mcyang@pollux.usc.edu (Mitch Yang) (07/16/89)
Is there any people developing some kind of social connectionism which might be used to explain some social phenomena just like social Darwinism ? =============================================================================== Mitch Yang InterNet: mcyang@pollux.usc.edu Department of Electrical Engineering CSnet: mcyang@usc-cse.csnet University of Southern California Bitnet: mcyang%pollux@kylara.bitnet Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 UUCP: oberon!pollux.usc.edu!mcyang
andrew@berlioz (Lord Snooty @ The Giant Poisoned Electric Head ) (07/18/89)
In article <18550@usc.edu>, mcyang@pollux.usc.edu (Mitch Yang) writes: > Is there any people developing some kind of social connectionism which > might be used to explain some social phenomena just like social Darwinism ? Or indeed, the whole gamut of economic activity?! (In this regard, small attempts are indeed being made by Wall Street right now, but this is just a nibble out of the enormous slice which you have carved out here!). -- ................................................................... Andrew Palfreyman I should have been a pair of ragged claws nsc!berlioz!andrew Scuttling across the floors of silent seas ...................................................................
wlp@calmasd.Prime.COM (Walter Peterson) (07/20/89)
In article <18550@usc.edu>, mcyang@pollux.usc.edu (Mitch Yang) writes: > > Is there any people developing some kind of social connectionism which > might be used to explain some social phenomena just like social Darwinism ? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > =============================================================================== I had no problems with this posting until I saw the last four words; "...just like Social Darwinism". The 'philosophy' of Social Darwinism comes from the last part of the 19th and early 20th centuries and is as much of a distortion of the theory of evolution by natural selection as some of the non-sense spouted by the creationists. Social Darwinism took a distorted view of the concept of 'survival-of-the-fittest' to attempt to support a world-view that went beyond racism in its arrogance and elitism. It transcended racism in that people who espoused this view applied it not only to the non-white races, but also to the so-called "lower classes" of their fellow whites, even to "less fit" members of their own ethnic group. Social Darwinism was used as one of the excuses for everything from brutal sweat-shop working conditions for immigrants in America to the beginings of Apartheid in South Africa. Social Darwinism is a total distortion of the princiles about which Charles Darwin wrote. Attempting to explain or justify any person's or group's social status based on Social Darwinism is every bit as ignorant a statement as the creationist's favorite question: "If man is descended from the apes, why are there stil apes?" I have not intended this as a flame, but rather as edification. The distortions of Darwin's work are legion and just when one seems to have been laid to rest in one place, it rears its ugly head in another ( I heard on the radio just this morning that YET ANOTHER fight over the teaching of evolution in public schools here in California is being started by the creationists .) Anyone wishing to learn more about Darwin's theories should start at the source by reading Darwin's work. Other excellent sources are just about any works by Steven Jay Gould. Now, to what I believe ( and hope ) the original poster was REALLY talking about, that is, the modeling of socio-politico-economic systems. This seems, at least on the surface, like a reasonable application of neural nets. I have heard of some work being done on modeling the stock market, but have not heard anything about other types of social science modeling. These things are quite different from anything like Social Darwinism, since they model the behavior of systems without any a priori value judgements as to the supposed "fitness" of the individual components of the system. May be some social scientist "out there" can construct a network to model how asinine beliefs like Social Darwinism spread through a supposedly intelligent population ( 1/2 :-) ) -- Walt Peterson. Prime - San Diego R&D (Object and Data Management Group) "The opinions expressed here are my own."