers of argument; Meno was a brutal military general who, in the eponymous dialogue, claimed to know the essence of virtue. And for Plato, learning was painful not because the pain was inflicted by the teacher but rather because being exposed to truth was jarring. (Or at least, that's my takeaway from the Allegory of the Cave.) Please don't drag the ancient Greeks into the "punch to the gut" model of pedagogy.

Pradeesh Kumar K V

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Nov 23, 2020, 1:52:30 AM11/23/20
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If I were to see 'what does that even mean?' reply to my first post here, I will think twice before posting a question again. Or maybe even give up the idea of posting again.

Edmund Chattoe-Brown

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Nov 23, 2020, 2:19:55 AM11/23/20
to 'Saadi Hayet' via netlogo-users
Actually I think this is a very _good_ question. I do not see so many ABM of "governance" generally so anarchy is an interesting case. I guess for me the question is how to build a "stylised task" in which different ways of "ruling" people can succeed or fail.

This is one nice example I know:

Harrington, J.E. Jr. (1998). “The social selection of flexible and rigid agents”. American Economic Review 88, 63–82.

In a way, the question is a bit like that of economics. Can we actually create "institutions" so that selfish behaviour (in the case of anarchy autonomous behaviour) is a "force for good" and not a "force for social harm". What might these look like?

-- 
  Edmund Chattoe-Brown

Diogo Alves

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Nov 23, 2020, 8:19:09 AM11/23/20
to netlogo-users, Pradeesh Kumar K V
Ngl, and won't name names, but some parts of this thread belong straight to the r/iamverysmart subreddit. 

That being said, it would be nice to see some concrete programming questions. It is true that sometimes questions could be avoided if one enlisted Uncle Google's help.


From: netlog...@googlegroups.com <netlog...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Pradeesh Kumar K V <prade...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2020 6:52:11 AM
To: netlogo-users <netlog...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [netlogo-users] anachy models
 

Michael Tamillow

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Nov 23, 2020, 1:06:02 PM11/23/20
to Charles Lassiter, Dale Frakes, netlogo-users@googlegroups.com >> netlogo-users
Charles, being exposed to the truth of your own ignorance is jarring. Truth is universal.

stanle...@gmail.com

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Nov 25, 2020, 1:37:55 PM11/25/20
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I'm working in the area of human social hierarchy formation (in a control/flow way, not the nested categories way) and its pros and cons, and I've been working on a couple agent-based models to explore the computationally important factors. Questions about human anarchy, in the folk definition sense, will ultimately come back to social hierarchy and social power, often as dynamics within an environmental context of common-pool resources and/or public goods. To add to the short list of helpful references, here are some key papers--which of course don't all agree--on ABMs of hierarchy formation or general discussion about hierarchy formation.

# Papers on hierarchy formation with ABMs

Epstein, J. M. (2003). Growing Adaptive Organizations: An Agent-Based Computational Approach (p. 41). Santa Fe Institute. (Chapter 13 from Epstein's Generative Social Science book covers this in a bit better detail.)

Smith, E. A., & Choi, J.-K. (2007). The Emergence of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies: Simple Scenarios and Agent-Based Simulations. In The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems. SAR Press. 

Hooper, P. L., Kaplan, H. S., & Boone, J. L. (2010). A theory of leadership in human cooperative groups. Journal of Theoretical Biology265(4), 633–646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.05.034 

Hooper, P. L. (2018). Ecological and Social Dynamics of Territoriality and Hierarchy Formation. In The Emergence of Premodern States: New Perspectives on the Development of Complex Societieshttps://www.academia.edu/37965866/Ecological_and_Social_Dynamics_of_Territoriality_and_Hierarchy_Formation 

Crabtree, S. A., Bocinsky, R. K., Hooper, P. L., Ryan, S. C., & Kohler, T. A. (2017). How to Make a Polity (In the Central Mesa Verde Region). American Antiquity82(1), 71–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2016.18 

Perret, C., Powers, S. T., & Hart, E. (2017). Emergence of hierarchy from the evolution of individual influence in an agent-based model. The 2019 Conference on Artificial Life29, 348–355. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_058 


# Hierarchy Formation Definitions and Discussions

Tainter, J. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press. (he has an overview of theory of state formation)

Johnson, A. W., & Earle, T. (2006). The evolution of human societies: From foraging group to agrarian state. Stanford Univ. Press. 

Dubreuil, B. (2010). Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature. Cambridge University Press.

Zafeiris, A., & Vicsek, T. (2017). Why we live in hierarchies: A quantitative treatise. ArXiv:1707.01744 [Nlin, Physics:Physics]http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01744 

Sabloff, J. A., Sabloff, P. L. W., Sabloff, J. A., Sabloff, P. L. W., & Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, N. M. ). (2018). The emergence of premodern states: New perspectives on the development of complex societies

Gintis, H., van Schaik, C., & Boehm, C. (2019). Zoon politikon: The evolutionary origins of human socio-political systems. Behavioural Processes161, 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.01.007 

Cheers,
Stan
--
Stan Rhodes
PhD candidate, Dept of Environment and Society, Utah State University

Paolo Gaudiano (Aleria)

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Nov 29, 2020, 9:27:12 AM11/29/20
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Hello everyone,

As I teach NetLogo to students in my class, I have run into a couple of issues with the plot auto-scaling function that are not critical but that contribute to occasional confusion, especially for anyone who may not be used to scientific plotting. (I did a web search and did not find any other references to this question, I hope I am not replicating something already discussed elsewhere.)

1) The auto-scale functionality of NetLogo plots sometimes reports the maximum axis values as decimals, even when the quantities plotted are integers (e.g., the X axis with Virus and Segregation). This can be particularly confusing for the X axis given that ticks are integers. The same is true with the numbers shown in the crosshairs as the mouse moves over the plot. It would be nice if there was a way (without having to re-write the auto-scale functionality using set-plot-[xy]-range) to allow users to specify the precision of the axis labels and crosshair read-outs as part of the plot edit settings.

2) The lack of tick marks and the positioning of the labels showing the auto-scale value confuses people, especially, in my opinion, for the Y axis. For instance, in the traffic model, the Y axis auto-scales to 1.1. I have had students often ask me why the cars can go to a speed to 1.1 if the max speed is set to 1.0. For the X axis, I have had people tell me things like “The model took 66.3 ticks to converge” - an understandable confusion given the positioning and labeling of the plot-x-range. It would be nice if the max labels could be moved to the very corner of the plots, matching their actual positions, and maybe even include a small tick mark in the corner to emphasize this.

Neither of these is vital, but when you are trying to teach a bunch of non-STEM undergrads, you realize that even little things that may seem obvious to someone trained in a quant field may be confusing to others…

Thanks,

Paolo

Aleria   |  QSDI   |  ARC  |  Forbes   | TEDx   | @icopaolo   | LinkedIn   |   +1-646-862-2934  |    Pronouns:  He/Him/His

Aaron Andre Brandes

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Dec 7, 2020, 12:42:14 PM12/7/20
to Paolo Gaudiano (Aleria), netlogo-users

Hi Paolo,

Thanks for your interest in NetLogo modeling.

 

For item 1) if you want the maximum x value on a plot using auto-scaling to be an integer, you can edit the plot and put the line

set-plot-x-range plot-x-min ceiling plot-x-max

in the Plot update commands section.

Y values can be controlled in similar fashion.

 

As far as item 2) is concerned NetLogo provides only a basic plotting capability with the assumption that users can use other programs with their data to produce more sophisticated plots. You have made good case for how some features would be helpful to new users. However I don’t think such enhancements will be available in the near future.

 

 

Here is one way to make tick-like marks every 10 ticks

edit the plot

Add a new pen

Change the color if desired by clicking on the color square, selecting a color from the palette that opens and clicking OK

put the following line in the pen’s Plot update commands section section:

if ticks mod 10 = 0 [  plot-pen-up  plotxy ticks 0   plot-pen-down  plotxy ticks plot-y-max / 50 ]

 

You can adjust the spacing and height of the “ticks” by changing the numbers 10 and 50.

This code is based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20988126/how-to-plot-a-vertical-line-every-x-step-in-netlogo  by Stephen Guerin

 

One explanation for why the minimum and maximum values numbers are offset from their actual  locations is that the lowest coordinates on the y and y axes would otherwise collide (given the layout), and that the maximum values are similarly constrained to lie within the physical plot range.

 

I hope this is helpful, and let the list know if you have further questions.

Aaron

 

-- 

Aaron Brandes, Software Developer

Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling

 

 

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Date: Sunday, November 29, 2020 at 9:27 AM
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