Weisberg, Michael
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Publication Segregation That No One Seeks(2012-01-01) Muldoon, Ryan; Smith, Tony; Weisberg, MichaelThis article examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demonstrate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states among agents of the same type. This is quite different from Schelling-like behavior and suggests (in his terms) that segregation is an instance of macrobehavior that can arise from a wide variety of micromotives.Publication Challenges to the Structural Conception of Bonding(2008-12-01) Weisberg, MichaelThe covalent bond, a difficult concept to define precisely, plays a central role in chemical predictions, interventions, and explanations. I investigate the structural conception of the covalent bond, which says that bonding is a directional, submolecular region of electron density, located between individual atomic centers and responsible for holding the atoms together. Several approaches to constructing molecular models are considered in order to determine which features of the structural conception of bonding, if any, are robust across these models. Key components of the structural conception are absent in all but the simplest quantum mechanical models of molecular structure, seriously challenging the conception’s viability.Publication Morton, Gould, and Bias: A Comment on "The Mismeasure of Science"(2016-04-19) Weisberg, Michael; Paul, Diane BStephen Jay Gould famously used the work of Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) to illustrate how unconscious racial bias could affect scientific measurement. Morton had published measurements of the average cranial capacities of different races, measurements that Gould reanalyzed in an article in Science [1] and then later in his widely read book The Mismeasure of Man [2]. During the course of this reanalysis, Gould discovered prima facie evidence of unconscious racial bias in Morton’s measurements. More than 30 years later, Lewis et al. published a critique of this analysis [3], denying that Morton’s measurements were biased by his racism. Instead, they claim that their “results falsify Gould’s hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views.” We believe this is mistaken, and our comment will explain why.Publication The Key to Electricity(2005-01-01) Weisberg, MichaelThe name "Benjamin Franklin" often evokes the image of an avuncular man flying a kite on a stormy night. It is indeed a striking picture: one of the founders of our country, a successful businessman, a diplomat, and the public face of the American Revolution spending his time contributing to the advancement of science-and putting his life at risk in the process.Publication Understanding the Emergence of Population Behavior in Individual-Based Models(2014-12-01) Weisberg, MichaelProponents of individual-based modeling in ecology claim that their models explain the emergence of population-level behavior. This article argues that individual-based models have not, as yet, provided such explanations. Instead, individual-based models can and do demonstrate and explain the emergence of population-level behaviors from individual behaviors and interactions.Publication Robustness and Idealization in Models of Cognitive Labor(2011-11-01) Muldoon, Ryan; Weisberg, MichaelScientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models’ robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes.Publication Modeling(2016-01-01) Weisberg, MichaelThis article focuses on the methodology of modeling and how it can be applied to philosophical questions. It looks at various traditional views of modeling and defends the idea that modeling is a form of surrogate reasoning involving two distinct steps: indirect representation of a target system using a model and analysis of that model. The article considers different accounts of model/target representational relations, defending an account of similarity. It concludes by presenting several examples of the use of models in philosophy, suggestions for philosophers new to modeling, and an assessment of the relationship between thought experiments and models.Publication Getting Serious About Similarity(2012-12-01) Weisberg, MichaelAlthough most philosophical accounts about model/world relations focus on structural mappings such as isomorphism, similarity has long been discussed as an alternative account. Despite its attractions, proponents of the similarity view have not provided detailed accounts of what it means that a model is similar to a real-world target system. This article gives the outlines of such an account, drawing on the work of Amos Tversky.Publication Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor(2009-04-01) Weisberg, Michael; Muldoon, RyanBecause contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent‐based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains.Publication The Robust Volterra Principle(2008-01-01) Weisberg, Michael; Reisman, KennethTheorizing in ecology and evolution often proceeds via the construction of multiple idealized models. To determine whether a theoretical result actually depends on core features of the models and is not an artifact of simplifying assumptions, theorists have developed the technique of robustness analysis, the examination of multiple models looking for common predictions. A striking example of robustness analysis in ecology is the discovery of the Volterra Principle, which describes the effect of general biocides in predator‐prey systems. This paper details the discovery of the Volterra Principle and the demonstration of its robustness. It considers the classical ecology literature on robustness and introduces two individual‐based models of predation, which are used to further analyze the Volterra Principle. The paper also introduces a distinction between parameter robustness, structural robustness, and representational robustness, and demonstrates that the Volterra Principle exhibits all three kinds of robustness.