Germs, Genes, and Memes: Function and Fitness Dynamics on Information Networks

Abstract

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Discrimination and Collaboration in Science

“…Introduction. Philosophers of science have used formal models to argue that the structure of communication and collaboration networks matters in science (see, e.g., Zollman 2007Zollman , 2010Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2013;Grim et al 2015;Holman and Bruner 2015;Rosenstock, O'Connor, and Bruner 2017). One finding from this literature is that diversity of beliefs within an epistemic community is key to ensuring that the group eventually arrives at true beliefs about the world and that network structure can be cru-cial to preserving this diversity (Zollman 2010).…”

Why Not All Evidence Is Scientific Evidence

“…And Grim et al . (2011) model social influence on belief merely by having the agent average the credences of all its neighbors and adopt that average as its own credence. While even more simple than the analogous mechanism in my model, their formula captures enough of the phenomenon to make the result plausible, but is simple enough that it's clear why the result occurs.…”

“…One of the lessons of modeling the social structure of science has been that in the long run, quick consensus can be hard to displace and tends to be less accurate than the results of long-term debate (Zollman 2007; Grim et al . 2011). I'm making a similar, but distinct point.…”

Coherence and Correspondence in the Network Dynamics of Belief Suites

“…On the other hand, work on belief dynamics that explicitly addresses descriptive questions of what can be expected from networks of agents with a particular structure has almost always dealt with what is thought of as a single belief across the network. Change in that single belief may be modeled either as a binary ‘yes-no’ or as a continuous value (Hegselmann and Krause 2002, 2006, 2009; Olsson 2011; Grim et al 2013, 2015; Vallinder and Olsson 2014; interesting exceptions are Riegler and Douven 2009 and especially Axelrod 1997). In contrast to both of these lines of work, but capturing simple aspects of each, the model used here is explicitly designed to explore the role of coherence and correspondence among suites of beliefs of agents interacting in structured social networks of epistemic contact.…”